190 CIVIL HISTORY, &c. 



never being deprived of milk and winter provision. 

 It is called " the oath of the shemle and nemle ;" 

 and to swear falsely by it would for ever disgrace 

 an Arab. 



Generally speaking, the political institutions of the 

 Bedouins may be traced to that natural authority 

 which the primitive fathers of mankind exercised over 

 their families, and which viewed the duty of obe- 

 dience as founded less on any legal obligations than 

 upon the opinion of benevolence in the ruler. The 

 office of their sheiks and elders, the maxims which 

 they observe in war and in negotiating peace, must 

 have arisen from the common wants and the com- 

 mon consent of the tribes. They are so simple so 

 well adapted to the spirit of their free and wander- 

 ing life that every nation not yet reduced to sla- 

 very, if thrown at large upon this wide desert, might 

 be expected to observe the same laws and usages. 

 The case, however, is very diiferent with their civil 

 institutions ; and it is not easy to imagine how so 

 many arbitrary regulations in their social economy 

 so many nice distinctions in estimating the price of 

 wounds and insults could have sprung up by chance, 

 or originated in the gradual improvement of a wild 

 and warlike multitude. Their political code differs 

 from that most generally prevalent throughout the 

 rest of the Moslem world, and must have been the 

 work of a legislator older than the revolution achiev- 

 ed by Mohammed. The Prophet obliged the Bedouin 

 Arabs to renounce their idolatry, and to acknow- 

 ledge the unity of a Divine Creator ; but he seems 

 to have been less successful in forcing his laws upon 

 his own nation than in establishing them with their 

 assistance in the surrounding countries. 



