Yesterday and To-day in Sinai.

Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1931.

Price: $150.00


About the item

First edition. Folding map at back, frontispiece, plates, half-title. xiv, 312pp. 8vo. Publisher's green cloth in cream pictorial Very Good unclipped dust jacket.

Item #319311

Governor of the Sinai from 1923-1936. "...His knowledge of Arabic, and of Bedouin customs and law, enabled him to settle tribal feuds, not only among the tribes under his official control, but their feuds with the neighbouring tribes in Transjordan and Saudi Arabia. He virtually obliterated banditry, and contributed effectively to Egypt's efforts to suppress the drug traffic by the desert routes. He made a special study of the wanderings of the Israelites in the Exodus, and traced the remains of what, before the Arab conquest, must have been a flourishing Roman and later Byzantine settlement in the north of Sinai. There, by damming the Wadi Gedeirat (Kadesh Barnea of the Bible), and restoring the old stone channels, he transformed a small swampy waterhole into several hundred acres of olive and fruit trees" [ODNB].