Abstract
THE geographical area covered by Mr. Thomas's book is wider than the title indicates. Of the ‘adventures’ which he records—and no other name would describe them so exactly—two out of the five have Mesopotamia as their setting and the three others southern Arabia, after he had been appointed Vizier of the Sultan of Oman and Muscat. Although the interest of the first two is essentially that of a record of a difficult military and political situation, Mr. Thomas's insight into the character of the tribal Arab gives it an added value for those who appreciate the significance of racial characteristics in their bearing on the task we have undertaken in Mesopotamia. Of his work and travels in Arabia the scientific results have already been published in the Geographical Journal and elsewhere. Here Mr. Thomas gives his readers the lighter side—fighting and politics—and here and there intriguing thumb-nail sketches of customs and beliefs. His book throws an interesting sidelight on the conditions in which his valuable additions to our geographical and ethnological knowledge of Arabia have been made. The recent award of the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society to the author is a fitting and well-deserved recognition of his work in the Great Sandy Desert.
Alarms and Excursions in Arabia.
By Bertram Thomas. Pp. 296 + 24 plates. (London: George Alien and Unwin, Ltd., 1931.) 15s. net.
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Geography and Travel. Nature 128, 956 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128956b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128956b0