ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 157 
Some, on the contrary, are so poor that they have no 
cattle, and these, whether relatives or “hired servants,” 
labour as farm hands for those who have. The possessors of 
beasts which can be employed in tillage, oxen, camels, horses, 
mules, and asses, such as the Sheikh, or Headman, and the 
members of his family, do not need to work with their own 
hands, being able to pay for the labour of others by letting 
out their cattle on a system of co-operation, as well as by living 
on the milk and wool of their flocks of sheep and goats. 
The assembly of the farmers is held in the house called 
Saha, or Madafa, kept, according to the hospitable custom of 
the East, for the entertainment of strangers, and which 
serves for all the public meetings of the community. The 
Khateeb, or Mohammedan religious teacher, who is also the 
scribe, recorder, and accountant of the place, presides at 
this gathering. He first writes down the names of all who 
desire to plough, and against each man’s name enters the 
number of ploughs that he intends to work. The farmers 
now form themselves into several equal groups, generally 
making up ten ploughs in a group, each of which chooses 
one of their number to represent them. If there are forty 
men who desire to farm, making up amongst them sixty 
ploughs, they will divide themselves into six parties of ten 
ploughs each represented by six chiefs.* 
The whole of the land is then parcelled out into six equal 
parts, one for each group of farmers, by the six elected 
chiefs. The land being in most instances of various qualities, 
some very good, some much poorer, and some comparatively 
bad, has to be chosen from different and often distant parts 
to form each of the six several parcels. Although there are 
no hedges, ditches, or walls, the tillage is all divided into 
portions somewhat auswering to our fields, marked off from 
one another by rough natural boundaries, each bearing a 
name, such as “ the field of the partridge,” “the field of the 
mother of mice,” &c. It would seem to have been the same 
in ancient times, for we read of “ the fuller’s field,” and “the 
potter's fieid,’t the latter called afterwards, on account of 
its purchase with the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas as 
part of the property, or capital, owned by the masses of mankind in every 
civilised community. 
* By a “plough” must be understood, not the rude implement which 
goes by that name in Palestine, but the possession of a normal plough-team 
of two oxen in light lands and of four oxen in heavy lands. The Roman 
Jugum, or yoke of two oxen, made a complete plough. 
+ 2 Kings xviii. 17. { Matthew xxvii. 7, 10. 
we So 
