Charles Forster
Originally published in 1844, also in two volumes, The Historical Geography of Arabia is now an important document in the historical development of Christian theological study. With the rapid expansion of European interests in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, the Christian Church discovered a reawakened interest in the lands from which its religion had sprung. At the same time, closer contacts with the Muslim faith produced in many churchmen the need to reassert their own faith and to seek for proofs of the foundations of their religion in its Old Testament setting. In Arabia, it was believed, resided the very roots of Christianity, hidden for centuries by the desert sands but now revealed to explorers and questing theologians. ’We may now know, in their own handwriting, what the earliest post-diluvian men and nations thought, and felt, and believed, not merely about this life...but about God, about religion.’It is to the study of these ’post-diluvian’ men, their settlements and their ancient inscriptions that the Rev. Forster devotes much of his work: ’if I may resume briefly the evidence here in question...their amount is this: in the Adite monument at Hisn Ghorab stands registered the incontrovertible fact, that the oldest monument in the world contains, at once, the fullest, and purest declaration of the great central truth of the Gospel. ..’
