Full nomads with no specific place of residence are not found in Egypt any
more. In 1907 635,000 persons, i.e. 5.6 per cent of the Egyptian population,
identified themselves as ’arab. Of these 100,000 were mobile Bedouin, either
full nomads or semi-nomads (Schamp 1977: 403). Two or three centuries ago
the numbers of the Bedouin population were much higher. The Bedouin
were the feared pirates of the desert and used to wage armed raids against
the fellaheen in their villages and against the monks in the desert monasteries,
robbing and murdering. In Upper Egypt, far away from the central admin-
istration in Cairo, they were especially powerful. Today their descendants’
settlements lie usually on the outer margins of the Nile valley, where they
struggle hard to gain access to land for cultivation. The initial words of the
names of these places are often ‘Beni’ or ‘Awlad’, both of which mean ‘sons
of ’, as in Beni Hilal or Awlad Ali (Girga), or ‘Nag’’, which means ‘hair tent’,
as in Nag’ El-Deir near Girga (Müller-Mahn 1998a: 263). However, similar
names may also occur for old settlements on the Nile, as in the cases of Beni
Suef and Nag’ Hammadi.