Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam

Finding sources on pre-Islamic Arabia is incredibly difficult, and finding sources in English is doubly so. This is an excellent overview of the subject, well written and well organized. The author gives the broader picture, tying the various peoples of Arabia in to the larger world in each time period, showing ties of diplomacy, war and trade, as well as focusing on what the different groups were doing individually and among themselves. The book is organized in a very standard and useful fashion, giving chapters on each region (internally organized by time period) before moving on to topic-focused chapters. This is a book which rewards a cover-to-cover reading, and is understandable to a novice on the subject; now that I've been through it once, I'll probably read it again at least once in its entirety, as well as using it as a look-up reference for individual bits of information. The notes are interesting and worth reading, without this being a case of all the good stuff being in the footnotes. The only complaint I have is that I'd have liked for each place mentioned more than in passing in the text to have been marked somewhere on one of the maps. More maps and some more detail would have been nice. This isn't an insurmountable problem, however, for anyone who has a good historical atlas, or access to the internet. For someone who's writing a journal article or a dissertation, this is probably too elementary a source. For a person with some historical background who's familiar with the ancient world in general, but lacking foundation knowledge of ancient Arabia, this is an excellent first source and provides many jumping-off points for further research. This is a keeper for me, and I'm sure it'll get a lot of use.

I am an amatuer archeologist, constantly on the lookout for practical, well researched books on the history of the Arabian Penninsula. What is difficult for any writer on Ancient Arabia, is the fact that there are very few texts available on this subject. However, the writer has delved into the society, mores, trade, cultural traditions, and other components of this unique land. All in all, I vote five stars for the effort and interesting writing style.

Why the author does not speak about the emperor Elagabal and his black stone ?