The Bedouin Arabs was the name of the North African troupe of acrobats that performed in England in 1836, after appearing in Paris at the Porte St. Martin Theatre. They appeared at the Adelphi Theatre in January 1836, and on 24 January 1837, The Times reviewer described The Real Bedouin Arabs as: 'the most active and elegant tumblers that ever exhibited before an English audience.' In his March 11, 1837 review of Hassan Pasha, the tumblers' dramatic vehicle, Charles Rice called their performance: 'the most astonishing thing of the kind I have ever seen' and reported that they were greeted with 'four tremendous rounds of applause'. According to the playbills advertising their appearance at the Royal Surrey Theatre in the summer, autumn and winter of 1836, their performances were: 'the theme of such universal wonder and admiration during the last four months' because of the 'astonishing nature' of their performance which had to be seen to be appreciated. The names of the troupe were given on the playbills as 'Sidi Ali, Abdallah, Ahmed, Hossein, Mohammed, Hassan Etc.'

These woodcut images of the Bedouins' act would have been cut from a larger poster, the perpetrator of the cutting and pasting probably believing that the images were of more importance than any accompanying text, so we do not know where they were performing when these images were made, but it is likely to have been for one of their London venues in 1836 or 1837. The establishment commissioning these posters clearly knew that illustrations such as these, although expensive to produce, would be great publicity for this act.

The act became so well known at the time that Thomas McLean published a political cartoon on 22 June 1836 of a drawing by John Doyle (1797-1860) showing a balancing feat by the politicians Joseph Hulme (1777-1855), Daniel O'Donnell (1775-1847) and John Russell (1792-1878) entitled Astonishing Exhibition! Bedouin Arabs Outdone!