Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Bedouin originated in the Syrian Desert and Arabian Desert. They have engaged in nomadic herding in the Syrian steppe since at least 6000 BCE, and by around 850 BCE had established a complex network of settlements and camps. After the spread of Islam, Bedouin tribes expanded across West Asia and North Africa.
Bedouin comes from the Arabic word badawi, which means desert-dweller. It was traditionally contrasted with hadir, the Arabic term for sedentary people. The Assyrians referred to them as Arabaa, a nisba of the noun Arab.
Bedouin shepherds were the first to discover the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judean caves of Qumran in 1946. A total of 972 texts were found over the following decade, and many of those were also discovered by Bedouins.
Under the Tanzimat land reforms of 1858, the Ottoman Empire issued a new land law that created legal grounds for displacing Bedouin populations. Few Bedouin registered their lands with the Ottoman Tapu due to illiteracy, refusal to pay taxes, and the irrelevance of written ownership to their nomadic way of life. Sultan Abdulhamid II also settled Circassian populations from the Balkans and Caucasus in traditionally Bedouin areas of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.
Early medieval grammarians believed Bedouins spoke the purest, most conservative variety of Arabic. When standardizing Classical Arabic, scholars brought in Bedouin speakers to recite poems and reached consensus on the pronunciation and spelling of disputed words. Bedouin dialect effectively served as the reference standard for the language being codified.
The Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym were large Bedouin tribes dispatched by the Fatimid Caliphate in the 11th century to defeat the Zirid dynasty in the Maghreb. According to Ibn Khaldun, their arrival transformed the culture of the Maghreb into Arab culture and spread nomadism into areas where agriculture had previously dominated. Sources estimated the total number of Arab nomads who migrated to the Maghreb in the 11th century alone at around one million.