Word: goatskins
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...look for graffiti, ancient inscriptions on rocks. Near the oasis of Ghat, 500 miles south of the Mediterranean coast, he found on his last expedition a shallow cave with many graffiti scratched on its walls. When he dug into the sandy floor, he found a peculiar bundle: a goatskin wrapped around the desiccated body of a child. The entrails had been removed and replaced by a bundle of herbs...
...many as 1,000 spectators crowded into the priory on weekends. A visiting Catholic bishop sat on the floor and ate mutton from a common bowl with the Moroccan Minister of Foreign Affairs and a Moslem scholar, listened with a Jewish dignitary while tribesmen beat out Arab rhythms on goatskin tam-tams. "We saw that people living together for three weeks were quickly becoming friends," said Father Martin. "We learned how freely a Moslem and Christian can discuss their faiths, without any compromise on either side." The sultan himself addressed seminar members at his palace in Rabat, prophesied that...
...story, reported one of its translators, Soldier-Scholar Yigael Yadin of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, was written on goatskin in Aramaic in "a very pleasant hand." It tells how Noah's father Lamech (son of Methuselah) was married to his own sister-a custom necessitated in earliest times by the shortage of women. Lamech, according to the scroll, began to suspect that Baby Noah was not his own child-apparently with good reason. At birth the child "rose up in the hands of the midwife and conversed with the Lord of Righteousness." His body was "white as snow...
Belgrave and his bride arrived in March 1926, found Bahrein a feudal and impoverished place. Manama, the crumbling mud capital, did not even have its own water supply. (Water brought from the mainland by ship was hawked through filthy streets in goatskin bags.) The populace, illiterate, diseased and unruly, was forever trying to overthrow the Sheik. The police, imported from Muscat on the Arabian coast, were, if anything, even less law-abiding...
...Southwestern Europe, it was Pelota Week. From Biarritz on the Atlantic coast to Orthez and Oloron-Sainta-Marie in the heart of the Pyrenees, Basques were playing their national game. Shepherds and schoolboys, fishermen and priests, customs inspectors and smugglers ran each other ragged as they whipped a goatskin-covered ball against any convenient wall and went through the swift gyrations of pelota, that rugged ancestor of jai alai, handball and most other court games...