Abstract
IN another column of this issue of NATURE (see p. 140) a preliminary account is given by Miss G. Caton-Thompson of the geological and archæological results of the Lord Wakefield Expedition of Exploration in South-West Arabia, upon which she recently accompanied Miss E. W. Gardner, the geologist, and Miss Freya Stark, whose adventurous journeying in Arabia on a previous occasion will be fresh in the memory of readers. Miss Caton-Thompson, whose present record amplifies in detail the archæological and geological references of Miss Stark's account of the expedition in The Times of July 18-21, is far from being a novice in archaeological exploration in conditions similar to those of her recent experience. With Miss Gardner as her geological colleague, she has investigated the evidences of early civilizations in the Faiyum and the Kharga oasis, while in Southern Rhodesia she has attacked, and, most archæologists would agree, has solved the problem of the Zimbabwe. In venturing with her colleagues into the rarely penetrated Hadhramaut she has initiated the archaeological investigation of a problem, or group of problems, which has fascinated historian and geographer ever since the explorations in southern Arabia of Niebuhr in 1761-64 and of Halévy and Glaser more than a century later revealed in their collection of inscriptions the existence there of civilizations going back possibly so far as nearly a thousand years before Christ. Yet the archæological record has remained virtually blank, and although the great frankincense route from India to the eastern Mediterranean through southern Arabia traversed country known to the ancient world of Sumer, Akkad and ancient Egypt, it may be, in the third millennium B.C., nothing is known with certainty of the cultures and relations of those civilizations. Minaean, Sabaean, Himyaritic, and the like, which Miss Caton-Thompson, wisely, for the moment accepts collectively as pre-Islamic. The work of Miss Gardner and herself in the Hadhramaut has laid securely the foundations for the study of a group of problems which recent development in the pre-and protohistoric archaeology of western Asia and Africa suggests may be one of the most important strategic points in future research.
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Archæological Exploration in South-West Arabia. Nature 142, 168 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142168a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142168a0