I once had tea with some bedouins in Jordan’s Wadi Rum around 2015 or so and these pictures could have been of that tea. The tent looked the same.
They were really nice people who just stopped some travelers for tea and a chat. They weren’t selling anything and wouldn’t take any gives or thank yous. Frequently when traveling you’ll get some fake hospitality experiences that end up just “gift shopping” but this experience was neat to me as they seemed just interested in travelers.
I wonder how frequently they do that as the road wasn’t super busy, but also wasn’t abandoned. We maybe spent half an hour and no else came by.
Also traveled that area, late 90s thru 2000. Somewhere with caves we went scrambling all over until through one hole a friend and I had clearly and unknowingly climbed into a families living room. Their first words (in Arabic), would you like some tea? You're english, right?
We hadn't realised (or ignorantly) but we were scrambling over a lived in area, peoples property. The reaction from everyone we randomly met was the same, warm, smiling.
The animals are in a line bunched up close and alternating facing so that one animal has its head on the shoulders of the two animals next to itself and looking towards their rear.
I haven't seen that before. More peculiar is that I can't see them eating anything. Normally when animals are milked, it's lunch (or dinner) time. They line up in front of their troughs and they're milked while they eat. Typically there's some kind of divider or railing to keep them more or less still also. Otherwise you need to have really well disciplined and calm animals or you'll get lots of hooves in milk pots and so on.
It's also very interesting to see how they dried their cheeses on top of their tents. These look like small, lactic cheeses. If they had a good source of salt they would probably be very high on salt both to help preserve and sanitise them and also to replenish the salt lost by the people to the heat of the desert. Anyway that must have been really strong cheese: sun-dried, very salty, goat's milk cheese. Yum.
I'm thinking ground rope and short leads. I've seen something similar done with pack goats. scatterign food on the rope helps train them to it, they'll wait more patiently if they know the ritual includes food sometime. even just a snack.
That makes sense but in that case they'd have their heads down. The animals in the picture are standing with their heads up, looking straight ahead. All of them!
Not that hard to train your goats or cows to this; highly dependent on the animal's inherited personality though. I would routinely milk one of our cows when I was a kid right out in the pasture. She was calm as ever, no food was ever required, and she was never tied to anything. Obviously, she was just very happy to be milked and have the pressure released from her utter (her babes were the same ilk). I agree though, seeing the goat line-up is quite interesting. :-D My current herd would not stand for it, I assure you.
Train them! I have to confess I'm useless with animals. Last time I tried to help, it took three of us to milk one goat. Then she put her foot int he milking pot :)
But that's a herd that's been allowed to go wild and we were primarily milking them for their relief. They're anarchist goats. If I stay longer on the farm (which is not mine) I may give it a go taming and training them, though. Should be fun :D
:-D That's one of my primary reasons for loving goats so much - they 100% completely refuse to bow to industrial agriculture or the whims of man. All goats are anarchist goats. :-D I love it! Good luck! Embrace the anarchy.
These photos are of stunning quality. I'm not sure I've seen any 19th century photos that come close, even with retouching and postprocessing. But also the lighting is incredible. Like it looks more like something associated with a more modern (ie post-WWII) technique.
I didn't see any mention of the provenance of these photos. Anyone know?
With all that light, they didn't need a flash, and the shutter could be fairly fast.
I am pretty sure they are real, but the dates given are kind of unverifiable, by looking. The Bedouin still pretty much look like that, today, but you might see the occasional watch, and probably more shoes, these days.
I'm pretty sure most of these photos were take in Arabia and not the Sahara. Some of them are clearly in Palestine and Jordan. Arabia is also mostly bright desert so the point stands.
These are crazy high quality it makes it reallyy questionable. I just looked up photos from 1900 on getty images and there's a graininess to them and a distinct quality to them. But I'm no photograph expert.
The photographic technique matters for image quality. You may have been looking at autochrome prints which used potato starch grains and typically had a long exposure time and a bit of a pointillist effect. For reference here is a collection of 110 year old autochromes of Paris:
some of these photos look like they were taken with a field camera on plates, a technique that can achieve higher resolution than modern consumer digital cameras. you may be looking at some smaller format for your examples.
most people have never seen a real photography exhibition and don't realize the extreme detail and depth that can be achieved with analog photography, and has been possible for over a hundred years. consumer cameras are oriented to convenience, but film is so much more powerful than the toy cameras you might remember from when you were a kid.
In my family we had a book made at an unusual, large, awkward size. The book was essentially a photo album and the pages essentially contact prints from large glass plates. The subject was the construction of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads to form the first transcontinental railroad in the US. In one picture, a very large wooden trestle bridge had just been completed, and the builders were all over it, if you could find them. The exposure time was long enough to turn the rapids of the river below feathery.
The photographer kept the camera and his supplies in a horse-drawn wagon, which was also the darkroom.
The photos could simply be misattributed in terms of date (Bedouins in various places had this sort of lifestyle well into the 20th century, AIUI).
Maybe someone who knows more about historical firearms than me can confirm whether the guns and ammo belts (which are the most visible bits of industrial technology) in the photos are viable for late 19th C.
From the side of the picture, it looks like it's on film. Was it possible to have a film camera in 1889? Yes, barely.
"The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888."
The number 109 (sweethearts) is much higher than 60 (mother and child). That implies that there were many more worse photos that were not selected for uploading.
Far more recently, in 1937, my grandpa went on a cycling trip through Germany, Austria, and Italy, then back to the UK.
My mum made a photo website about it, including links to some hotels that are still operating.
My mum then wrote an article about it for the CTC cycling magazine in the UK, and it was published in the Feb/Mar 2021 issue, page 47-49. (paywall, free registration required to view)
> I didn't see any mention of the provenance of these photos. Anyone know?
these photos are genuine — they come directly from the
- Library of Congress Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection [0]
- Library of Congress American Colony (Jerusalem). Photo Department [1]
- New York State Education Deparment Instructional lantern slides [2][3][4]
> These photos are of stunning quality. I'm not sure I've seen any 19th century photos that come close, even with retouching and postprocessing.
While lensmaking has become more industrialized and specialized, raw photographic technology has not advanced much over the past ~100 years.
This goes viral on reddit every so often, so I assume most are already familiar, but I recommend looking through the Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky[5] collection[6] on the LOC for examples of medium to large format color photography from 1905-1915, for example. Gorsky's field work of Tsarist Russia (with what was most likely some version of the Miethe Dreifarben-Kamera[7][8][9], given the rectangular shape of the glass negatives) is stunning.
Interesting that they say “taxation” of caravans was their source of income, so were they effectively grifters making caravans pay them for protection money?
Grifters is probably still on the euphemistic side -- one wonders what happened to those unable to meet "tax" bills. In the early 2010s present day Bedouins in the Sinai were widely reported to supplement their incomes by torturing would-be migrants from Africa to death unless their ransom money demands were met by the families or harvesting and selling their organs.
I think this is an interesting thing. If you scale the idea of 'country' down to the size of a tribe, then you can call it taxation, whithout any euphemism. They control/own the land, they decide the 'laws' on it. If that is good or bad for development of a region is another question.
> If you scale the idea of 'country' down to the size of a tribe, then you can call it taxation, whithout any euphemism.
No. "Taxes" in the modern sense implies that the taxees [1] as a group receive something in return. Are the bedouins building and maintaining roads? I don't think so. "Pay us money or else we'll torture, rape, and/or kill you" alone doesn't qualify as taxes, but as extortion.
[1] Is that a real word? I use it to refer to the people who have to pay taxes.
As a house owner I pay property taxes. Some of that money is spent by the state to maintain the road which connects my garage to the rest of the world. Some of it is spent to finance the school my kids go to. And the school bus. And the roads beneath the school bus.
'Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by "roving bandits" destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits. Both can be better off if a bandit sets himself up as a dictator-a "stationary bandit" who monopolizes and
rationalizes theft in the form of taxes. A secure autocrat has an encompassing interest in his domain
that leads him to provide a peaceful order and other public goods...'
Olson, 'Dictatorship, Democracy and Development', APSR 1993.
When you pay them you have safe passage through their territory, not only from them but from other tribes who usually want to avoid robbing people in another tribes territory.
With the taxation you not only pay them to not rob you but their presence also protects you from other robbers, who may not be willing to negotiate and just shoot you.
I really don't see a principled difference to taxation by states, the only difference is the size and a more formalized institution surround the racket.
You can decide for yourself on the morality of it, I will avoid to offer an opinion on it.
You don't pay them to have safe passage through their territory.
It's not their territory, similarly to how guerrilla groups in Columbia/Nepal do not own the Jungle/Himalaya/etc, and you don't get a choice whether you want their protection. If you brought your own armed man with you, you will get fired upon.
There where/are rubbers in Europe and in the USA, and we call them "rubbers"/"criminals". Why all of a sudden when we're discussing an "exotic" tribe we can't call it what it is?
and again I'm emphasizing that not all Bedouin tribes practic(ed) violent rubbery, but some really did(do), and it was/is really nothing like taxation.
If we want to discuss a general claim that rubbery is the same as taxation, that's fine (and I disagree), but there is no reason to drag a specific type of rubbers into focus.
They lived there since generations. They had weapons. They controlled who goes in their land.
I think that mattered more in reality, than some arbitary lines drawn on some map far away, by people never been close to the land in the first place.
And taxation in its oldest shape was indeed just protection money.
You had to pay your lord/king for safety. Otherwise the noble knights came to your farm and took what they wanted and might have burned it down, if they felt like it.
And if you passed through foreign land, you had to pay hundreds of local lords for safe passage.
Same here. You pay the nomads for safety - they keep other tribes/rubbers away from their territory, providing you safety.
So you can claim, they did provide a "service".
But sure, you cannot really compare it to the taxation and services of the modern national states.
And sure, for the caravans it would be better, if just no one was around they needed to pay for protection of someone else.
It is parasitism. But this is how most states started. By preying on the weak for the benefit of a ruling class.
These people were the government. If it's robbery when they do it it's robbery when the government does it.
Until the governments in question were able and willing to project the power necessary to take the Bedouin controlled territory by force it was their state. Regardless of what the .gov claimed on paper. The Bedouins were the government there in practice.
Except they didn't build the road or own it or live in it. They go over a vast land, attack caravans, do some damage, and then approach a day later and ask for money for "protection".
Exactly what everyone called a gang or bandits in the Americas.
For crying out loud "raiding" is listed in the Bedouin Wikipedia page under "traditions". (Again not the only practice, but it is what it is).
Also note that raiders are not generally also herders or traders and don't act in some common good and share their loot with the formers. (they share with their own close family) (most Bedouin families suffer from the raiders)
If you still have issues with seeing this as bandits also note that these tribes come with child abuse and women slavery bundled, but hey who are we to judge.
This all thread now reminds me of the movie Dogville. Highly recommend.
And don't get me wrong. They could have easily formed an autonomous territory and collect passage taxes. They didn't. The raiders, "protectors", were exactly, literally what we call gang or bandits anywhere else. Now you can go philosophical about how raiders and gang families are just tiny states, but use general terms please, these raiders are generally not different than others
You risk being murdered and your business put on fire?
Stop romanticizing it.
Yes, some states started from violent protection based tribes (not all of them). This was not taxation. There were/are states and actual laws in the places Bedouin extort people for money under threat of violence. They provided no service in return execpt the promise that they themselves would not harm you.
Absolutely no, extorting "protection" money is not OK and it is not taxation.
The difference is marginal in my view. The only difference now is that they wear suits and bleed you slowly instead of putting you out of your misery with one shot.
The commenter was instructed to ask people who have actually paid taxes. My point is that everyone does. I’m a valid person to ask my experience. It’s not scary. I doubt anybody who has been mugged would say the same.
> You risk being murdered and your business put on fire?
Yeah. Depending on the details of how you go about not paying your taxes I can see it happening. Heck, even if you pay your taxes the tax men might do it to you anyway if you do the kind of business they don't like they think you're unsympathetic enough and can get some political brownie points for screwing you[0](though thankfully this is very rare).
> There were/are states and actual laws
What makes them "actual laws". Surely the Bedouin have customs regarding the right and wrong amounts to charge, methods of payment, penalties for non-payment, etc, etc and those who work outside of those customs would be subject to penalty as a corrupt or rogue agent of the state would be in a "normal" state.
On the other I'm guessing your country does actually provide a ton of services you benefit from every day. Transport and utility infrastructure, health services, social services, policing and justice systems that protect your personal and property rights, national security and defence, it's easy to take all of that for granted.
If you live in a democracy, 'the government' is a consensus agreed by the people around you that you live amongst. The government is your family, neighbours, employer, all your fellow citizens. If you really don't like it vote, campaign, go into politics and change it. People do that.
I don’t really buy the moral argument. The government regulates, facilitates and protects the economy in which you work and earn. It creates and acts to protect the value of the currency itself.
The problem with consumption taxes is they can be bypassed in many ways, such as by spending your earnings abroad. I do think income taxes at higher brackets can be counter productive because they also can be bypassed in various ways, but that’s a practical matter not a moral one.
I have links to China and I think the growing implementation and use of income tax in China is a good thing. I hope that it will give Chinese people a sense that they are personally funding government, and that therefore the government should be accountable to them, the people paying its way.
As a citizen I feel a lot more of a direct connection between myself and responsibility for and accountability of government through the income taxes I pay than anything else. I’m proud of my contribution through income tax, but not so much for things like VAT.
Because if people consume more, they would pay more and wealthier people generally consume more.
The problem with income tax is that low income people risk being put in jail if they can't pay their taxes. And rich people can easily avoid income tax anyway (e.g. earn 1 USD a year from the job and get paid in stock or donate most income to a foundation that is in their own control).
An extra tax on luxury goods (private airplanes, yachts) would also be ok by the way.
It’s called taxation, in the Middle ages peasants we’re taxed by the King and the only thing offered was protection. Government services is a modern world thing.
And even in the middle ages there were criminals. People that rubbed villagers on the side of the road. People that brunt down their fields and asked for money. There is a difference between violently robing people and taxation.
In a modern society, if you don't pay your taxes you are likely to be imprisoned, possibly violently (depending on circumstances). Fundamentally there is no difference.
You fail to see the parallels. A state is a group of people, and taxation is money for that group. I guess you are thinking emotionally and with associations ("state" and "tax" is something "respectful" and "civilized" and "bedouins" and "robbers" are something "uncivilized").
First of all I didn't say 'bedouins' are 'uncivilized'. Bedouins are not just about what we discuss here and they are not all violent, unlawful, or "robbers".
Second, I see very well where people are making the very much false IMO parallels.
You are comparing modern states to opportunistic self-serving shortsighted violent families. Yes, states used and use violence also, but, no, they did not evolve from the kind of behavior that we are talking about, if anything they evolved in opposition to this. "Parallels"? similarity? maybe in some broad sense, but the differences are Hugh.
There is no structure here, there is no idea of a shared identity, there is no law. There is just the extended family (tribe) an the opportunity and willingness to do harm to others for profit. And no, historically this is not where we all came from, and no, this was not how most states where formed, and no, this is not what taxes are about.
I don't think you're correct there as others have pointed out, but are you trying to say that taxation is bad, or that this kind of rent-seeking behavior is good? I can't quite work out what you're getting at.
He's saying that you can't both say it's good if the government does it and bad if a tribe does it. The tribe has just as much right (that is, might), as a "legitimate government".
> He's saying that you can't both say it's good if the government does it and bad if a tribe does it.
Who says that though? Is it a straw man argument or is there some real point to it? Is it bad when the government and the tribe does it, or good when they do it?
> The tribe has just as much right (that is, might), as a "legitimate government".
I read that as a very polite way of saying that, historically speaking, they were widely regarded as thieves. As in, if you traveled in certain places of the desert without an armed escort, you would be robbed.
It depends on the specific tribe. But absolutely, yes, some of the Bedouin tribes were (and still are) in the "protection" business (in the criminal sense). Some tribes have other professions.
This article about the history of Greco-Roman Palmyra recently posted here [0] shows that Palmyra citizens made their living as caravan traders ferrying goods from India and China to the Roman empire across the Syrian desert.
It's likely that part of their success in doing so was by having effective alliances with Bedouin tribes of the region.
>"Palmyra’s role in all this was to help get the merchandise over the eight hundred miles that separated the cities and ports of Syria from the Persian Gulf and the sea route, by crossing the Syrian desert to the welcoming banks of the Euphrates and the fertile Persian territory; this was the annual adventure of the large caravans. The bartering and the palavers with tribal chiefs and the bribing of the Roman and Persian customs officers were done in Greek and Aramaic, the international languages of business."
So this "taxation" likely has a history going back over 2,000 years and would be a known feature of trading relations, not very different from paying a fee to use the Suez canal today.
They most probably were in possession of the monopoly of violence in those parts of the world and as such, like any other state, they exercised their rights to tax people.
I took an interest in the Bedouins after seeing the film Lawrence of Arabia, which features them. If you haven’t seen it and have a few hours to kill, you definitely should.
I highly recommend the book Lawrence in Arabia, by Scott Anderson, which puts that story in context. It follows four people active in the area at the time: TE Lawrence (who first went to the Middle East as an archaeologist), an American employee of Standard Oil, the leader of a Jewish spy ring working with the British, and a Turkish official. Very interesting.
That's what David⁸ did in Prometheus T10m58s and he enjoyed the film so much that the next two Alien movies were about a robot imitating T.E. Lawrence.
"Arabian Sands" is an fascinating book describing travels though the empty quarter in Saudi Arabia and interactions with the Bedouin at a time when their way of life was about to start changing fast (1940s):
Just about to post the same.My copy disappeared but I think it had great photos. There was a vengeful account of a tribe killing a boy left alone. He was trapped inside cliffs with no escape.
Thesiger Said he respected Bedouin more than his Eton chums.
1898 is pretty early in the technology of photography, maybe I didn't read carefully enough, but I would like to know what was used to take these photographs. They are very interesting and look better than I would expect for 1898!
As to the history of photography, when these were taken Fenton's [in]famous pictures of the Crimean War were already 50 years old. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky colour pics of the Russian empire are of about the same early 20th century vintage.
Ah, thanks a lot for that link, much more information! The OP looks to be a bit misleading as well, not all of the photographs were necessarily from 1898:
The majority of the images depict Palestine (present day Israel and the West Bank) from 1898 to 1946.
Here’s a Library of Congress collection of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s colour photographs from the 1900s and 1910s; I particularly love his color portrait of Leo Tolstoy, who seems such a quintessential 19th-century figure but in fact lived long enough to sit for a color photograph in 1908:
It certainly is 'blogspam' - at least one of the photos, complete with caption, is lifted from Wikipedia [0] (not even Wikipedia's source's caption [1]).
Indeed, this is why Leica, the inventors of using 35 mm film for stills, called it Kleinbild - “small image”. At the time people doubted you could make optics good enough for this to work out, but Zeiss (inventors of modern optical engineering) and Leitz proved those naysayers wrong.
It's over 50 years after the invention of photography. Plate photography was already quite a robust technology at that point in time. Sensitivity and exposure times weren't too bad either. The first experimental color photographs were made some 20 years earlier.
“123 years from now, these images will be transmitted on a vast world wide information network. These small windows into your life will make impressions on the minds of thousands of future strangers across the globe. And incredibly, the magic of this journey through space and time, will be cheapened by embedded pop up ads.”
For those of you who saw the "instrument", noticed that it's a bagpipe, check out the huge range of bagpipes from round the world: http://www.bagpipesociety.org.uk/guide/
Yes it's a bagpipe. It's called Mezwed here in north africa. It's made of a single goat skin, although it's not hollowed out, the animal is skinned normally but carefully as to not leave holes or thin sections. Then it's stitched back to the shape of the bagpipe.
It's probably a goat, maybe a sheep. But yeah, I've seen (and heard) a bagpipe made out of a single goat skin. It was Bulgarian, I think. The skin seemed completely intact, except for where the head and feet were replaced by pipes.
Smiling to cameras is a learned behavior, and not something unfamiliar adults do naturally. (Kids do more smiling in general and are less aware of cameras / less self-conscious about their appearance, so if you go somewhere without a culture of cameras and take candid shots, you’ll get more smiling kid pictures than smiling adult pictures.
My godparents are indigenous Maya peasants from southern Mexico, and until the last decade or two no adult in their village would ever smile to a camera, and certainly not in a formal portrait. Nowadays they are more exposed to mainstream Mexican/World culture, and norms are changing fast, but if you tell some adult you want to take their portrait you are still likely to get a very serious expression.
The reason I heard is that it took a long time to take a shot and was expensive. So you did not want to mess up a shoot with a smile. Better go for the safe option and put on your RBF.
When traveling in SE Asia maybe 20 years ago, locals would ask me to have their picture taken. The older people would just stand there stiff as a plank and absolutely no expression on their face.
Younger kids would put their index finger & thumb in the shape of a gun and hold that under their chin and they would smile.
When I take pictures of my own kids (toddlers) they also have no idea about smiling, you have to "teach them" but then you end up with super fake expressions.
Of course, now Saudi Arabia has changed a lot due to oil revenue and, then, construction of cities, especially near the coast of the Persian Gulf.
But in recent years, surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is well into farming! The have borrowed the idea used in dryer parts of the US called center point irrigation. So, from a central pivot, they have a long boom, on wheels, that goes round and round spraying water drawn from the center point.
For the water? There was lots of it in the area some thousands of years ago, and it accumulated in fresh water aquifers now some hundreds of feet down.
In addition, on their west coast, that is, along the Red Sea, there are some mountains and, surprisingly, moisture blows in from the west and generates rain in the mountains. Soooooo, they've been capturing the runoff from that rain and using it for more agriculture.
Right. I thought about including that as the aquifers and oil wells dry up, they will have to use solar and/or nuclear power to desalinate the water! Also to get from agriculture as much revenue as they are getting from oil, they will have to grow a lot more crops! I left out that, IRCC, actually they are making money now exporting some of the crops they are growing from the center point irrigation!.
I've always wondered why desert nomads dress like they do. Given modern fabrics and constructions, would you chose to dress like this to go to the desert? I understand it is an area of extreme heat in the day and extreme cold when the sun goes down, the head and face protection I understand, but the flowing, multi-layered robes? The conjecture would be that they insulate more than disperse heat via evaporative cooling? Seems like we have cold-weather gears figured out with cold and high-altitude expeditions, but desert gears?
There are several reasons. One is that white fabric is transparent, and the sun will reach the skin. Black fabric blocks the sun, and the heat is kept in the upper robe, and doesn't penetrate inward.
Another reason is the structure of the garment - it's a robe that is open from top to bottom, this allows air currents to flow along the skin, drawing away moisture and cooling the person.
The heat of the sun acts as the engine that causes that airflow (i.e. it's worth slightly higher temperature, which will then cause the hotter air to rise up, and out the neck carrying moisture with it).
And finally, you don't want a sunburn.
Modern heat control is all about exposing the skin for the cooling, but it relies on shelter and sunscreen to block the sun.
If you can't block the sun then you want a garment to do it.
Polygyny, where one male mates with more than one female while each female mates with only one male, is thought to be the fundamental mating system of animals.
Interestingly they look and behave quite similar even today as one can see in southern Israel, some replaced camels with an old beaten Subaru 4x4 but they still used tents, grow animals and wear traditional clothes
In Syrai Badia, is a region of desert, semi-desert and steppe covering 500,000 square meters, Bedduin is mostly derived from Badia or primitive in Arabic.
That Bedouin nomad never imagined you watching him this day, on your couch, using your glowing pocket screen. Or being used to sell tennis shoes.
Imagine what will become of our memories?
Maybe future us can simulate the past so well that we can recreate it. Maybe we're just echoes of the past in this very moment, playing out for dwellers of an advanced future.
Maybe they're omnipotent. They can capture all the radiation that gets emitted and reverse calculate everything. Our brain states. No simulation at all, but a recreation.
We could be in a mundane No Mouth Cannot Scream or Roko's Basilisk scenario this very moment. Implausible, but just maybe...
I find it interesting that the photos of the men often showed them enjoying themselves while the photos of the women often showed them working, and there were no photos with the roles reversed.
I hope that isn't reflective of how their lives were.
It's never a good idea to go intro gender conversations these days, but a couple of points:
1. there were plenty of societies where one sex had it worse than the other. From what I know of theirs, I'd be shocked to here they were egalitarian.
2. Women had what we'd recognize today as jobs, and in a tribal society those were just as hard as they needed to be - it was more or less an extended family. Men on the other hand used weapons, which suggest they were quite a lot more exposed to being killed. Women would have been harmed only in a wipeout, but as a man you're never sure you'll still be alive next year. Romance aside, I know what I'd chose.
That's not accurate - there are photos there of men with weapons, with falcons, on horseback, etc., that reference their work. And there are photos of women not working.
I'm no fan. It does kind of bridge the gap with modern expectations, but it's often so drab and in very similar color palettes, that the bridging effect will soon be gone: everyone will recognize that palette as old as B/W.
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They were really nice people who just stopped some travelers for tea and a chat. They weren’t selling anything and wouldn’t take any gives or thank yous. Frequently when traveling you’ll get some fake hospitality experiences that end up just “gift shopping” but this experience was neat to me as they seemed just interested in travelers.
I wonder how frequently they do that as the road wasn’t super busy, but also wasn’t abandoned. We maybe spent half an hour and no else came by.