The people appear to be ignorant of tillage. They have no regular fields; and the Dhourra, their only grain, is sown among the thorny trees and tents, by dibbling large holes in the ground, into each of which a handful of the seed is thrown. After the harvest is gathered, the peasants return to their pastoral occupations; they seem never to have thought of irrigating the ground for a second crop with the water which might everywhere be found by digging wells. Not less than four-fifths of the ground remains unsown; but as the quantity of Dhourra produced is generally sufficient ... they never think of making any provisions for increasing it, notwithstanding that, when the inundation is not copious, or only partial (no one remembers it ever failing entirely) they suffer all the misery of want.[56] This kind of procedure could not, of course, have been invented in Palestine and Syria where rivers with regularly recurring inundations are unknown. However, the same results can be achieved where there are copious spring rains. Newberry says of the Alabdeh (Hamites living between the Nile valley and the Red Sea): “Some of these nomads sow a little barley or millet after a rainstorm, and then pitch their tents for a while till the grain grows, ripens and can be gathered. Then they move on again with their little flocks.”[57] There are, then, many ways in which a temporary abundance of water can be utilized by simple people to produce crops, and it may well be that the systematic distribution of water which marks the agriculture of historical times in Egypt and Mesopotamia did not exist in prehistoric times at all. We shall see that the problem of drainage was at first as important as that of irrigation, or rather more so; in this respect the modern analogies do not hold good.