Karak Resources Project

Useful historical atlases and guides to the chronology of the Early Islamic period include:

Bacharach, J.

1974 Near East Studies Handbook, 570-1974. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

Barraclough, G.

1986 Times Atlas of World History. Revised edition. London: Times Books.

Brice, W.

1981 An Historical Atlas of Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Freeman-Grenville, W.

1993 Historical Atlas of the Middle East. New York and London: Simon and Schuster.

The Arab communities of pre-Islamic Arabia, Jordan, Palestine and Syria are discussed in:

Hoyland, R.

2001 Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. London and New York: Routledge.

Schick, R.

1995 The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule. A Historical and Archaeological Study. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 2. Princeton NJ: Darwin Press 1995. Chapters I-III. For the Early Islamic period, see chapters V-VI.

For a general survey of the history of the Early Islamic period, see:

Donner, F.

1981 The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gabrieli, F.

1968 Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam, trans. V. Luling and R. Linell. London and New York: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson (reprinted 1977).

Kennedy, H.

1986 The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates. The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century. New York: Longman 1986.

For more specific historical information on the Karak plateau, see:

Buhl, F.

1993 Mu’ta. Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition 8: 756-57.

Johns, J.

1995 The Longue Durée: State and Settlement Strategies in Southern Transjordan across the Islamic centuries. Pp.1-31 in Village, Steppe and State. The Social Origins of Modern Jordan, eds E. Rogan and T. Tell. London and New York: British Academic Press.

1996 Karak. Pp.280-83 in Encyclopaedia of Near Eastern archaeology 3, ed. E. Meyers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sourdel, D.

1978 Karak. Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition 4: 609.

Important archaeological surveys and excavations of Early Islamic occupation on the Karak plateau and southern Jordan include:

Brown, R.

1991 Ceramics from the Kerak Plateau. Pp.232-246 in Archaeological Survey of the Kerak Plateau. American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Reports 1, ed. J. M. Miller. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press.

McQuitty, A. and Falkner, R.

1993 The Faris project. Preliminary Report on the 1989, 1990 and 1991 Seasons. Levant 25: 37-61.

Sauer, J.

1971 The Heshbon Pottery, 1971. Berriens Springs Mi.: Andrews University Press.

Walmsley, A., Karsgaard, K. and Grey, T.

1999 Town and Village: Site Transformations in Southern Jordan (the Gharandal Archaeological Project, Second Report). Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 43: 459-78.

Whitcomb, D.

1988 A Fatimid Residence at Aqaba, Jordan. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 32: 207-24.

2000 Hesban, Amman, and Abbasid Archaeology in Jordan. Pp.505-15 in The Archaeology of Jordan and Beyond. Essays in Honor of James A. Sauer. Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant, eds L. Stager, J. Greene and M Coogan. Winona Lake In.: Eisenbrauns 2000.