Bedouins: the splendid life of chase, hunt and horsemanship
Regional-Syria, Culture, 10/7/1998

The desert entailed not only a simple life, but also the trial and education of the chase. The Umayyads, one and all, were huntsmen. Game was plentiful: lions existed in the Euphrates valley until the middle of the nineteenth century, and the large herds of gazelles which still range the steppes must in the days before cars have been even larger.

The Umayyads pursued their games with hawks, seluki dogs and the tame cheetah.

Yazid of Wines, son of Mu'awea, particularly distinguished as a huntsman, was the first person to train cheetahs to ride on the croup of his horse, along with his pack of selukis (hunting dogs), each one attended by a special slave.

These princes were also inevitably good horsemen and breeders of horses, and racing was a common alternative to the chase. It was organized under royal patronage, and apparently there were as many as four thousand entries, an all time-record, for a great race arranged by Caliph Hisham.

It is these aspects of Umayyad life, the hunting and the horsemanship, that provide the most effective link between the "Raula" tribe in Palmyra (Palmyra in Syria and means city of palms) today and the eighth-century grandeur of the desert nomads. The great chiefs still hunt much as the House of Umayyad did, and like them still recite the poetry of the chase in the tents at the day's end. The cheetah has disappeared but the selukis and the obedient hawks remain, and when the great sheikhs with slaves and servants set out to hawk for gazelles, swaying high on their camels "the finest Arab horses are held unridden in reserve for the contest," the desert men come into their own again.

Gazelle hunting is a very skilled and complex affair and perhaps the most curious thing to be seen in the deserts, since the gazelle will outrun even the seluki, its death is only to be compassed by the elaborate cooperation of hawk, hound and huntsmen. This cooperation is effected in the following way: the hound starts a gazelle at which the huntsman, in full pursuit, loosens the falcon from his wrist. The bird, climbing quickly, soon overtakes the game and swoops at the gazelle. Each time the falcon swoops, the gazelle must break its stride and try, with a flourish of its horns, to stop the bird from burying its talons into its shoulder. In this way, unless the falcon becomes exhausted, the selukis close in on the game and the kill is effected.

Why, it may well be asked, should a falcon swoop at so large and unnatural a target as a full-grown gazelle? This indeed is the most interesting feature of the Bedouin technique and is the result of a long and hard training. The young falcon is given its meat on the shoulders of a straw-stuffed dummy over which a gazelle skin is sewn. After some days an incision is made in the skin and the meat half hidden that the bird must pull it out. Finally, the meat is tucked out of sight and the skin sewn up, so that the falcon to get its meal must tear open the dummy's shoulder with its talon.

In this way a conditioned reflex is achieved: to the falcon's mind gazelles come to be food, and a good falcon can thus be relied on to swoop even at a moving gazelle.

Previous Stories:
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  Arab women's fashion between mythology and modernity   (5/25/1998)
  Collapse of the Umayyad empire   (4/29/1998)

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