Customer Reviews

Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (Peoples of the Ancient World)

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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.

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.

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.

Robert Hoyland's "Arabia and the Arabs" is a much welcomed addition to the limited corpus concerning Arabia before the advent of Islam. Hoyland's work is chronologically and geographically expansive, outlining the history of Arabia, a region which he defines as stretching from the Syrian desert down to the Arabian sea, from the Bronze age up until the early Islamic period. Nevertheless, the author does not bog the reader down with needless information, but rather he provides a smooth narrative of this region's diverse history, which he recounts by way of academic commentary coupled with an extensive selection of quotes from contemporary documentary historical sources. Hoyland explicitly notes that the purpose behind this methodology is "to let the witnesses speak for themselves rather than to deploy an omnipotent narrator, thus allowing the viewers the chance to form their own opinion" ( 11-12).

Hoyland organizes the text by region and theme. First, he discusses the three distinct Arabian regions (East Arabia, South Arabia, North and Central Arabia) and their people, providing a more general "political" history of the different tribes and societies based in these areas, before moving on to the themes (Economy, Society, Religion, Art and Architecture, Language and Literature, and Arabhood and Arabisation), in which he provides more in-depth information about the structure, culture, and sociological features of the various peoples and civilizations in Arabia as a whole during this time period. One of this book's most remarkable features is Hoyland's ability to synthesize a variety of different evidence --inscriptions, texts (history, poetry, geography), pottery, art, etc -- in an array of languages (South Arabian, Safaitic, Hismaic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Nabataean, etc) into a cohesive and fluid historical narrative.

Given the wide scope of "Arabia and the Arabs", certain chapters of this book will surely be more accessible and interesting to an assortment of readers given their respective backgrounds. Personally, coming from the field of Islamic history, it was fascinating to learn of the distinct regions and civilizations that existed in Arabia up until the 4th-5th century AD. Furthermore, the connectedness of Arabia, particularly the South Arabian civilizations, to the Mediterranean, Persia, India and Asia Minor from the Bronze Age onwards (ie. the longue duree) was enlightening in regard to the fluidity of influence and the breaking down of historically constructed "borders" that tend to be created by academics who focus on specific civilizations and time periods. Finally, Hoyland's hypothesis about how the Byzantine-Sasanian patronage of the Arab chiefdoms provided the imperial culture and affluence necessary for the Arabs to articulate and promote their language and poetry is thought provoking and original.

What "Arabia and the Arabs" lacks in depth and critical scholarly elaboration, it certainly makes up for with its expansive and erudite overview of this much understudied region of the world. Plus, Hoyland has compiled a wonderful bibliography that provides references to books and articles regarding every theme and sub-theme in the book for readers who are interested in doing further reading/research on specific aspects of Arabia.

Arabia and the Arabs is a read for experts. The Foreign names and places make it difficult for Western readers to capture the depth of Hoyland's research. The mixture of primary evidence with archaeological findings is invaluable and the outcome is original. Here is a scholar that goes to the bottom of the questions rather than swimming with the consensus. It is a must read for students of Islam, the Middle East and the Arab Peninsula.

It is beyond the grasp of the author, however, how his findings fit into the big picture. This is a fundamental flaw in the science of history, not Hoyland's. Lacking the context, the findings can mean anything. Yet, without his findings, the context would have revealed little for my own writings.

Students will need to take Hoyland and read nothing more into the evidence than exactly what it says (leaving out everything that derives from traditions). Only then can it be placed into its proper context. This approach will open an entirely new world in the Arab Peninsula.

A.J. Deus, author of The Great Leap-Fraud - Social Economics of Religious Terrorism.

I keep looking for books about the history of Arabs giving a pure academic point of view, unfortunately without success. This book certainely doesnot go deep intothe history of Arabia, nor of the origins of its people or the origins of people who migrated out of Arabia.

It is a big dissapointment.

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