A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone | Hacker News Reader

A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone

newyorker.com

80 pointsTomte13 comments

If you are interested in this subject I highly recommend following Ahmad on twitter where he is very active.

@safaitic

I love the fact that when read aloud this writing is almost directly intelligible by modern speakers of arabic. There can't be many other languages of that period that you can do the same with.

I found this part particularly interesting:

> By morning, he had deciphered a complete, previously unknown Arabian zodiac. “We’d thought that they were place names, and, in a way, they were,” he told me. “They were places in the sky.”

Interesting article. There's no doubt we will continue to discover fascinating things about our past human civilizations, especially with data centralization, advanced mapping, etc...

One big takeaway from the article, which indicates an interesting geo-political strategy behind funding research on these topics:

> ... the desire to show that the country had a glorious pre-Islamic past. “The Saudis are building a national narrative,” Al-Jallad told me. ...

This is another good read along those lines: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8421289

Mohammad himself was born and died in the Petra region of Jordan. The foundation myth of Islam moved the story to Arabia (as we know it) for political reasons.

Source?

Here's a good overview of some aspects: https://www.quranite.com/makkah-is-the-centre-of-a-cult/

I don't think this kind of reference to a self-published author (Dan Gibson) should be posted without a reference to some of the criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Gibson_(author)#Reception_...

I think it's fair to say his view is not shared by many scholars.

His other works are suggestive of a possible evangelical motive. I thought Patricia Crone was still the foremost proponent of deuterocanonical historiography as far as Muhammad’s location

All of the above comments prompted me to look a bit deeper into this, and I found very interesting article by Gibson, written in response to a review of his book:

https://www.academia.edu/34569516/Response_to_David_King_wit...

The general consensus among historians is that the notion that Mecca was really Petra was bunk. To pick a specific example on your list (mostly because al-Aqsa is the only structure on that list I can quickly pinpoint on a map), the error of the main orientation of al-Aqsa to Petra is only about half that of the error of its orientation to Mecca, which is to say, it's not a particularly good correlate to either direction.

When you step back and ask the question, how was the direction determined, you arrive at the basic problem that geodesic survey techniques to precisely determine latitude and longitude did not exist in the 7th and 8th centuries, nor would the Arabs have had access to accurate bearings. The closest they would have had were astronomically relevant observations, but these wouldn't have been able to provide a reliable basis for determining direction for a particular spot on Earth.

See, e.g., https://www.islamic-awareness.org/history/islam/dome_of_the_...

Here's a link related to the discussion, about analyzing the Quran and historical sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/scholars-are-quietly...

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