Besides the tribes occupying the northern parts of the peninsula, five chief clans are enumerated by Burckhardt.[FN#7] Nassar, and other authorities at Suez, divided them into six, namely:-

1.  Karashi, who, like the Gara in Eastern Arabia, claim an apocryphal origin from the great Koraysh tribe. 2.  Salihi, the principal family of the Sinaitic Badawin. 3.  Arimi:  according to Burckhardt this clan is merely a sub-family of the Sawalihahs. 4.  Sa’idi.  Burckhardt calls them Walad Sa’id and derives them also from the Sawalihahs. 5.  Aliki ; and lastly, the 6.  Muzaynah, generally pronounced M’zaynah.  This clan claims to be an off-shoot from the great Juhaynah tribe inhabiting the coasts and inner barrens about Yambu’.  According to oral tradition, five persons, the ancestors of the present Muzaynah race, were forced by a blood-feud to fly their native country.  They landed at the Shurum,[FN#8] or creek-ports, and have now spread themselves

[p.146]over the Eastern parts of the so-called “Sinaitic” peninsula.  In Al-Hijaz the Muzaynah is an old and noble tribe.  It produced Ka’ab al-Ahbar, the celebrated poet, to whom Mohammed gave the cloak which the Ottomans believe to have been taken by Sultan Salim from Egypt, and to have been converted under the name of Khirkah Sharif, into the national Oriflamme.

There are some interesting ethnographical points about these Sinaitic clans-interesting at least to those who would trace the genealogy of the great Arabian family.  Any one who knows the Badawin can see that the Muzaynah are pure blood.  Their brows are broad, their faces narrow, their features regular, and their eyes of a moderate size; whereas the other Tawarah[FN#9] (Sinaitic) clans are as palpably Egyptian.  They have preserved that roundness of face which may still be seen in the Sphinx as in the modern Copt, and their eyes have that peculiar size, shape, and look, which the old Egyptian painters attempted to express by giving to the profile, the form of the full, organ.  Upon this feature, so characteristic of the Nilotic race, I would lay great stress.  No traveller familiar with the true Egyptian eye,-long, almond-shaped, deeply fringed, slightly raised at the outer corner and dipping in front like the Chinese,[FN#10]-can ever mistake it.  It is to be seen in half-castes, and, as I have before remarked, families originally from the banks of the Nile, but settled for generations in the Holy Land of Al-Hijaz, retain the peculiarity.

I therefore believe the Turi Badawin to be an impure

[p.147]race, Syro-Egyptian,[FN#11] whereas their neighbour the Hijazi is the pure Syrian or Mesopotamian.

A wonderful change has taken place in the Tawarah tribes, whilome pourtrayed by Sir John Mandeville as “folke fulle of alle evylle condiciouns.”  Niebuhr notes the trouble they gave him, and their perpetual hankering for both murder and pillage.  Even in the late Mohammed Ali’s early reign, no governor of Suez dared to flog, or to lay hands upon, a Turi, whatever offence he might have committed within the walls of the town.  Now the Wild Man’s sword is taken from him, before he is allowed to enter the gates,[FN#12] and my old acquaintance, Ja’afar Bey, would think no more of belabouring a Badawi than of flogging a Fellah.[FN#13] such is the result of