D'Aden a Zafar: Villes d'Arabie du sud preislamique.

• Author: Yule, Paul Alan
• Position: Book review

D'Aden a Zafar: Villes d'Arabie du sud preislamique. By JEREMIE SCHIETTECATTE. Orient & Mediteranee, Archeologie, vol. 6. Paris: DE BOCCARD, 2011. Pp. 372, illus. [euro]64 (paper).

Jeremie Schiettecatte's new settlement history derives from his dissertation, "Villes et urbanisation de l'Arabie du Sud l'epoque preislamique: formation, fonctions et territorialites urbaines dans la dynamique de peuplement regionale," Universite Paris I (2006). Since then, numerous changes have updated this important work. The author's purpose is to synthesize the archaeological facts which relate to towns and cities in pre-Islamic South Arabia. Most convenient especially for beginners is the set of five maps illustrating the political territoriality of the different periods (figs. 2-6).

On the strength of ninety-five town sites, Schiette-catte evaluates early urbanism in terms of the prerequisites of environment, chronology, sociology, and epigraphic sources (pp. 1-42). Following this introduction, he sets out to apply his historical analysis to the main regions of Old South Arabia, which constitutes the lion's share of the book (pp. 43-296). A definite help for the research-oriented reader are his annexes (comments regarding urbanism made by Greco-Roman authors, database of the periods of occupation of the different sites and areas, as well as technical explanation of his excellent mapping technique), indices (pp. 316-48), abbreviations, and bibliography.

The section on the sites provides a platform for Schiettecatte to treat various topics and update old information. For the sake of expediency, he has translated the attractive color images from his unpublished dissertation into adequate black-and-white ones. The addition of a digital color version on a CD-ROM might have been a cost-effective improvement. This book successfully catalogues the sites and presents for the first time a representative selection of images as well. The author has redrawn several of the maps in order to clarify or update them or to emphasize aspects of the topography. The section on Raybun (Hadramawt) is most welcome since several of the excavation reports are written in Russian, are rare, or both--a real problem in the field of Arabian archaeology.

The originality of this work lies in its systematic treatment of the sites, employing a unified chronology and scheme of evaluation. Also important are the demographic results, which are expressed according to increasing site size...