Format: 137 x 216 pp. with 48pp. colour
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Publisher:  East & West Publishing
Year:  2009
ISBN: 978-1-907318-00-9

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

OUT OF ARABIA
Phoenicians, Arabs and the Discovery of Europe
Warwick Ball

Arab history is often viewed as beginning with Islam. But the Arabs have a long history
stretching back millennia—and it is one intimately bound up with European history and
identity. The Arabs’ forbears, the Phoenicians, were exploring the coasts of England and West
Africa and colonising much of Spain, Sicily and North Africa in the early first millennium BC.
The Arabs were to continue this tradition of world penetration long before the European
‘Age of Expansion’. Islam, therefore, was as much a culmination as a beginning. The arrival
of the Arabs in Spain in 711 and the subsequent continuation of Islam’s first Caliphate in
Cordoba after a second one had been established in Baghdad—not to mention Emirates in
the Balearics, Sicily and southern Italy, and further penetration throughout much of Italy,
France and Switzerland—can only be understood as part of a process that had already been
underway for several thousands of years.

Phoenicians and Arabs form a part of European history that is both European and
Asiatic, a part that defines and makes Europe what it is—cultures that can no more be excluded
from Europe than the Viking, Roman or Greek. Europe has been engaged in a complex
relationship with the Arabs and their immediate forbears throughout its history. This richly illustrated book is an account of that relationship.

This is the first of four volumes examining the spread of cultures from the east into Europe.
WARWICK BALL is a Near Eastern archaeologist and author who has carried out excavations, architectural studies and monumental restoration in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and elsewhere. He is currently director of Eastern Approaches, a special-interest cultural tours company specialising in the East. Author of many books and articles on the history and archaeology of the region, his book, Rome in the East: the Transformation of an Empire, was winner of the James Henry Breasted History Prize in 2000.

Born in Australia, Warwick Ball now lives in Scotland.