List of Titles

Niebuhr, Carsten.  Travels through Arabia and Other Countries in the East.  Edinburgh: Printed for R. Morison, 1792.

The author, a German in the service of the king of Denmark, was the sole survivor of a group of five who traveled through Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula in 1761 to 1763. This version is an abridged translation by Robert Heron of Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern (Copenhagen: N. Möller, 1774-78).

Ockley, Simon.  The History of the Saracens; Comprising the Lives of Mohammed and His Successors, to the Death of Abdalmelik, the Eleventh Caliph.  London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857.

From the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 1918:

“Ockley based his work on an Arabic manuscript in the Bodleian library which later scholars have pronounced less trustworthy than he imagined it to be. His English is pure, and simple, his narrative extraordinarily vivid and dramatic, and told in words exactly suited to his subject—whether he is describing how Caulah and her companions kept their Damascene captors at bay until her brother Derar and his horsemen came to deliver them, or telling the tragic story of the death of Hosein. The book was translated into French in 1748, and was long held to be authoritative. As a history, its defects are patent, its account of the conquest of Persia, for example, is so slight that even the decisive battle of Cadesia is not mentioned; nor is any attempt made to examine the causes of the rapid successes of the Saracen arms: it reads, indeed, more like a collection of sagas than a history. Such defects, however, do not impair its peculiar literary merit.”

The original edition was published in Cambridge, England, in two volumes, the first in 1708 and the second in 1718. The version presented here includes a brief biography of Ockley and annotations derived from later histories.