Children of the seven sands : the history of the United Arab Emirates / Alexander McNabb

Introduction: An Amazing History -- Chapter 1: The Emergence of Man -- Chapter 2: The End of Eden -- Chapter 3: The Lords of Magan -- Chapter 4: Death in the Mountains -- Chapter 5: The Impossible Desert Forge -- Chapter 6: The Rise of Mleiha -- Chapter 7: Here Lie 10,000 Men -- Chapter 8: Schism, Rift and War -- Chapter 9: Lords of the Seven Seas -- Chapter 10: The Portuguese Sword and Cross -- Chapter 11: The Company and the Prophet -- Chapter 12: The Arrival of Albion -- Chapter 13: Exile and the Kingdom -- Chapter 14: The Trucial Coast -- Chapter 15: The Father of the Gazelle -- Chapter 16: War in the Sands -- Chapter 17: Of Perpetual Peace -- Chapter 18: The Rise of the Tribes and Zayed the Great -- Chapter 19: The Protectorate and the Darbar -- Chapter 20: Troubled Times in Sharjah -- Chapter 21: The Passing of the Pearls -- Chapter 22: Look Up to the Blue Sky -- Chapter 23: Oil, Rebellion and War -- Chapter 24: The Buraimi Incident -- Chapter 25: Founded on a Handshake -- Chapter 26: The Act of Union -- Chapter 27: Winds of Change

The Emirates was founded a little over fifty years ago, by a handshake between two men meeting in a tent in the desert between Abu Dhabi and Dubai – and yet its human history stretches back to the emergence of anatomically modern humans from Africa to populate the earth, a story of 130,000 years of humankind’s survival in one of the world’s harshest environments. Thanks to modern archaeological and historical research, we can now trace the UAE’s story back to the Garden of Eden, the mythical floods of the Old Testament and the very foundation of the Sumerian civilisation. Known to the Sumerians as Magan, a key source of the copper that sparked the metallurgical revolution that swept Europe, the land of the Emirates was home to a Bronze Age trading entrepot linking Mesopotamia, Persia and the Indus Valley Harappan civilisation. This early Bronze Age human development was transformed through the Iron Age into a locus for agricultural and social innovation, welcoming strange religions and seeing great pre-Islamic cities blossom in the sands, from Mleiha in Sharjah’s desert interior through to Ed-Dur on the coast of Umm Al Quwain. Emerging from the pre-Islamic age to become a commercial centre that dominated the fabulous wealth of the trade monopoly between Asia and Europe, the people of the Emirates would straddle the seven seas until the arrival of the bloody Portuguese triggered the series of clashes with expansionist European empires that would eventually impose the Pax Britannica on the Trucial States, the coastal city states which eventually came together to found the United Arab Emirates when the British protectorate finally ceased in December 1971. This, then, is their story – told in full for the first time ever.