"كتيّب سوريا (بما في ذلك فلسطين). لندن: إدارة استخبارات الأركان البحرية، يونيو ١٩١٩" [و‎‎٩‎٢] (٧٣٨/١٨٨)

DISTRIBUTION AND DENSITY OF POPULATION 177
plain to the top of the hill with the view of obtaining
better protection from Bedouin depredations. Where both
advantages (defence and water-supply) cannot be combined,
the latter consideration gives way to the former. Thus many
villages are half a mile away from their wells ; and in places
villages are established where there are no springs, and where
the water-supply is contained in open tanks or cisterns, which
depend on the rainfall. The size of any settlement is ulti
mately determined by the water-supply.
Since, without a reasonable degree of protection from
marauders, no community can exist, the area wherein it is
possible for town and village life to be maintained depends
very largely on the efficiency of the government at any
particular time. Complaints occur in many books of travel
of the inefficiency of the Ottoman Government, which by its
failure to suppress the nomad raiders permits large areas,
which might be profitably cultivated, to lie waste. It would
seem doubtful, however, whether in these cases bad govern
ment alone is responsible ; for it has been shown that the
tendency to raid the cultivated lands varies inversely with the
rainfall and the scarcity which want of rain produces among
the nomads is largely the cause of their raids.
The tendency of late years has been to increase the popu
lation of the towns at the expense of the villages. Reasons
given for this are the modern civil code, owing to which
agricultural land has largely passed from communal owner
ship into the hands of individuals ; and the ruin of native
industries by the introduction of cheap manufactured goods
from Europe. Thus in a village where a few years ago
forty looms were at work only six were found by a recent
traveller. Another reason is doubtless the better piotection
which the town affords. Thus many villages in the rich and
fertile lands of the Hauran were laid waste by the Bedouin
because the villagers declined to pay the blackmail called
khuwweh, ‘ fraternity ’; the people fearing further ill treatment
then sought more secure abodes in the vicinity of towns
more directly under Turkish rule.