
A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone - Tomte
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-new-history-of-arabia-written-in-stone/
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Nydhal
If you are interested in this subject I highly recommend following Ahmad on
twitter where he is very active.

@safaitic

[https://twitter.com/safaitic](https://twitter.com/safaitic)

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starbeast
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.

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curtis
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.”_

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anonu
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. ...

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latchkey
This is another good read along those lines:
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8421289](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8421289)

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infradig
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.

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fastball
Source?

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

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jcranmer
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_...](https://www.islamic-
awareness.org/history/islam/dome_of_the_rock/qibla.html)

