A very important book on eastern Arabia. Raunkiær’s description of Kuwait is the lone example of the period, and stands out as a vital record (both visual and textual) of the state before the discovery of oil.
“Early in 1912, the Dane Barclay Raunkiaer travelled in eastern Arabia on behalf of the Royal Danish Geography Society to reconnoiter for a proposed Danish expedition into the Southern desert. Various parts of Raunkiaer’s route (Kuwait-Buraida-Riyadh-al-Hufuf-‘Ujair) coincided with parts of the journeys of Palgrave (1862), Guarmani (1864), Pelly (1865), Doughty (1878) and Shakespear. Raunkiaer’s scientific intentions were largely thwarted by practical problems, but his account of Kuwait in 1912 was praised by T.E. Lawrence, and he was the first European to visit Riyadh for fifty years. In Riyadh he met ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn Sa’ud father of Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Sa’ud. While in Kuwait Raunkiaer became seriously ill; he never recovered and he died in 1915 aged twenty-five” (Cottrell, The Persian Gulf States: a General Survey, 1980).
Gennem Wahhabiternes Land… is illustrated throughout with the author’s photographs and drawings. An English edition, printed in Cairo at the Government Press in 1916, did not feature any of the pictorial elements of the first Danish edition. A later English edition (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) included some, but not all, of the photographs in the present book.
