Inside the Ksar El Khorbat, this award-winning museum traces tribal migrations through 22 rooms of carefully curated artefacts of seminomadic life: saddles worn shiny, contracts inscribed on wooden tablets in Arabic and Hebrew, ceramic urns for water and preserved butter, heavy silver jewellery and inlaid muskets and handcuffs to protect it all from would-be thieves.
Interesting multilingual explanations in French, English and Spanish illuminate tribal and family affiliations and explain the vexing architectural differences between a ksar (fortified village) and a kasbah. Useful indeed when you wander around the labyrinthine alley of the ksar in which the museum is housed and which is still home to some 80 families.
