Auda Abu Tayeh or Awda Abu Tayih ( 11 January 1874 – 27 December 1924) was the leader (shaikh) of a section of the Howeitat or Huwaytat tribe of Bedouin Arabs at the time of the Great Arab Revolt during the First World War. The Howeitat lived in what is now Saudi Arabia/Jordan. Auda was a significant figure in the Arab Revolt; outside Arabia he is mainly known through his portrayal in British Col. T. E. Lawrence's account Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and from the partly fictionalised depiction of him in David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia. The Howeitat Lawrence recorded that the Jazi Howeitat had formerly been under the leadership of the House of Rashid, the amirs of Ha'il, but had since fragmented and that Auda had come to control the Eastern Howeitat, known as the abu Tayi. Auda had taken up the claims of his father, Harb abu Tayi (? – 1904), who had contested the tribe's chieftainship with Arar ibn Jazi. Auda and his ibn Jazi rival, Arar's half-brother Abtan, diverted the energies of the Howeitat—previously settled farmers and camel herders—into raiding, greatly increasing the tribe's wealth but introducing a mainly nomadic lifestyle. Tensions between them and the Ottoman administration had increased after an incident in 1908, when two soldiers were killed who had been sent to demand payment of a tax that Auda claimed to have already paid. Life Auda abu Tayi is considered a hero of the Arab revolt. For while Prince Faisal was the prophet of Islam, Auda was the warrior. T.E. Lawrence romanticized him as someone who epitomized everything noble, powerful and proud about the Bedouin, "the greatest fighting man in northern Arabia", with an impressive lineage of many generations of great desert Howeitat warriors of the Arabian peninsula. Lawrence wrote that "He saw life as a saga, all the events in it were significant: all personages in contact with him heroic, his mind was stored with poems of old raids and epic tales of fights." As was customary in the desert Auda was known for his hospitality and generosity which "kept him always poor, despite the profits of a hundred raids". He claimed he had been married 28 times and wounded more than a dozen times in action. Legend had it that he had killed 75 Arabs by his own hand; he didn't even bother to keep count of the Turks. In