Zarb Period COrigin theory BVerified

Zarb begins with a hole in the sand. Charcoal is lit in it, lamb and a side of rice are lowered in, earth is heaped over the top, and the whole thing cooks sealed shut for hours. Inside the buried oven the meat neither dries out nor loses its aroma. It comes to the table with rice and onion, at a meal laid on for guests.

The lamb comes from sheep domesticated in the Fertile Crescent in the eighth millennium BC, a long-established animal of this land. For people who moved with their herds, meat was simply at hand.

The pit oven itself makes hard sense in a desert. Digging into the sand and cooking under sealed heat over charcoal saves fuel, keeps out blowing sand, and holds heat for hours, and the pastoral nomads of the Arabian Peninsula worked it out from the practical demands of that life. The same idea has been taken up independently by cultures all over the world, from the Hawaiian imu to the New Zealand hāngī. Zarb is one such adaptation, with no single inventor and no founding year.

One early record catches the dish under its own name. In 1908 the French scholar Antonin Jaussen published Coutumes des Arabes au pays de Moab in Paris, based on fieldwork among the Bedouin tribes of what is now south-central Jordan, around Kerak. Listing the ways they cook meat, he writes that the true Bedouin make the zarb: they dig a hole, line it with flat stones and close the top with a slab, burn a fire fierce enough to leave the stones nearly red, rake out the ashes, put in a lamb quartered or whole, and seal it up. The meat that comes out, he was told, is superb. The procedure is all but identical to the one dug up from the sand at Wadi Rum today.

That said, 1908 marks the year by which the dish already existed under this name, not the year it began. The pit oven behind it is far older than any of these records.

For a long time zarb was described as a dish whose very identity was new. Cooking in a pit is done everywhere and can be credited to no one; the framework that offers this universal technique as "the traditional Bedouin dish of Jordan," so the argument ran, was assembled only after travellers began arriving at Wadi Rum. The story suited a dish usually introduced alongside photographs of fire, sand and goat-hair tents. That no contemporary record of the naming had come to light made the reading easier still.

What broke the framework was a book written before tourism existed there at all. Jaussen's Coutumes des Arabes au pays de Moab, published in Paris in 1908, is an academic ethnography of the Bedouin tribes of Transjordan, and in its opening chapter on family life it names the zarb outright and describes it exactly as it is made now: stones laid in the pit, a slab over the top, the ashes raked out, the lamb sealed in. The index at the back carries its own entry, "Zarb, 65." Decades before the camps at Wadi Rum became a destination, zarb stood in print as a named Bedouin way of cooking.

The tourist reading is not wholly wrong, though. Zarb was pushed to the front as one of the sights of Jordan in the later twentieth century, and that belongs to how a dish spreads and how it is presented, not to how it came into being. Mansaf travelled the same road to its place as the national dish. The age of the technique, the age of the name and the newness of the tourist stage each belong to a different period.

What remains open is everything before 1908. By the time Jaussen wrote it down, the zarb was already current among the tribes as the thing that true Bedouin make. How far back the name itself runs has yet to be established.