Book dossier

Prehistory in Northeastern Arabia

by Abdullah Hassan Masry

"Prehistory in Northeastern Arabia: The Problem of Interregional Interaction" is a groundbreaking study of the earliest evidence of human actitivy in part of the ancient world whose history has, until very recent times, been markedly neglected. It discusses the presence in the northeastern deserts of Arabia and its eastern coastline of artifacts associated with the earliest inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia, the predecessors (and probably the ancestors) of the Sumerians, one of the most influential ancient near eastern civilizations. In particular, the study focuses on a series of archaeological excavations carried out in the area in the early 1970s by the author, Dr. Abdullah Masry, a Saudi Arabian scholar who went on to become his country's Director General of Antiquities and its Deputy Minister of Education for Cultural Affairs. He found Ubaid pottery being used in the region of which he writes, which he proposes indicates contacts between it and southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millenium BC. He also describes the evidence for animal and plant domestication in a region which hitherto had not been suspected of maintaining settled, if only occasional, populations. Since Masry's excavations the evidence for contact with the makers of Ubaid pottery has been found throughout the Arabian Gulf, including its southern and eastern limits. Account of these later discoveries has been taken in the updating of the present work, which is an important study in the early history of a region of great historical significance to the world which derived so much of its systems and beliefs from ancient Western Asia.