What is Jordan?

[Henny]

Via a good friend in Amman:

What is Jordan?

A tiny slice of desert stuck between Iraq and a hard place.

 

[Xavier_Onassis]

The hard place being Israel? Or Saudi Arabia? I guess for a Jordanian, both are pretty hard places.

[Henny]

The hard place being Israel? Or Saudi Arabia? I guess for a Jordanian, both are pretty hard places.

Generally speaking, it's a bad neighborhood!

[Xavier_Onassis]

Jordan is not all that tiny, but I suppose it is rather tiny if one counts the parts that are habitable.

It has many beautiful beaches, but there seems to be a decided lack of ocean.

[Henny]

Jordan is not all that tiny, but I suppose it is rather tiny if one counts the parts that are habitable.

It has many beautiful beaches, but there seems to be a decided lack of ocean.

To my American thinking, this is one tiny country!

But ok... you're right. Still, to Bedouins, all of it is habitable. (To everyone else, not so much.)

[Plane]

Jordan is not all that tiny, but I suppose it is rather tiny if one counts the parts that are habitable.

It has many beautiful beaches, but there seems to be a decided lack of ocean.

One Port city , the only bit of Jordan I have ever seen myself.

The Citizens there were marvelously friendly tho, a great contrast with Baharan where I felt as if I were a tolerated nusance.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Jordan is sort of like Nevada: expansive but largely empty. I am not sure that we ever had any seriously nomadic Indians in Nevada. A lot of the central part is not only very dry, but the soil is heavily alkali, so even with rain it would be hard to farm.

[Plane]

Arabs are not all Nomads some of them are city builders from a way back..., and Nevada is home to lots of Navaho one of the least nomadic tribes.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I think you will find that the Navajos (Diné)  live mostly in Arizona, nor Nevada, and that they were nomadic prior to being settled in the Navajo reservation in NE Arizona and NW New Mexico.

Nomadic cultures generally depend on domestic livestock, such as sheep, cattle and goats. American Indians had no such animals until the Spanish came. The Sioux in the Dakotas and Montana followed the buffalo herds after they got horses. Before horses, I believe that most of them lived in Minnesota.

Horses were also not native to North America and were also brought by the Spanish.

The Hopi, on the other hand, are NOT nomadic and have lived in the same place for something like 5000 years.

I know that most Arabs are not Bedouins.

[Plane]

Navaho depended a lot on the domestication of corn, post Colombus they have been hearding sheep also.

American Indians include a lot of diffrent lifestyles , fishermen , hunters , farmers and nomads .


  I think the Navaho are not nomadic because their traditional home is the Hogan , a small but substantial building, not easily moved .

http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment/lecture-2/lecture-2



Looks like ai was wrong about Nevada tho.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I believe that the Navajo were originally rather sedentary, and moved only when the land would grow no more. Then the Spanish arrived and at least some of them became more nomadic. Then the US government resettled them further west, around the Hopi reservation.

Hogans are rather similar to yurts, the traditional Mongolian dwellings. They are less portable than tepees, but more so than the adobe homes of the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande (San Ildefonso, etc.).

The Navajo have not lived in Nevada in any recent times.

[Plane]

Yurts get moved, hogans dont get moved.

[Xavier_Onassis]

There is rather a lot of info about Navahos in the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_people

When the Spanish arrived, these people lived further East, in central NM. They were forceably moved to Bosque Redondo, and then allowed to return to the Canyon de Chelly. Later they were give the area surrounding the Hopi reservation.

The portable version of a hogan is called a wikiup, and is traditional to the Apaches and Utes, also tribes of the same Athabaskan linguistic group the Dine belong to.

The Hopi and Pueblo Indians are not Athabaskan, but the Navajo have learned many of their ways. You could say that the hogan, is an adobe version of the wikiup, a sort of synthesis of the Hopi and Navajo cultures.

Strangely, the name given to the largest group of Pueblo Indians is Anasazi, which is a Navajo word.

And the word Navajo seems to be a word used by the Pueblos to describe the Navajo, who call themselves the Diné.