Children of the Seven Sands
The history of the United Arab Emirates
The Emirates was founded a little over fifty years ago, by a handshake between two men meeting in a tent in the desert between Abu Dhabi and Dubai – and yet its human history stretches back to the emergence of anatomically modern humans from Africa to populate the earth, a story of 130,000 years of humankind’s survival in one of the world’s harshest environments.
Thanks to modern archaeological and historical research, we can now trace the UAE’s story back to the Garden of Eden, the mythical floods of the Old Testament and the very foundation of the Sumerian civilisation. Known to the Sumerians as Magan, a key source of the copper that sparked the metallurgical revolution that swept Europe, the land of the Emirates was home to a Bronze Age trading entrepot linking Mesopotamia, Persia and the Indus Valley Harappan civilisation. This early Bronze Age human development was transformed through the Iron Age into a locus for agricultural and social innovation, welcoming strange religions and seeing great pre-Islamic cities blossom in the sands, from Mleiha in Sharjah’s desert interior through to Ed-Dur on the coast of Umm Al Quwain.
Emerging from the pre-Islamic age to become a commercial centre that dominated the fabulous wealth of the trade monopoly between Asia and Europe, the people of the Emirates would straddle the seven seas until the arrival of the bloody Portuguese triggered the series of clashes with expansionist European empires that would eventually impose the Pax Britannica on the Trucial States, the coastal city states which eventually came together to found the United Arab Emirates when the British protectorate finally ceased in December 1971.
This, then, is their story – told in a single book for the first time ever.
Published by Motivate Media Group - February 2025
