INTRODUCTION

Many books are published every year in the West on Arabia and on the Arabs, but their concern is with Islamic (and especially oilproducing) Arabia and with the Muslim Arabs, descendants of those who emigrated en masse from Arabia in the seventh century to conquer and colonise the whole Middle East. Such books will devote at most a few pages to Arabia and its inhabitants before this exodus, and even then will usually only treat the lifetime of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad (c. AD 570-632 ). The many centuries of Arabian history that precede the death of Muhammad are little studied and little known in the West. It might be thought that this neglect reflects Arabia’s insignificance in world history before the emergence of Islam, but this would be an unfair judgement. Though the inhabitants of Arabia lived on the periphery of the great empires, they were of great importance to them. Firstly their homeland occupies a central position between India, Africa, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world, which meant that people or goods passing from one to the other would often be obliged to have dealings with them. It was, for example, only with the help of Arab tribes that the Assyrian king Esarhaddon in 671 BC (‘camels of all the kings of the Arabs I gathered and water-skins I loaded on them’, IA 112), and the Persian rulers Cambyses in 525 BC (‘the Arab . . . filled skins with water and loaded all his camels with these’, Herodotus 3.9) and Artaxerxes in 343 BC were able to cross

north Arabia in order to march on Egypt. Secondly the existence in south Arabia of frankincense, myrrh and other aromatics – all much in demand in the civilisations of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia – brought wealth and renown to its Arabian cultivators and expeditors. And thirdly Arabia provided a reservoir of military manpower, one experienced in travel in the desert, and they played an important role both as allies on behalf of various powers and as foes against them.