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Notes to Chapter Two

1035", in Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London vol. 7,
1837, pp. 102-13. Bertram Thomas relates in his book Arabia Felix,
which sums up his travels until the year 1931, that during the preceding
six years in Oman, south-east and central south Arabia he had heard
from the beduin that the scarce rains had been diminishing within their
lifetimes. The date crop of the interior of Oman was then half of what it
had been a generation earlier and many plantations had vanished
altogether. See Thomas, Bertram, Arabia Felix, London, 1932, p. 137.
The question which is of importance in the context of this chapter is
whether the manifest recession of agricultural land and good grazing
ground throughout the area is due only to the desiccation in a climatic
cycle which might have begun this phase with a rainy period around the
lime of the last European Ice Age, or does the loss of productivity of the
agriculture in the region between the middle of the 19th and the middle
of the 20th centuries originate in a change in the structure of society?
6 Regarding the still-unanswered question of the origins of these early
inhabitants, see e.g. Bertram Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. 22f and
elsewhere, and Appendix I, pp. 301ff to the same book, written by
Arthur Keith and Dr W.M. Krogan, and other remarks by Bertram
Thomas (e.g. source mentioned in footnote 4) all supporting the non-
Arab theory. The literature about the contradicting theories is dealt
with extensively in the footnotes of Dostal, Waller, Die Beduinen in
Sudarabien. Fine elhnologische Sludie zar Enlwicklung der Kamclhir-
tenkultur in Arabien, Wien, 1967, pp. 85ff, and in the bibliography on
pp. 166—90.
7 A Himyaritic inscription was found on a tombstone in the western
territory of Sharjah. The late Ruler, Shaikh Khalid bin Muhammad,
arranged for the inscription to be transferred to paper, and it has since
been identified by Prof. A.F.L. Beeslon in Oxford; see also Wilkinson,
J.C. Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia: A Study of the
Aflaj of Oman, Oxford, 1977, p. 135, footnote 6.
8 An example from S.B. Miles’ pen may indicate the general trend:
. . others were Tasm and Jadis, who were sisters of two brothers
Thamood and Sohar. . . . The sections of the Tasm and Jadis, who
migrated to Oman, appear to have settled in Al-Jow and Towwam giving
to those districts the names of the places they had occupied in their old
home in Yemama." Miles. S.B., The Countries and Tribes of the Persian
Gulf, 2nd edn.. 1966, p. 4. Tu’am was for centuries the name of Buraimi.
and al Jawf that of the area south of Nizwa; see Wilkinson. Water, p. 33
footnote 5 and elsewhere.
9 See for the following: Wilkinson, J.C., Origins, pp. 70ff. See also Miles.
Countries, pp. 9ff, especially pp. 16-28.
also Klein, Hedwig in the annotated edition of chapter 35 of the
10 See
anonymous Arab chronicle, Kasf al-Gumma al-Gami 'li-al Ahbur al-
Umma, Hamburg, 1938, pp. 2lff.
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