Piracy off the coast of Somalia has been a threat to international shipping since the early twenty-first century, but what we are witnessing today may appear as the latest manifestation of a phenomenon which already existed in antiquity. This paper collects together and analyses all surviving textual evidence relating to ancient piracy in the Indian Ocean in the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods.

Long before Muhammed preached the religion of Islam, the inhabitants of his native Arabia had played an important role in world history as both merchants and warriors Arabia and the Arabs provides the only up-to-date, one-volume survey of the region and its peoples, from prehistory to the coming of Islam Using a wide range of sources - inscriptions, poetry, histories, and archaeological evidence - Robert Hoyland explores the main cultural areas of Arabia, from ancient Sheba in the south, to the deserts and oases of the north. He then examines the major themes of *the economy *society *religion *art, architecture and artefacts *language and literature *Arabhood and Arabisation The volume is illustrated with more than 50 photographs, drawings and maps.

The wealth of data on fishing and navigation recently dug out of the archaeological layers in harbours and other littoral sites on the Red Sea induced archaeologists to look for elements of comparison onto the people collectively labelled Ichthyophagoi, i.e. Fish-Eaters, by the Greeks, focusing on the writings of Nearchus of Crete and Agatharchides of Cnidus because of their detailed descriptions of the Ichthyophagoi peculiar way of life. Notwithstanding the general awareness of the strong ideological bias that led the Hellenistic writers to portray the Ichthyophagoi as a wretched and backward race, recent publications maintain the assumption that they correspond to the people who left shell middens and traces of fishing and other maritime activities in the archaeological sites of Arabia and the Red Sea. A closer reading of the Greek sources should prove such a correspondence simplistic, and reveal a more complex picture. Agatharchides certainly tapped his informations on the material culture of the Ichthyophagoi from the reports sailors made on the coastal adapted people of the Red and Arabian Sea making out on maritime resources for a living. But his description is also the product of Hellenistic geographic thought as well as of his personal disposition. This is clearly demonstrated by comparison with the concepts of the Ichthyophagoi expressed by other ancient authors, and their treatment of the social, economic and political ties between the populations of the Arabian and African littoral of the Red Sea. The diachronic study of the name Ichthyophagoi challenges the idea of an unequivocal correspondence between the archaeological remains and and the Ichthyophagoi as described by the Greek sources.

The present book does not consist in a concise Ancient History of the Emirates; it does not represent an effort of systematization of the textual sources relating to the ancient land of the Emirates. Furthermore, the ancient historical sources and the modern bibliography are not exhaustively discussed. However, this book is the first effort to incorporate two key subjects into the modern historiography of the pre-Islamic history of the Emirates: Meluhha and Gerrha. Meluhha is an ancient land known through Ancient Sumerian and Assyrian – Babylonian texts; due to the colonial involvement and owed to political needs of nationalistic character that were also instigated by the colonial academia of England and France into the political elites of the Indian subcontinent, Meluhha was falsely identified with the Harappa civilization cities in the Indus Delta area. References to Meluhha in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets cover indeed a long period from the end of the 3rd millennium BCE down to the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. Gerrha is an ancient city known through Ancient Greek and Latin texts; it was a key point in the trade between the South and the North, the East and the West during in the Antiquity. However, similarly with Meluhha, Gerrha was falsely identified as located in the area of today’s Dammam in Saudi Arabia. References to Gerrha in Ancient Greek and Latin texts cover many centuries before and after the beginning of the Christian era. http://www.adlibris.com/se/bok/meluhha-gerrha-and-the-emirates-9783847385363 https://books.google.com.eg/books/about/Meluhha_Gerrha_and_the_Emirates.html?id=9WP1kgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

The paper will review the information on sacred places and beings among some littoral societies of the Red Sea as recorded in the Greek and Latin sources. Sailors and merchants from Egypt and the Mediterranean witnessed ritual practices connected to the marine environment during their journeys throughout the 4th-2nd century BC. These involved environmental features tied to the daily life of the local populations as well as to their thought: coastal shrines, special places, sea animals and marine phenomena. Although scanty and manipulated by ancient observers and geographers, these data can still provide an insight into their ideological representation of the man-sea relation. To further explore the theme, the paper will compare this information to similar records of man's intimate ties with the sea and its creatures from the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.