Israel’s ancient Bedouin culture gets new life online The archive of researcher Clinton Bailey is going global, furthering knowledge on a civilization that’s thousands of years old. a new collection in the works at the National Library of Israel preserves 50-odd years of documentation of the Bedouin community carried out by a world-renowned expert. It will be made freely available online within the next year. The collection will be based on the archives of Clinton Bailey, a US-born Israeli Middle East expert who for 50 years collected materials from the last Bedouin generation to grow up in the pre-modern period, making them an invaluable source of an orally transmitted ancient civilization. Bailey first came across the Bedouin when he was working as an English teacher in the Negev Desert. “So I spent the next 50 years doing so.I bought a jeep and a tape recorder and went around. I met and stayed with hundreds and hundreds of people. In many groups I was even a member of the family, in a metaphorical way.” What most interested him was that the Bedouin way of life managed to maintain itself in the desert over history. “Just the fact that people like that could survive in the desert, in desert conditions, for such a long time, fascinated me. I found that since the desert doesn’t change if you don’t bring in water then survival in the desert doesn’t change either. You need the same systems and therefore the culture is very old,” he notes. What most interested him was that the Bedouin way of life managed to maintain itself in the desert over history. “Just the fact that people like that could survive in the desert, in desert conditions, for such a long time, fascinated me. I found that since the desert doesn’t change if you don’t bring in water then survival in the desert doesn’t change either. You need the same systems and therefore the culture is very old,” he notes. Source: Israel 21c