Page 195 - UAE Truncal States
P. 195

Chapter Five

                  used to draw water from wells; the bucket was lowered on a  rope
                  which passed over a pulley mounted about two metres high on the
                  well frame. As the oxen walked away from the well down an incline,
                  the full bucket was pulled up and caught by the attendant, who
                  emptied it into the irrigation channel or into a tank.
                    Both sheep and goals used to be kept by most settled and beduin
                  families in theTrucial Stales. During the last few decades the number
                  of goats has increased at the expense of sheep. The reason which the
                  owners give for this preference is that goats are easier to keep
                  because they are less particular in their diet. The goats are usually
                  tended by women and children in the vicinity of the settlements.
                  When the tribes who roamed the foreland of the I.Iajar mountains left
                  their settlements and adopted a nomadic life during the winter
                  months, they look the goals and sheep with their camels. The
                  nomadic tribes in the desert of Abu Dhabi sometimes left the goats
                  with members of the tribe in the Liwa during the winter because they
                  took their camels to an area without wells from which the goals could
                  be watered. In the past there were not many goats nor sheep in the
                  Liwa villages.
                    The goat was useful in a variety of ways. The milk was turned into
                  curds (makhld or ra'ib), the hair was spun and woven by the women
                  into tent material and tent ropes, or knitted into socks to protect the
                  feet in the burning hot sand of the summer. Goatskins and the skins
                  of an edible lizard, ciliabb, were favoured for making bags to
                  transport water or clarified butter. The skins were cured with salt,
                  worked and sewn together; sometimes the extremities of the skins
                  were neatly knotted to form tassels and handles.



                  3 Hunting, fishing, collecting

                  Wildlife and hunting
                  Within living memory there was never enough game for a family to
                  live off the hunt anywhere in Eastern Arabia, but until recently there
                  was enough wildlife in the mountain foreland and even in the desert
                  to justify a beduin carrying a rifle even if he did not expect to meet an
                 enemy but hoped to spot some game for the pot. In the Trucial States
                 there used to be many gazelles, not only in the oulwash plains of the
                 mountains and in those parts of the desert which were fairly green,
                 such as Khatam, but even on the shallow inshore islands and

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