Qataban and Sheba : exploring Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia

Wendell Phillips

Published by Victor Gollancz ltd, hardcover, illustrated

CHAPTER ONE
TURN BACKWARD, TURN BACKWARD
FROM THE AIR, Arabia looks as if it had lain there, harsh and barren, from the beginning of time. This huge block of earth, wedged between the vast land masses of Asia and Africa, suggests the first groping efforts to separate the land from the sea, for it is starkly primitive, gnarled and naked. Here is the earth's trust undressed, unornamented by lakes or forests.

Only at the outermost corners does one glimpse small patches of green, indicating that the Maker of this sub-continent realized that something more than stone and sand were needed to make the earth good for human beings. Finding that trees and even a few rivers improved the property, He made most of the other continents with those features, but left Arabia as it was, except for a few precious drops of fertility scattered sparingly among its corrugated valleys and sandy plateaux.

Despite the forbidding face of southern Arabia, it looked good to me when I made a two-week flying survey in August, 1949, for I had some idea of what lay behind the withered and emaciated mark. I saw beneath the shifting sand dunes, the parched wadis, and the tumbled rocks, a long highway stretching seven hundred miles across the broad base of the country, then turning northward and winding for more than 1000 miles to the shores of the Mediterranean and the homes of our civilization's ancestors.

I looked back over my shoulder 3,000 years and saw long trains of camels burdened with frankincense and myrrh and sometimes with gold, pearls, ivory, cinnamon, silks, tortoiseshell, and lapis lazuli. They followed the single road because there was no other; to the north the Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter, offered hundreds of miles of absolute desiccation; to the south the barren ..................