The war that has dragged on in Yemen for seven years has created a major humanitarian disaster. Yemen has experienced war and conflict before since the early days of the Queen of Sheba. The last of the South Arabian kingdoms before the coming of Islam was captured in a qasida by the 12th century Yemeni scholar Nashwan b. Sa‘id al-Himyari. In reading this poem recently I was struck at how relevant the last lines of his poem are for the current political crisis and I share these with you. The full poem can be read online at https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%AF%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9. An English translation was made by W. F. Prideaux in 1879 and can be found here: https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.93715/page/n3/mode/2up.
The current de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, MBS, has promoted a major development scheme entitled Vision 2030. This time, instead of sending henchmen with cleavers, he is authorizing imported Western bulldozers to basically turn the older parts of the historic port of Jeddah into a wannabe Dubai. As noted in a recent article on Qantara:
“Currently, the areas most affected by the destruction are those to the south and east of the old city, the Balad, parts of which have been designated UNESCO World Heritage sites. Prior to evacuation, between 10,000 and 50,000 people lived in each of these neighbourhoods. That means tens of thousands are likely to lose their homes. Estimates circulated by dissidents and demolition critics range from hundreds of thousands to one million."
The port of Jeddah has been the main stopping point for Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca for almost fifteen hundred years. It is described by early geographers in detail, given the amount of travelers who passed through. For the modern kingdom, however, history means nothing and can be erased by the whims of the super rich. This continues the destructive Wahhabi impulse that sacked Kerbala in 1802, as described below by ‘Uthman b. Abd Allah b. Bishr (d. 1872) in his Unwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd (Mecca, 1930):
“In the year 1802, Ibn Sa’ud made for Karbala with his victorious army, famous pedigree horses, all the settled people and Bedouin of Najd, the people of Janub, Hijaz, Tihama and others…The Muslims [i.e. the Wahhabis] surrounded Karbala and took it by storm. They killed most of the people in the houses and the markets. They destroyed the dome above al-Husayn’s grave. They took away everything they saw in the shrine and near it, including the coverlet decorated with emeralds, sapphires and pearls which covered the grave. They took away everything they found in the town—possessions, arms, clothes, fabric, gold, silver, and precious books. One cannot even enumerate the spoils! They stayed there for just one morning and left after midday, taking away all the possessions. Nearly 2000 people were killed in Karbala.”
When the well-primed news media talk about reform in Saudi Arabia, it is worth noting that reform has a long way to go, given the roots of its blood-soaked Wahhabi past. It will take more than letting women drive at the same time that women who protest are jailed, basic human rights in the kingdom are ignored, and heads are still chopped off in public. Even the chopping up of a journalist who dared to call out the corruption is now ignored, because of the profit for a family which defies the morality of the country’s own Prophet. As long as the Saudi regime buys Western military supplies, they are given free rein to use them, resulting in the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in Yemen, with thousands dead and more dying every day, and fueling the sectarian divide between the Saudis and Iran.
There is a saying that blood is thicker than water, but it seems that for the Saudi elite it is oil which is thicker than either blood or water. They have plenty of oil, have shed lots of blood and are desperate for water. All this leads to an economic domino effect: the world craves oil, oil revenues fuel a family wealth fund which spreads an intolerant interpretation of Islam worldwide, and then much of the oil revenues come back to oil-hungry countries who sell weapons to the Saudis.
Imagine if Greece leveled the Parthenon for a shopping mall and Italy replaced the Colloseum with a football field. In a sense that has already happened to Mecca and Medina. Welcome to Saudi Arabia in 2030…
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has conducted a major investigation into an antiquities dealer who bought looted materials from archaeological sites and museums. Read about it here:
My friend, the historian G. Rex Smith, has recently translated into English a marvelous travel diary by the French military official and traveller Pierre Loti (1850-1923). It is also available on Amazon as a Kindle Book. This day-by-day diary details Loti’s trip along the caravan trail of 1900 from the coast at Bushire to Shiraz and his ultimate goal of Isfahan in order to visit the area during the season of roses. One might expect such an account to be dry, but Loti comments on what he saw, including the people, along the way and one gets a first-hand sense of what it was like to travel a treacherous route that was at times over pure desert and at other times up or down seemingly impenetrable mountain heights. There is also a brief account of his stop at Muscat on the way to Persia. Smith, with the aid of his son, has done an admirable job in reflecting the flavor of the original French and includes 24 photographs taken by Loti. This is a book well worth reading, whether you are interested in Persia at the time or not.
The original French version is available as a pdf here. Archive.org has quite a few of his works.
This article relates to a previous paper entitled “Egyptian Cosmology and the Grand Canyon” published by Tabsir on September 1, 2007. I revisited the Grand Canyon in October this year (2021) to have a closer look that might help with rethinking earlier views. In this present thesis I aspire to shed more light on the obfuscated issue of ancient Egyptians and other past people who are thought by several explorers to have impacted the Grand Canyon and other places in the North America prior to the arrival of Columbus. In fact, there has been ongoing debate since the appearance of a front-page story of the Arizona Gazette on April 5, 1909 reporting on an archeological expedition of the Grand Canyon in which an underground network of tunnels, caves and cities was found above the Colorado River, containing various oriental and ancient Egyptian artifacts, statues, hieroglyphs, and mummies, among other items. The report in the Arizona Gazette relied on the findings of G. E. Kinkaid and Professor David Jordan (McEwen, 2000; Reyes, 2019). It is interesting to note that, preceding them, John Wesley Powell, an American geologist and the first director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, made several expeditions funded by the government, to the area in 1868 and 1871-1872, and proposed the name of the “Grand Canyon” instead of the previous name, the “Big Canyon.” Powell and other explorers coined historically and mythically inspired names of temples and towers including those of Isis, Osiris, Horus, Ra, Set, Cheops Pyramid, and Shiva, for example (Carpenter, 2020) for some of the outstanding and poignant geographical features/sites in the Canyon.
The following points highlight the controversial aspects or pros and cons concerning the findings of Kinkaid reported by Arizona Gazette. 1- The Smithsonian Institute, motivated by conspiracy theories, rejected both the findings of Kinkaid and the Gazette’s report. 2- The Smithsonian Institute described the report of the Arizona Gazette as a hoax aimed at gaining publicity and selling more copies. 3- The Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology denied hiring Kincaid and Professor Jordan for conducting any research. It also denied any records verifying the existence of Kincaid or Professor Jordan (Carpenter, 2020). 4- Government institutions have been involved in protecting what they consider a forbidden zone encompassing secret caves and sensitive areas in the Grand Canyon, even guarding them with armed forces. People have not been allowed to approach these caves. This forbidden zone contains Egyptian and oriental monikers as well as ancient manmade chambers (Carpenter, 2020). 5- Those who support the findings of both Kinkaid and the Arizona Gazette’s report argue that the Smithsonian Institute intended to cover up archeological discoveries in order to preserve the current view that there was no transoceanic contact in pre-Columbian time (Eisten, 1999) and that the ancient Egyptians never ventured outside of the river Nile (CNY Artifact Recovery, 2013). 6- Several authors have indicated that the Smithsonian, in its rejection of the historical findings, referred to the Phoenix Gazette rather than the Arizona Gazette, which might be considered an error, but might also be viewed as a cover-up (CNY Artifact Recovery, 2013; McEwen 2000). 7- The government has been criticized for its role in covering up historical and archeological discoveries that oppose traditional academic teachings (Carpenter, 2020). As Don Lago (2009) put it, when the Smithsonian and the government deny the reality of the Egyptian cave, they are denying the existence of the spiritual world; they become symbols of the secular worldview. 8- Supporters of the findings of Kincaid and Jordan state that Professor D. S. Jordan, who served as President of Indiana University (1885-1891), and as President and then Chancellor of Stanford University (1892-1916), was affiliated with the Smithsonian for a 30-year period (1880-1910), when he was offered a top job at the Smithsonian in 1906. In 1898, Jordan made an expedition down the Grand Canyon. He, accompanied by T. Kincaid, also made an expedition to Alaska. He is also prominently found in many Smithsonian publications from the 1800s (Newswire, 2014). In a word, despite their denial of any association with him, Professor Jordan’s photo can be found within the Smithsonian Archives (See, Accession 90-105, Science Service Records, Image No. SIA2008-4524: https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/edanmdm:siris_arc_397686?q=Professor+David+Starr+Jordan&fq=online_media_type%3A%22Images%22&record=14&hlterm=Professor%2BDavid%2BStarr%2BJordan&inline=true) 9- Despite the denial of the existence of Egyptian caves, there are caves named after the explorers of Kincaid and Powell (Reyes, 2019). Forensic geologist, Scott Wolter (2014), funded by the History Channel, produced a video documenting caves and other sites in the Grand Canyon pertaining to Egyptian treasures discovered in the Grand Canyon. 10- In conclusion, there is an urgent need to objectively rethink historical and archeological discoveries in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere without disturbing cultural and historical chains.
