![]() ![]() ![]() The discovery, he says, “triggered a 16-year, obsessive quest,” involving more than 50 trips to segments of the caravan road and innumerable hours of background research and mapping “to seek out more marker stones and establish their significance and relationship to each other.” This stone is now one of 63 milestones Alkadi has identified, and it is number 12 of the 55 recorded along the route in his book published this year in Arabic and English, Milestones of Arabia.īabylonians, Egyptians and people of the Indus Valley all began to pave roads more than 6,000 years ago, but it was Romans who are first known to have used stones to measure off distances along them. Was it a landmark to help travelers follow the road? Or was it, as Alkadi hoped, also a distance marker? The effort to quarry, carry and set this basalt stone clearly spoke to the significance of the task. Most markers were cairns-conical piles of stones-rather than monoliths. ![]() Marking paths and roads with stone was practiced also along other desert caravan roads in the Arabian Peninsula. When he and his research companions found the stone, he recounts, they discovered with a bit of digging that about one-third of it lay buried, which had provided it the stability to remain standing for centuries. ZAID AHMED - The 18th milestone, Alkadi notes, “was found in two large pieces that fit together perfectly.” He and a field team excavated the pieces, stood up the base and replaced the top. He holds a doctorate in urban and regional planning from Portland State University in Oregon, USA. “Much of our work was conducted on foot,” recalls Alkadi from his home in al-Khobar, along Saudi Arabia’s east coast, where he has served as vice president of Studies, Development and Community Services at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Dammam as well as a professor at its College of Architecture and Planning. He was focused particularly on those along the route of the Hijra, the migration in 622 CE of the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers from Makkah some 450 kilometers north-mostly along the caravan route-to the place where they would build the first mosque and establish the first Muslim community: Madinah.Īlkadi knew that historical sources made references to milestones that helped travelers along this route, but other than boundary markers near the edges of the holy cities themselves, no such stones had yet been identified along the route, and the sources offered little in the way of description. Alkadi was amid searches for historic sites that had connections to specific verses that appear in the Qur’an. ![]()
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