13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Insight into the History of Ancient Arabia, January 23, 2008
This review is from: Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (Peoples of the Ancient World) (Paperback)
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent First Source, January 6, 2010
This review is from: Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (Peoples of the Ancient World) (Paperback)
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb read well worth the work, December 18, 2011
This review is from: Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (Peoples of the Ancient World) (Paperback)
It is not easy to find objective literature on Arabian history that doesn't force everything Islam right down your throat from beginning to end (no different with Jewish history and the Old Testament). Fortunately, "Arabia and the Arabs" is objective literature. Its emphasis is on pre-islamic history, and the level of scholarship is impressive. It particularly shows in the section on language and literature, plus its genuinely massive bibliography. However that also means that it isn't an easy, relaxing read. It requires that one follows the author as he first presents the evidence at hand, then how he reasons what picture one can assemble from it. More often than not this picture must remain incomplete until further evidence, be that through excavations, language analysis or other discoveries, comes to light and is understood in the proper context. Such reading takes concentration and some patience. Of particular interest to me was the last chapter on Arabhood and Arabisation. It did much to illuminate the mistaken but widely held impression that "the Arabs" some day just burst out of their peninsula and onto the scene of European history. After I was done with the book I definitely felt that the realistic understanding it conveyed was well worth the time and effort.
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