Mankind and Deserts 1

1 Cover

2 Title page Series Editor Françoise Gaill

3 Copyright First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK www.iste.co.uk John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA www.wiley.com © ISTE Ltd 2020 The rights of Fernand Joly and Guilhem Bourrié to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943974 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-630-2

4 Foreword

5 1 Introduction: The Concept of a Desert 1.1. All about a word 1.1. All about a word Desert is one of those familiar yet ambiguous words whose meaning changes depending on people, time and place. It is one of those words whose various meanings can change the very image one has of reality. The personality of the desert is as difficult to capture in everyday language as in the imagination or in scientific research. The object and the idea, as well as the words to talk about them, exist in humanity’s oldest texts: Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese etc. In Latinate languages, the word can be traced back to 11th Century Latin. The word first described the result ( desertus : deserted, abandoned) of an act of separation ( deserere : to desert, to leave). A little later, the word was used to denote a place ( desertum : desert), an empty or emptied site, uninhabited or depopulated. The various forms this word has taken over the years reflect this ambiguity. In Medieval times, hermits would retire to the desert . The term, in this context, denoted both the isolation from other people as well as the barrenness of the place, the solitude and mysticism of the situation. In the 17th Century, “deserts” chiefly evoked the idea of chosen spots that were distant and discreet, where one could “flee into a desert from the approach of humans”. It was a place that was cut off from the world, voluntarily so, as was the case at the Port-Royal-des-Champs convent 1 , or as a result of circumstances, as in the case of the Camisards, French Protestants who lived in an isolated region of France. This connotation of abandonment or exile persists to this day. For example, we say about someone whose words go unheeded that “he is the voice crying in the wilderness” (Isaiah 40:3) and Charles de Gaulle was abandoned politically between 1946 and 1958 in a period that came to be called his “crossing through the desert.” 2 From the 18th Century onwards, however, it is the geographic sense of the word that prevails. A desert is a seemingly lifeless region, uninhabited, uncultivated, arid (from the Latin arere , to burn, to dry) and sterile due to its dryness. The 19th and 20th Centuries, in turn, saw the rise of new forms of deserts: economic and demographic deserts due to rural flight toward industrial and urban areas. Finally, “desert” is used in a psychological sense to talk about an internal state resulting from a sense of deprivation of the heart or mind. 1.2. Arriving at a definition 1.3. The world of deserts 1.4. Deserts of the world 1.5. To know more

6 2 Conquering Deserts 2.1. Prehistoric times 2.2. The dawn of history 2.3. Knowledge of deserts in prehistory 2.4. Antiquity 2.5. Deserts known to Antiquity 2.6. Deserts as corridors of migration 2.7. Deserts: the birthplace of religions 2.8. Deserts and empires in the Middle Ages 2.9. Deserts known at the end of the Middle Ages 2.10. To be continued 2.11. References

7 3 Aridity3.1. Where we examine semantics 3.2. Causes of aridity 3.3. Climatic factors and the numerical expression of aridity 3.4. Nuances in aridity 3.5. Variations in climatic aridity over time 3.6. Unusual phenomena caused by or promoted by aridity 3.7. Aridity and drought 3.8. References

8 List of Authors

9 Index

10 End User License Agreement

1 Cover

2 Table of Contents

3 Title page Series Editor Françoise Gaill

4 Copyright First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK www.iste.co.uk John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA www.wiley.com © ISTE Ltd 2020 The rights of Fernand Joly and Guilhem Bourrié to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943974 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-630-2

5 Foreword

6 Begin Reading

7 List of Authors

8 Index

9 End User License Agreement

1 Chapter 1Figure 1.1. Arid regions around the world as per (Meigs 1977–1979), modified

1 Chapter 3Table 3.1. Arid regions – precipitation Table 3.2. Arid regions – temperatures Table 3.3. The limiting values for aridity indices for the transition between th...Table 3.4. Values for aridity indices in sub-desert arid regions Table 3.5. Values for the aridity indices for a meso-arid region Table 3.6. Values for the aridity indices for a frankly arid desert region Table 3.7. Values for the aridity indices for hyper-arid regions Table 3.8. The chronological framework of deserts in the Quaternary period Table 3.9. Comparative scheme of pluvials and interpluvials in the Sahara

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