HOGARTH, David George.
The penetration of Arabia.
London, Lawrence and Bullen, Ltd., 1904. Large 8vo. With 50 photographs of Medina, Mecca (incl. the Kabah, pilgrims camping outside the city praying in the Great Mosque-Precinct and at the Tomb, mostly after the photographs of Snouck Hurgronje), Maskat, Sana, Jidda; portraits of explorers such as Carsten Niebuhr, J.L. Burckhardt, G.A. Wallin, Richard Burton, J. Snouck Hurgronje, Jos. Halévy, W.G. Palgrave, W.S. and Lady Anne Blunt and others, maps of their routes through Arabia and several maps and plans of Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Mecca, Medina, Sana, Riad, etc.; the Teima stone, the first published Himyaritic inscriptions, etc. At the end are bound two folding coloured maps on one large leaf (345 x 675 mm) containing (1) the orthographical, and (2) the land surface features of Arabia. Original green publisher's cloth, title in gold on the front board with a gold-tooled section of a compass with the signs of the zodiac, title in gold on the spine. XV, 359 pp.
€ 450
The first edition of this highly interesting and important book on the Arabic peninsula by the archaeologist David George Hogarth (1862 1927) who was from 1909 on keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and president of the Royal Geographical Society. During the First World War, he was acting director of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, where he was instrumental in launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks, in which T. E. Lawrence, a protege of his, played so prominent a part. As an archeologist he worked on excavations Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and several countries of the Middle East (1887-1907).
This book, published in 1904 as the Hejaz railway was being built, is a summary of earlier explorations in the Arabian peninsula, by both Muslim and European travelers and an attempt to chronicle the growth of Western knowledge about the Arabian Peninsula, rather than a first-hand account based on travel to the region. Hogarth's first visit to Arabia was not made until 1916, when he travelled to Jeddah with 10,000 in gold to finance the Arab revolt. The purpose of this volume is to describe the exploration of inland Arabia is the first sentence of the book, which is instead based on his extensive reading of travel literature, included in a bibliography for each chapter.
The book has two sections. In The Pioneers he analyzes the historical geography of the region from the time of Claudius Ptolemy (second century AD), and includes discussions of explorations by 18th- and early-to-mid-19th-century travelers such as Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815) and Domingo Badia y Leblich (1766-1818). The second section, entitled The Successors, covers the travels of mid-19th-century to early 20th-century explorers, including Richard Francis Burton, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, William Gifford Palgrave, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Lady Anne Blunt, and Charles Montague Doughty. Each chapter ends with a bibliography, and all of the chapters contain illustrations, maps, or photographs.
With blind stamps on the title-page and the leaf after the title-page and a label mounted on the front pastedown of the Ballarat Public Library (Victoria, Australia). Untrimmed. Small tear in the map, otherwise in good condition. M. J. L., Dr. D. G. Hogarth, C.M.G., in: Nature, 120 (1927), pp. 735-737; D.G. Hogarth in: Who's Who, 59 (1907), p. 855; Bull. NY Publ. Library, 15 (1911), p. 167.
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