Page 195 - UAE Truncal States

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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