Charles Forster

Title: The historical Geography of Arabia, and an appendix containing translations, with an alphabet and glossary of the Hamyaritic inscriptions recently discovered.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The GEOGRAPHY & TOPOGRAPHY collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. Offering some insights into the study and mapping of the natural world, this collection includes texts on Babylon, the geographies of China, and the medieval Islamic world. Also included are regional geographies and volumes on environmental determinism, topographical analyses of England, China, ancient Jerusalem, and significant tracts of North America. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Forster, Charles; 1844. 8 . 1298.f.1.

Originally published in 1844, also in two volumes, 'The Historical Geography of Arabia' is now an important document in the historical development of Christian theological study. With the rapid expansion of European interest in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, the Christian Church discovered a reawakened interest in the lands from which its religion had sprung. At the same time, closer contacts with the Muslim faith produced in many Churchmen the need to reassert their own faith and to seek for proofs of the foundations of their religion in its Old Testament setting. In Arabia, it was believed, resided the very roots of Christianity, hidden for centuries by the desert sands but now revealed to explorers and questing theologians. 'We may now know, in their own handwriting, what the earliest post-diluvian men and nations thought, and felt, and believed, not merely about this life...but about God, about religion.' It is to the study of these 'post-diluvian' men, their settlements and their ancient inscriptions that the Rev. Forster devotes much of his work: 'If I may resume briefly the eivdences here in question...their amount is this: in the Adite monument at Hisn Ghorab stands registered the incontrovertible fact, that the oldest monument in the world contains, at once, the fullest, and purest declaration of the great central truth of the Gospel. ..' Such evidence, and the conclusion reached by the author, are here republished in facsimile.