The Technical Heritage of Date Palm Leaves Utilization in Traditional Handicrafts and Architecture in Egypt & the Middle East
E.A. Darwish, Y. Mansour, H. Elmously, A. Abdelrahman
download PDFAbstract. Date Palm Trees enjoy a recognized stature in Egypt since the ancient times. The abundance of Date Palm Trees and their distribution over the Nile valley, Delta, Oases and Sinai in Egypt granted them familiarity with the people that remains until the present. This familiarity is represented in the survival of various traditional techniques in the utilization of Date Palm Trees pruning residues in the fields of handicrafts and construction in rural Egypt. On the top of those pruning residues are the leaves, which rank the highest in the annual quantities. Date Palm Leaves are still widely used in traditional handicrafts and building in the poor rural areas in Egypt due their renewable availability and low cost. This paper aims to analyze the technical heritage behind those traditional utilization fields in order to identify the dominant techniques used. Those techniques, including Bundling, Rope Fastening and friction based assembly, can be introduced as the basis on which the development of those techniques for modern and contemporary uses of date palm leaves should be based in order make use of the surviving skills to sustain the familiarity needed to guarantee the success of the developed uses.
Keywords
date palm leaves, technical heritage, architecture, handicrafts
Published online 4/20/2019, 8 pages
Copyright © 2019 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: E.A. Darwish, Y. Mansour, H. Elmously, A. Abdelrahman, The Technical Heritage of Date Palm Leaves Utilization in Traditional Handicrafts and Architecture in Egypt & the Middle East, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 11, pp 325-332, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644900178-28
The article was published as article 28 of the book By-Products of Palm Trees and Their Applications
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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