Hamama
Hamama
حمامة Hamameh Aref al Aref and Julian Asquith, in 1943 | ||
---|---|---|
Etymology: "dove"[2] | ||
Geopolitical entity Mandatory Palestine | | |
Subdistrict | Gaza | |
Date of depopulation | 4 November 1948[5] | |
Area | ||
• Total | 41,366 dunams (41.4 km2 or 16.0 sq mi) | |
Population (1945) | ||
• Total | 5,070[3][4] | |
Cause(s) of depopulation | Military assault by Yishuv forces | |
Current Localities | Nitzanim,[6] Beit Ezra,[6] Eshkolot[6] |
Hamama (
its ruins are today in the north of the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Etymology
Hamama's earliest recorded name is Peleia, dating to the Roman period. It translates as "dove", and when the
Underlying Hamama's Late Ottoman and British Mandate toponymy, is a limited stratum of pre-Ottoman village names. To this pre-existing stratum, residents added new place names referring in cases to families living in or around the village. The great importance of land as the main means of production in Hamama’s agrarian society, is reflected by many place names relating to the soil and its characteristics.[8]
History
In the fifth century CE, the site consisted of the Byzantine town of Peleia. [9]
Remains from the fifth and sixth century CE have been found here, together with Byzantine ceramics.[10] A fragment of a Greek stone inscription was discovered at this site and is currently held in the collection of the Louvre in Paris.[11]
Hamama was located near the site of a
Ottoman era
Hamama, like the rest of
The seventeenth-century traveller
Marom and Taxel have shown that during the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, nomadic economic and security pressures led to settlement abandonment around Majdal ‘Asqalān, and the southern coastal plain in general. The population of abandoned villages moved to surviving settlements, while the lands of abandoned settlements continued to be cultivated by neighboring villages. Thus, Hamama absorbed the lands of Ṣandaḥanna, Mi‘ṣaba, and excluded the lands of Bashsha, an exclave of al-Majdal.[18]
Hamama appears on Jacotin's map drawn-up during Napoleon's invasion in 1799, though its position is interchanged with that of Majdal.[19][20] In 1838, Hamameh was noted as a Muslim village in the Gaza district.[21]
In 1863, the French explorer Victor Guérin visited the village, and noted a mosque constructed with ancient materials. The village had a population of "at least eight hundred souls".[22] He further noted: "The gardens of Hamama are outstandingly fertile. They are divided by living fences of huge cactus pears, and are planted with olive, fig, pomegranate, mulberry and apricot trees. Here and there slender palm trees and broad treetops of sycamore trees rise above them."[23]
An official Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed that Hamame had 193 houses and a population of 635, although it only counted the men.[24][25]
British Mandate era
Under the British Mandate in Palestine, a village council was established to administer local affairs, and Hamama had a mosque, and two primary schools for boys and girls established in 1921.[26] In the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Hamama had a population of 2,731; 2,722 Muslims and 9 Christians,[27] where all the Christians were Orthodox.[28] The population had increased in the 1931 census to 3,405; 3,401 Muslims and 4 Christians, in a total of 865 houses.[29]
In the 1945 statistics Hamama had a population of 5,070; 5,000 Muslims, 10 Christians and 60 Jews,[3] with a total of 41,366 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey.[4] Of this, 1,356 dunams were used for citrus and bananas, 4,459 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 28,890 for cereals,[30] while 167 dunams were built-up (urban) land.[31]
In 1946, the boys' school had an enrollment of 338, and the girls' school an enrollment of 46. Its inhabitants engaged primarily in fishing and agriculture, cultivating grain, citrus, apricots, almonds, figs, olives, watermelons, and cantaloupes. Due to the existence of sand dunes in the north part of the town, trees were planted on parts of those lands to prevent soil erosion.
1948, and aftermath
According to reports published by the newspaper
It was captured by
At the end of November 1948, Coastal Plain District troops carried out sweeps of the villages around and to the south of
Mohammed Dahlan's family is originally from Hamama.
In 1992 it was noted: "No traces of village houses or landmarks remain. The site is overgrown with wild vegetation, including tall grasses, weeds, and bushes. It also contains cactuses. The surrounding land is unused."[6]
References
- ^ Conder and Kitchener, SWP II, 1882, p. 418
- ^ Palmer, 1881, p. 267
- ^ a b c Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, 1945, p. 31
- ^ a b c Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 45
- ^ Morris, 2004, p. xix, village #286. Also gives the cause of depopulation.
- ^ a b c d Khalidi, 1992, p. 100
- ISSN 0305-7488.
- ^ Marom, Roy. "Arabic Toponymy around Ashkelon: The Village of Hamama as a Case Study". escholarship.org. Retrieved 2024-04-23.
- ^ a b c Khalidi, 1992, pp. 97-98
- ^ Dauphin, 1998, p. 869
- ISBN 978-3-11-033767-9, retrieved 2024-02-23
- ^ MPF, 10 No. 30. Cited in Petersen, 2001, p. 146
- ISSN 0305-7488.
- ^ Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, 1977, p. 142. Cited in Khalidi, 1992, p. 98.
- ^ Grossman, D. (1986). "Oscillations in the Rural Settlement of Samaria and Judaea in the Ottoman Period". in Shomron studies. Dar, S., Safrai, S., (eds). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House. p. 382
- ^ a b Petersen, 2001, p. 146
- ^ Khalidi, 1992, p. 98.
- ISSN 0305-7488.
- ^ Karmon, 1960, p. 173 Archived 2019-12-22 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Palestine Exploration Quarterly Jan-Apr 1944. Jacotin's Map of Palestine. D.H.Kellner. p. 161.
- ^ Robinson and Smith, 1841, vol 3, 2nd appendix, p. 118
- ^ Guérin, 1869, pp. 129 -130
- ^ translated by Moshe Gilad, 'This Explorer Visited Israel in the 19th Century and Found It to Be Anything but Empty', 22 February 2022, Haaretz
- ^ Socin, 1879, p. 154
- ^ Hartmann, 1883, p. 131, noted 291 houses
- ^ a b c Khalidi, 1992, p. 99
- ^ Barron, 1923, Table V, Sub-district of Gaza, p. 8
- ^ Barron, 1923, Table XIII, p. 44
- ^ Mills, 1932, p. 3
- ^ Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 86
- ^ Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 136
- ISBN 978-1-4797-4125-0.
- ^ Morris, 1987, p.220, quoted in Khalidi, 1992, p.99.
- ^ Coastal Plain District HQ to battalions 151 and ´1 Volunteers`, etc., 19:55 hours, 25 Nov. 1948, IDFA (=Israeli Defence Forces and Defence Ministry Archive) 6308\49\\141. Cited in Morris, 2004, p. 517
- ^ Coastal Plain HQ to Southern Front\Operations, 30 Nov. 1948, IDFA 1978\50\\1; and Southern Front\Operations to General Staff Divisions, 2. Dec. 1948, IDFA 922\75\\1025. Cited in Morris, 2004, p. 518
Bibliography
- Barron, J.B., ed. (1923). Palestine: Report and General Abstracts of the Census of 1922. Government of Palestine.
- Conder, C.R.; Kitchener, H.H. (1882). The Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology. Vol. 2. London: Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
- ISBN 0-860549-05-4.
- Elhassani, Abdelkarim (2012). From Hamama to Montreal. ISBN 9781479741243.
- Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics (1945). Village Statistics, April, 1945.
- Guérin, V. (1869). Description Géographique Historique et Archéologique de la Palestine (in French). Vol. 1: Judee, pt. 2. Paris: L'Imprimerie Nationale.
- Hadawi, S. (1970). Village Statistics of 1945: A Classification of Land and Area ownership in Palestine. Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center.
- Hartmann, M. (1883). "Die Ortschaftenliste des Liwa Jerusalem in dem türkischen Staatskalender für Syrien auf das Jahr 1288 der Flucht (1871)". Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins. 6: 102–149.
- Hütteroth, Wolf-Dieter; Abdulfattah, Kamal (1977). Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the Late 16th Century. Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, Sonderband 5. Erlangen, Germany: Vorstand der Fränkischen Geographischen Gesellschaft. ISBN 3-920405-41-2.
- Karmon, Y. (1960). "An Analysis of Jacotin's Map of Palestine" (PDF). Israel Exploration Journal. 10 (3, 4): 155–173, 244–253. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-12-22. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
- ISBN 0-88728-224-5.
- Mills, E., ed. (1932). Census of Palestine 1931. Population of Villages, Towns and Administrative Areas. Jerusalem: Government of Palestine.
- Morris, B. (1987). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949. Cambridge University Press.
- ISBN 978-0-521-00967-6.
- MPF: Ipsirli and al-Tamimi (1982): The Muslim Pious Foundations and Real Estates in Palestine. Gazza, Al-Quds al-Sharif, Nablus and Ajlun Districts according to 16th-Century Ottoman Tahrir Registers, Organisation of Islamic Conference, Istanbul 1402/1982. Cited in Petersen (2001).
- Palmer, E.H. (1881). The Survey of Western Palestine: Arabic and English Name Lists Collected During the Survey by Lieutenants Conder and Kitchener, R. E. Transliterated and Explained by E.H. Palmer. Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
- Petersen, Andrew (2001). A Gazetteer of Buildings in Muslim Palestine (British Academy Monographs in Archaeology). Vol. 1. ISBN 978-0-19-727011-0.
- Robinson, E.; Smith, E. (1841). Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea: A Journal of Travels in the year 1838. Vol. 3. Boston: Crocker & Brewster.
- Socin, A. (1879). "Alphabetisches Verzeichniss von Ortschaften des Paschalik Jerusalem". Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins. 2: 135–163.
External links
- Hamama's official site
- Welcome To Hamama, at Palestine Remembered.
- Hamama, Zochrot
- Survey of Western Palestine, Map 16: IAA, Wikimedia commons
- Hamama from the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center