A personal followup. I spent a year in KSA. Visited the ruins of Diriyah, which they preserve lovingly and which is now a suburb of Riyadh. Also went across the desert to find the camel trail up the escarpment that runs down the middle of the country and which must be surmounted if one goes from west to east, a very rough trip. Hidden behind "Faisal's Needle" the trail goes up the escarpment and was used by the then Albanian viceroy of Cairo for the Ottomans, later to rebel against them, Muhammed Ali, to drag his cannons up to attack the naughty Sa'udis who had dared to take away the sultan's hajji tolls.(posted 8754 days ago)The trail has remnants of stone put in place by Muhammed Ali so the heavy stuff could be dragged up. When we finally reached the top, we found a 4,000 year old "kite" rock formation from a culture dating to when the area had rain. The camel trail used by Muhammed Ali has been used for a very long time. Ah, path dependence....
Barkley Contributed by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. (rosserjb@jmu.edu) on April 19, 2000.