The deserts and grasslands breed in their sons certain qualities and characteristics-courage, hardihood, the stiff-necked pride of the freeman, vigilance, wariness, sense of locality,[1169] keen powers of observation stimulated by the monotonous, featureless environment, and the consequent capacity to grasp every detail.[1170] Though robbery abroad is honorable and marauder a term with which to crown a hero, theft at home is summarily dealt with among most nomads.  The property of the unlocked tent and the far-ranging herd must be safeguarded.[1171] The Tartars maintained a high standard of honesty among themselves and punished theft with death.[1172] Wide dispersal in small groups is reflected in the diversity of dialects among desert peoples;[1173] in the practice of hospitality, whether among Bedouins of the Nejd, Kirghis of the Central Asia plateau,[1174] or semi-nomadic Boers of South Africa;[1175] in the persistence of feuds and of the duty of blood revenge, which is sanctioned by the Koran.

Isolation tends to breed among nomads pride of race and a repugnance to intermixture.  The ideal of the pastoral Israelites was a pure ethnic stock, protected by stern inhibition of intermarriage with other tribes.  Therefore, Moses enjoined upon them the duty of exterminating the peoples of Canaan whom they dispossessed.[1176] While the urban Arabs show a medley of breeds, dashed with a strain of negro blood, among the nomad Bedouins, mixture is exceptional and is regarded as a disgrace.[1177] The same thing is true among the nomad Arabs of Algeria, and there it has placed a stumbling block in the way of the French colonial administration, by preventing the appearance of half-breeds who might bridge the gap between the colonials and natives.  Where pastoral Semites have settled in agricultural lands, intermixture on a wide scale has followed, as in the Sudan from Niger to Nile; but even here, when a tribe or clan has retained a strictly pastoral life in the grassland, and has held itself aloof from the agricultural districts of the Negro villages, relatively pure survivals are to be found, as among the Cow or Bush Fulani of Bornu.[1178] On the other hand, the Hausa, a migrant trading folk of mingled Arab and Negro blood, spread northward along the trans-Saharan caravan route to the oasis of Air before the fourteenth century, and there have infused into the local Berber stock a strong Negro strain.[1179] Among the nomads of Central Asia, one wave of race movement has so often followed and overtaken another, that it has produced a confused blending of breeds.  The mixtures are so numerous that pure types are exceptional,[1180] and the exclusiveness of the desert Semites disappears.

[Sidenote:  Religion of pastoral nomads.]