Arabian Peninsula Environmental History

Catalog description

This course is ONLY offered at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar. This course will look at the history of the Arabian Peninsula from a fresh perspective, examining human/environmental interactions over a long stretch of time. In contrast to the way that Arabian history is typically taught in academia, this course will take the pre-Islamic period of Arabian history (al-jahiliyya) as seriously as the post-Islamic period, and will focus on continuities between the two periods as much as discontinuities. What is more, while conventional histories of the Arabian Peninsula focus on political and religious affairs, this course will try to understand Arabian history on a deeper level by focusing on the lifeways of the Arabian people, including pastoralism, oasis "bustan garden" agriculture, fishing and pearling, and shifting patterns of long-distance trade. What is more this course will draw heavily from material from other disciplines, especially medical sciences, to better understand patterns of change over time. Finally, this course will examine to what degree these older patterns of human/landscape interactions are still valid for the Arabian Peninsula today, which has undergone a transformation almost unparalleled in world history due to the discovery natural gas and oil.