Golden river to golden road: society,culture and change in the middle east
- Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania 1962
- 422 p.
From The Golden River, the Spanish colony of Río de Oro in West Africa, to the Golden road leading from Khurasan to Samarkand in Turkestan, immortalized in English literature by Flecker, stretches the huge land mass of the Middle East. The distance from the Golden River to the Golden Road is roughly five thousand miles in a west-easterly direction, while from the Black Sea coast of Turkey in the north to Aden and Sudan in the south is about two thousand miles. The land area of the Middle East is about 7,156,000 square miles, or almost two and a half times that of the continental United States. Its population, how ever, is only 156 million, as against the 180 million of the United States.
This huge territory, though inhabited by peoples speaking many different tongues and exhibiting many different physical features, is nevertheless the of one basically identical culture. The core area of the Middle East, stretching from the Nile to the Tigris, is the locale of the oldest recorded history of mankind. From here, in successive waves, cultural influences spread in all directions, reaching their climax thirteen centuries ago when the new Islamic variety of Arabian culture became superimposed on pre-existent cultural layers all over the Middle East, resulting in the characteristic pattern still predominant to the present day.