Desert Studies, Global Humanities Vol. 7

2005

For centuries, deserts have captured the public imagination as places of extremes. These are landscapes that might be perceived as impenetrable barriers to human occupation or instead as the domain entered into by individuals pursuing a revelatory experience. They are of course also the same terrain through which the Tigres and Euphrates rivers passed and which, when hydraulically ''tamed,''became the agricultural powerhouses of the Near East. Desert societies have also been central to the anthropological imagination.

Archaeological Review From Cambridge, 2019

The papers in this wide-ranging collection span four continents and vary in their chronological focus from prehistory to the modern age. However, two broad trends run across them all. The first trend is a consistent highlighting of how humans shape desert environments to suit both socio-economic and ideological or spiritual need. For instance, the articles by Moulin, Boza Cuadros, Stone and Alaika & Gonzalez La Rosa all emphasise how humans have transformed the Peruvian desert into a network of transport routes reflective of both commercial necessity and a desire for access to sites of particular religious significance. Likewise, Bird explains in his paper how people in Western Australia have used rock art and stone arrangements to create a sacred desert landscape that not only relates to their beliefs, but also has implications for practical matters of staking claim to territory. Similar processes have been shown to be at work in Namibia by Breunig, while Roberts et al have further backed up these observations by demonstrating how nomadic populations in Qatar have sought to appropriate the desert on both a level of political ideology, and as a physical environment for pastoralism, commerce and conflict. As an Egyptologist, in this commentary I will be adding my thoughts on comparable phenomena in the Egyptian desert.

Geography bulletin, 2014

Hungarian Geographical Bulletin

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021

Deserts, like any geographic setting, are not sites where geopolitical dramas simply unfold or "touch down"; rather, they actively constitute geopolitical orders. This article shows how taking deserts rather than states as an entry point can provide a unique lens on geopolitics, state making, and empire. Investigating the political lives of deserts requires asking how they are imagined, narrated, and connected across space and time, and with what effect. To do so, I consider one case of desert-to-desert connection: a long but little-known history of exchange between individuals and institutions in Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula. Taking one example from this history, I show how the "desert" as an environmental imaginary figured in the University of Arizona Environmental Research Laboratory's joint greenhouse and desalting plant, which was initiated in Abu Dhabi in the late 1960s. Primarily drawing from archival research in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Arizona, I also show how this project fit into shifting geopolitical relations in the Arabian Peninsula's colonial relations, the rise of the UAE as an independent state, and the role of experts working in the service of broader political agendas of the state and the academy, as well as their own self-interest.

in the.first years of this study, was the one that sowed the seeds ofcuriosity and love of the land and its people. He was a like well ofwisdom from which we could draw and a point of relerence when we movedfirther into the land and among the mountains. He indulged not only us as novices in his land but also the strange attitude towards visible and invisible aspects oflocal nature and time we brought with us. We learned as time passed that his patience,faithfulness andfriendship coupled with his great sense ofhumour was something he shared with the larger part of the Beja people. Mv great lear was that on my next arrival in Erkowit he would no longer be there. Now, I know that myfear has been realised. Mv continued research in the hills will be dedicated to his memory

The desert is among the victors of our time. And its victory seems, from the human point of view, a great catastrophe. Deserts, arid zones, steppes expand all over the world, irresistibly, with an annual increase of an area of about the size of Germany. The process is called desertification. Scientists estimate that worldwide one and a half billion people are involved in it, meaning that the soil where upon they live and from which they draw their living, is turning into desert or steppe.

A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near east, 2022

We are fortunate that in the Hellenistic and Roman periods we know more about the deserts of the ancient Near East and those who lived in them than at any other period. This is not because we have much useful information provided by outsiders, such as the Greek and Roman geographers and historians, but because for the only time in history before the present many of the inhabitants of these deserts could read and write (Macdonald 2009a I on this extraordinary phenomenon).

2000