Unknown Oman By texasbeerguide.com

texasbeerguide.com ✓ 7 Download

Arrived safely, thank you. Hardcover The book's content is pretty amazing, and you'd have to be a really rotten writer not to be able to write something interesting about Oman at that time, But Wendell is not a rotten writer; and perhaps a prototype for Indiana Jones.

Wendell turns up in the area as an artchaeology grad student in hsi 20s and talks his way into a major 'dig', in the Yemen. Finds some stuff that indicates that it's Sheba's city (or one of them), the war starts in the Yemen, he and his crew have to literally drop everything and run for the border of Oman. He gets befriended by the old Sultan and goes off to look for a lost city in the Rub al Kali. As well as this does some research and digging in Sohar and other places.
The information on the digs is interesting, but what is really interesting in this book are his comments documenting contemporary Oman before the oil was found. This was a place that had no roads no schools no hospitals, and yet had fallen from the position of having had a trading empire (slaves) that included the E coast of Africa as its sphere of interest and Zanzibar as the sister city of Muscat. They sent an equipped warship to America as a present and yet it had become utterly forgotten by the rest of the world. Unknown indeed.
Its a fascinating read. It could have been an account by Burton or Speke (if he could have written anything) but its not a report of 19thC Africa, this is the middle of the 20thC. Its quite extraordinary.
The chapter on 'medical' practices alone is worth having the book for. It's a bit gruesome, but made sense of thing that i saw in Oman while i was there. Lots of men with burn scars. Searing was a sort of arabic form of acupuncture runny nose? hmm red hot iron to the back of the neck should fix it.
Wendell is often made light of by mainstream archaeologists, and the image of him wandering about with a 45 on his hip is certainly glamorous, and might give you the idea that he was 'only a cowboy'. But he did GO there. And he did explore. More than might be said for a lot of the mainstreamers.
Oman today is largely 'unexplored' and often still unstudied. Wendell is one of a breed who was happy to take a few chances and be able to leave a couple of books for the rest of us to compare what is there today and what was there 40 years ago. He was a brief candle, died when he was 42.
I have a copy of this that i pinched from a library (in Oman) that was about to be closed down and god knows what was going to happen to what I thought was an out of print book. I had heard bits and peices about Wendell, but after reading the book he became my hero. Maybe he can be yours too. Wendell is wonderful Hardcover

Unknown Oman Unknown Oman