Beit (pipe bag)
Beit ( Arabic بيت, DMG beīt , Pl. Bīyūt ) is a pipe pouch that is one of the traditional objects in Mauritania that the men of the Bidhan society carry in their clothes bags. It is used to store tobacco , a small pipe pipe and other utensils. The word beīt means “house” in Arabic and in Hassania , the dialect of Arabic spoken in Mauritania.
The usual men's outer garment in Mauritania is the derrāʿa (hassania Pl. Drārīʿe ), a two-meter-wide strip of fabric that extends to the calves, with a neckline in the middle. The wide-hanging cotton cloth in blue or white color has a large sewn-on breast pocket on the left side, in which pipe pouches , toothbrush sticks (m. Mswāk , pl. Msāwīk ), money and other small things are kept. The beīt is 15-20 centimeters long, about 5 centimeters wide and has three to four hinged lids ( warge , Pl. Wrag ). A pipe tube , a piece of wire for cleaning the pipe and matches ( ūgīde , Pl. Ūgīd ) or a lighter are pushed between the individual lids . The old iron punch lighters ( āznad, zenād, Pl. Zendāwāt ) have practically no longer been in use since the middle of the 20th century, as have flints and tinder. According to the descriptions of the French travel writer Odette du Puigaudeau , who traveled to the French colonial area, which had only just become safe for Europeans, in 1934, these equipment for making fire were still carried in the pipe bag. The fourth compartment holds tobacco ( šem, tabāke and other local names), which is openly offered in the markets everywhere. The pipe (ṭ ūba) is an approximately 10 centimeter long conical tube made of various metals, until the middle of the 20th century it was also made of the black wood of grenadilla (sangū) . The volume of the pipe is very small, the tobacco in one cigarette is enough for three fillings.
For the production of the bīyūt , the women of the maʿllemīn (artisan class) who specialize in it use lambskin or goatskin. From his stay in 1975 in what was then the Spanish Sahara colony, John Mercer describes that lizard skin was occasionally used for pipe bags. For a bag, you need four leather strips that are semicircular or tapered at the ends and are twice as long, i.e. 30–40 centimeters, and two strips with a single length. The outer hinged lid is decorated with embossed patterns and sometimes with fringes. All stripes are painted with geometric patterns or simple serpentine lines. The leather strips are smooth on the top, the outer ones have a red base color, the inner ones are successively yellow, red and green, for example. The rough inside of the stripes is mostly dark blue. The individual leather strips are laid one on top of the other and hemmed in at the edges with the overlock stitch. The finished bags are flat or slightly curved, some are slightly tailored. Older bīyūt had a shoulder cord with which they could be worn visibly on the chest like amulets.
In addition to its practical function, the pipe bag serves as a men's jewelry similar to the ornate amulet containers and prayer chains ( tasbih ) . The painting and punching follow fixed basic patterns, as can also be seen in the armrest cushions surmije , in the no longer manufactured transport bags (Pl. Tisufren, also tiziyāten ) and other leather work.
literature
- Wolfgang Creyaufmüller: Nomad culture in the Western Sahara. The material culture of the Moors, their handicraft techniques and basic ornamental structures. Burgfried-Verlag, Hallein (Austria) 1983, pp. 267-273, 633
- Wolf-Dieter Seiwert (Ed.): Moorish Chronicle. The peoples of Western Sahara in historical lore and accounts. Trickster-Verlag, Munich 1988, fig. 98, 99 (spelling bit )
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Mercer: Spanish Sahara. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London 1976, p. 171
- ↑ Wolfgang Creyaufmüller: Peoples of the Sahara - Moors and Twareg. Lindenmuseum, Stuttgart 1979, p. 107