Crone debunks MECCA on the Land Trade Route! скачать в хорошем качестве

Crone debunks MECCA on the Land Trade Route!

According to William Montgomery Watt (a Scottish minister who became an expert on the history of Islam), Mecca became important in the 7th century due to the problem with trade going from the East, through the Persian gulf to Basra, and then across Iraq and Syria, to the Mediterranean Sea, where it then went to Europe. But in the 5th - 6th centuries the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires were at war with each other, which shut down the trade going via the Persian gulf. Watt said that the trade then had to be redirected, from the Western coast of India, across the Arabian sea, to Aden, where the goods were taken off the ships and put on camels, which then went along the Western Plateau to Sanaa, then Najran, then to Taif, and on to Mecca, and from there to Yathrib, Kaybar, Tabuk and Gaza on the Mediterranean Sea. And it was this trade that Mecca was in charge of, and from which it enriched itself and became an economic power during the time of Muhammad. That was known as the "Trade Route Theory". Dr Patricia Crone, in 1987 had problems with this theory and wrote a bunk to debunk it called "Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam". First of all, she said, someone needs to look at a map of the Western Coast of Arabia, because you will quickly see that Mecca is not on the Western Plateau, but is almost 1,000 meters (that's 3,000 feet) down off of the plateau. Which means the caravans would have to descend the 1,000 meters from Taif down to Mecca, where there was no water, and thus no vegetation to feed the camels, and then ascend the 1,000 meters back up to get to Yathrib in the north. What's even more problematic, she asked why would you take all of your goods off the ships at Aden to then go 1,250 miles overland to Gaza, when you had a water way known as the Red Sea, which went the same route, and would have been much cheaper. She found that if you take a ton of goods 15 miles by land, it would cost the same as taking the same ton of goods 1,250 miles by sea. That's why we send most of our goods by sea even today, in the 21st century. So, she decided to test out her theory, and because she could read and write 15 languages, she went back to all of the trading documents from the 2nd to the 7th centuries, and found that all of the trade from the Western Coast of India to the Mediterranean was by Sea, and not by land at all; and that the city which was responsible was Adulis, in Eritrea, which is on the Western Coast of the Red Sea, in what is today Eritrea, suggesting that Arabia had nothing to do with the trade of that time. In one fell swoop, Patricia Crone debunked Montgomery Watt's 'Trade Route Theory', using historical evidence for her support. But she didn't go far enough in her analysis, because she didn't bother to look more closely at the Red Sea, to see why exactly the trade didn't go up the Eastern side of the Sea, which is the Arabian side. That we will look at next. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2022 (62,220) Music: "Justice and Fame" by Rafael Krux, from filmmusic-io