Description
Object description
whole: the seven images occupy the majority. The title is separate and positioned across the top edge, in black, held
within an orange inset. The text is separate and placed down the centre, in black, and with each image as a caption, in orange. All set
against a white background.
image: seven photographs of Middle Eastern life.
text: LAND AND PEOPLE: 1
CONSIDER A MAN.....
What causes, forces and influences have gone to mould him and make him what he is?
This is the first sheet of a series about the lands of the Middle East, and their inhabitants: what sort of people they are and why.
Conditions and climate in this part of the world were so kind to pre-historic man that he at last had sufficient leisure to form a settled
community and start the civilization from which ultimately your way of life derives.
El-haj Pasha el Habasha, leader of the Mecca Pilgrims from Cairo in 1943
HEREDITY
The blood of generations of ancestors flows in his veins and among other things he inherits from them his appearance, skin-, hair-, and eye-
colour, also his physique. Obviously climate is partly responsible for his skin-colour and diet affects his physique: these are just
examples of cross-influences that are always at work.
Three generations of an aristocratic Arab family from the Hadramaut, S. Arabia.
LAND
The geological structure of the country, whether it is mountainous or flat, rocky, fertile or desert influences the sort of home he has, be
it of stone, or mud-brick, a goat-hair tent or a cave. Every other aspects of his life is affected by it too.
Mount Demavend, near Teheran, Iran.
CLIMATE
On the climate and weather depend the vigour of the individual, the type of work he does, the sort of crops he grows or flocks he rears,
hence to a great extent his clothes and food: in short, the kind of life he leads.
A Bedouin boy tending flocks in the Western Desert.
RELIGION
Under the heading of religion and tradition come all the beliefs, superstitions, folk-memory and customs that mould his point of view and
condition his thought. Many pagan survivals still influence him.
A priest of Ethiopian Church.
FOREIGN INFLUENCE
Influences from abroad come by invasion, refugees, trade, immigration, captives brought back from war, or being ruled by an international
power. Cyprus during the last two thousand years has been successively invaded, ravaged, ruled or conquered by Romans, Arabs, Crusaders,
Venetians, Turks and British: its population is still predominantly Greek-speaking.
Fifteenth century Venetian lion inside the ramparts at Famagusta, Cyprus.
WATER
The availability of water is a conditioning factor in everybody's life: is he a nomad, dependent on oasis-wells for livelihood? - or a
fisherman? Rivers and seas act as barriers and as trade routes, as frontiers and connecting links.
A village in Iran.
Clearly all these headings are closely interwoven and results which are attributed exclusively to one are equally attributable partially to
others. Many headings have had to be omitted, among them international economic factors which obviously affect the life of every human being.
Pictorial Review
No. 68
JUNE 8, 1946
Crown Copyright reserved
Army Education, M.E.F.
Physical description
Pictorial Review No. 68.
Produced as part of the 'Land and People' series of posters (see PST 16940, PST 16943, PST 16948, PST 16949 and PST
16952).