It was in the ancient city of Petra, in 2013, when National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek said he came upon a crossroad filled with antiquity, fabulous monuments, palaces and grand avenues chiseled into a sandstone canyon far above the rift valley of Jordan.
After walking for the better part of a year through the desolate deserts of the Horn of Africa and then into the almost equally desert and empty landscape of Saudi Arabia, Salopek said he was welcomed into Jordan by a Bedouin musician named Qasim Ali.
Qasim Ali sings the blues, Bedouin style, at Petra, the ancient heart of the Nabatean empire. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.
Credit:
Paul Salopek/National Geographic
Ali sang the blues while playing the Rababa, an ancient stringed instrument. Salopek described it as a dramatic setting.
<iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F131742239&show_artwork=true" tabindex="-1"></iframe>
“It kind of became the backdrop music for stepping from nomadism into millennia of settlement, into this highly contested, many-chambered heart that we call the Levant,” he said.
The World’s Marco Werman talked more with Salopek about his journey through Jordan and into the Israeli-occupied West Bank, following in the footsteps of the first humans out of Africa.
Marco Werman: Your walk through Jordan was a kind of transition from the world of Bedouin herders and nomadic life to a world of farms and villages where early people first put down roots. How did walking it on foot help you appreciate human history?
Paul Salopek: Well, it was kind of almost a schizophrenic reality, Marco. There was kind of walking through every day at three miles an hour out of the empty desert, and suddenly tomato farms started to appear. Irrigation canals … the whole infrastructure of modern-day farming. But at the same time, my project is about deep, deep history and the people I'm following, when they walked through, none of that was there. But something happened when we first migrated out of Africa, through this part of the world. As one archeologist told me, we finally sat down. We stopped moving so much. We settled. We invented agriculture. We started piling rocks on top of each other. We smelted metal. And this era, called the Neolithic, is the one, essentially, that we're still inhabiting today. A city-based, urban, settled lifestyle. This was one of the corners of the world where it began.
Ghawarna women dye wool using oxide-rich mud. Modaita, the yawning camel is unimpressed. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.
Credit:
Paul Salopek/National Geographic
You crossed a border in May of 2014, the Jordan River, and you walked into the West Bank through Israeli army checkpoints. Give us a sense of life in the Palestinian West Bank in 2014.
Back at that time, it was a time of, relatively speaking, calm, right? I mean, there's always tension in this corner of the world, but there was no open warfare that I saw. But this, this was a foretaste, again, of this extraordinary maze of the Middle East, of the West Bank, which is partitioned, as you probably know, into three different administrative sectors: Israeli, Palestinian, and then mixed administrative control. There were checkpoints everywhere. There were barriers everywhere. For somebody coming from almost a year on foot, out of kind of relatively open horizons, it was dizzying. It was just a bit surreal. I was walking at the time with my Palestinian walking partner Bassam Almohor, and he said, “Paul, this is my life. I have to kind of change personality every time I cross one of these checkpoints.” And he was a walker, Marco. He was one of the founders of a walking club based in Ramallah. His philosophy was “My piece of Earth. This place I call home is so small that walking makes it big. This is how I keep my sanity.”
Credit:
Paul Salopek/National Geographic
Wow. Well, we know that things had been tense and violent in the West Bank before 2014 when you were there. Your journey also took you into the ancient city of Jerusalem. You walk the same paths as the ancient Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, early Christians and Muslims. How much did that sense of history color your view of the modern state of Israel?
It was inescapable. I mean, there are just so many layers. Again, I deal with historians and archeologists. These are the people that I talk to to advise me on what compass bearing to move on as I pass along these ancient pathways of dispersal out of Africa. Another archeologist based in Jerusalem said, “Paul, Jerusalem was a village, a settlement that was prehistoric.” You know, it started to kind of appear in the consciousness of that inhabited landscape around the Bronze Age. I measured history, recorded history, from the time of that settlement to today, there had been 700 or more wars. But everybody that I met in that highly conflicted, highly contested, very small corner of the world has their own ways of trying to keep life good. And he said, “Paul, I focused not on those 700 wars but on the spaces of peace in between.”
Credit:
Paul Salopek/National Geographic
So, as you follow the news from the Middle East today, what jogs your memories of walking the Holy Land on foot?
This part of the world was new to me. I never covered it as a journalist, and I'd covered some pretty big episodes of mass violence among humans in Africa. I covered, for example, the Congo Civil War, which was one of the bloodiest and most devastating at the time in the early 2000s. The numbers there are staggering. In Central Africa, almost 5 million people died in that conflict. And so here I am, coming from out of Africa into the Middle East, where it's tiny, by African standards. And I was astonished at the amount of attention that was focused on it. It was like
United States
