56 BULLETIN 1457, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
use. The consequence is that brick and tile burning are nearly 
unknown to the country, and the great mass of the people live in 
houses of handmade, unburned brick. But in any event a few 
sticks of timber and some roofing material are essential, and with 
the prohibitive prices of European timber the date palms are their 
chief source. Aged or unprofitable trees are cut or may be broken 
by the wind; sometimes a garden must yield to eminent domain for 
a railroad or a highwa}^ and such trunks are all utilized to the 
utmost. Door and window caps and floor joists for the more pre- 
tentious houses, with overhead joists for the flat roofs, are provided 
by quartering and hewing good-sized trunks. Then for flooring 
or roofing a thick layer of leaves with the pinnae intact is laid down 
and covered with well-packed mud. 
These examples are only a few of the many uses to which the parts 
of the date palm are applied. Table 3 gives an outline of many of 
the uses to which materials from this tree are put. 
Table 3. — Date tree by-products, showing examples of useful application of 
materials other than the fruits 
Classes of material 
Sap 
Tree trunk as timber... 
Leaves: 
Entire leaves 
Leef (sheath fiber).. 
Pinnae. 
Rachis or rib (gerid). 
Sobata (fruitstalks), in- 
cluding the shamrokh, 
or fruit-bearing 
strands. 
Fermented and distilled liquors. Not now permitted by law. 
Floor and roof joists, lintels, sakieh frames, water conductors, light bridges, 
rustic work. 
Fence building; palisades around housetops; spread thickly on joists to sup- 
port a layer of earth for floors or roofs. 
Small cordage; ropes; burden nets for camels and donkeys; reinforcing for 
baskets; bfush brooms; pads; packing material. 
Basket making: By flat braid sewed into form; by wrapped coil weave, like 
the Pima baskets of Arizona; baskets for a great variety of uses, such as mar- 
keting produce, handling coal, earth, sand, and street rubbish; small cordage 
(called habl sariafl), mats, pads, fans, fly flappers; sakieh ropes in Upper 
Egypt and the Sudan. 
Crates, racks, trays, drums, or stands; crates for every conceivable use, such 
as transporting poultry, eggs, fruit, vegetables, pictures, glass, mirrors, light 
fixtures, and pottery. 
Sakieh ropes: The macerated stalks have the fibrovascular bundles separated 
and twisted into very firm cord and strong rope for tree-climbers' girdles, 
saddle girths, etc.; cores for the wrapped spiral- weave baskets. 
It is not for a moment supposed that most of these uses could be 
profitably applied in American date-growing regions, where the 
vast resources of this country in sawed and dressed lumber, brick and 
tile, lime and cement, wall board and patent roofing, metal lath, 
and sheet metal are at the command of the humblest builder. 
With the price of a day's labor from 6 to 10 times as high in 
America as in Egypt, it is not possible that much of the handicraft 
that has grown up around the date-palm products in that land can 
find profitable application here. The hand twisting of cordage from 
leef (the fiber of the great sheath at the base of each leaf) and the 
plaiting of basket braid are old-age occupations in a land where old 
age seldom brings leisure (pi. 3, B, and pi. 4, A), and the immense 
number and endless variety of crates made from the strong and 
elastic midribs of the leaves are only produced at a profit by the 
native methods with labor at 7 to 10 piasters a day, the equivalent 
of 35 to 50 cents in American money. 
The chief available by-product of American date palms will 
probably be the leaves, 12 to 20 of which are pushed out of the great 
