ABSTRACT
The Bedouin have played a major role in world history, and the literature dealing with them is correspondingly large. But in spite of earlier contributions by some outstanding authors, it was only in 1967, with the publication of Emanuel Marx's Bedouin of the Negev that we had for the first time an analysis of a Bedouin society that came up to the standards set by modern social anthropology. One of the difficulties of Marx's book is that his terminology is liable to cause confusion. Marx's book was originally written in English, and was later translated into Hebrew. The Hebrew version differs only slightly from the English one. In the nineteenth century the whole of the Negev was divided between various Bedouin groups. At that time the Bedouin, among them the Ahaywat, who until 1948 occupied not only a large part of central Sinai but also the southern Negev, dominated the region.
