Meluhha, Gerrha, and the Emirates

The present book sets the foundations of the Ancient History of the UAE. Through use of hitherto misinterpreted historical sources, the author identifies the land of the Emirates with the region Meluhha of the Assyrian – Babylonian sources. He then locates the legendary city Gerrha of the Ancient Greek and Latin texts in Abu Dhabi’s territory. The author rejects the farfetched identification of Meluhha with the Indus Delta, which reflects Indian nationalistic ideas, and refutes the absurd effort to locate the yet unexcavated Gerrha in the province Al Ehsa of Saudi Arabia. He refers to ancient sources like Strabo and Ptolemy the Geographer who accurately located Gerrha while also expanding further on the land of today’s Emirates. Contextualizing the re-interpreted sources within the History of the Ancient Orient, the author illustrates three millennia of pre-Islamic History of the Emirates, and reveals the land’s great importance as key point in the vast commercial network of land/desert/sea routes between the East and the West; he thus sets a historiographical model at the antipodes of Orientalism, which has been the academic dimension of the Anglo-French colonialism.