Bakhtiari-1 (Bronowski)

There are some nomad tribes who still go through these vast transhumance journeys from one grazing ground to another: the Bakhtiari in Persia, for example.

And you have actually to travel with them and live with them to understand that civilisation can never grow up on the move.


Everything in nomad life is immemorial. The Bakhtiari have always travelled alone, quite unseen. Like other nomads, they think of themselves as a family, the sons of a single founding father.

The Jews used to call themselves the children of lsrael, or Jacob. The Bakhtiari take their name from a legendary herdsman of Mongol times, Bakhtyar.

And the father of our people, the hill-man, Bakhtyar, came out of the fastnesses of the southern mountains in ancient times. His seed were as numerous as the rocks on the mountains, and his people prospered.

The patriarch Jacob had two wives, and he worked as a herdsman for seven years for each of them. Compare the patriarch of the Bakhtiari:

His first wife of Bakhtyar had seven sons, fathers of the seven brother lines of our people.His second wife had four sons.And our sons shall take for wives the daughters from their father's brothers' tents, lest the flocks and tents be dispersed.

Sheep and goats were first domesticated about ten thousand years ago - only the dog is an older camp follower than that. The life of the nomads is an endless struggle – an endless ritual – to live by keeping their animals alive.

The object of the system of cross-cousin marriage, for example, is to ensure that the flock, and the simple technology that goes with it, is preserved within the family.