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Old Posted May 27, 2017, 8:53 AM
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10023 10023 is offline
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Originally Posted by photoLith View Post
Dubai is for sure no place Id ever want to visit, I mean if I had the chance and it was free and or fairly cheap than hell yeah, Id go. But Dubai to me seems like a dead soulless fascist place with no character. Its basically soulless suburbia with supertall skyscrapers. NYC minus the city.

Also, after further research, it seems the fort is the oldest building Dubai and was built in 1787 and other than a fort there wasn't much in the city until the early 1900's, which is surprising, considering the region is one of the oldest inhabited places by humanity, being close to Iraq, Iran etc which was home to nearly the oldest human civilizations on the planet. I would have figured Dubai had been home to some sort of port for thousands of years but this doesn't seem to be the case.
The ancient cultures of the Middle East were really in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan). Sana'a in Yemen is an old city (maybe the oldest Arab city), but that's because it's at 7500 feet above sea level and has a mild climate.

With few exceptions, the relatively few people that were in the Arabian peninsula were nomads on camels. Even Mecca was unknown before it became the birthplace of Muhammad, and it was probably a small town at the time. That fort in Dubai, like the ones in Aden and elsewhere, would have been built by the Ottomans as a remote outpost at the borders of their territory. They're not evidence of ancient cosmopolitan cities or even real trading centers. Muscat is one that was around as a trading center - they traded with India, probably because Oman is geographically cut off from the inland of the Arabian peninsula.

But then, oil.

As an aside, I believe that most problems in the Middle East and global Islam in general are a direct result of the fact that people from this part of the Arab world, who have no history of civilization, are the ones with all the money. Saudi and the Gulf states jumped straight from about the 10th century into the 20th.
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