Robert Hoyland

Robert Hoyland

The Birth of Arabic Writing on Stone

Robert Hoyland is professor of late antique and early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He has conducted fieldwork in a number of countries of the Arab world, including Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Yemen. A season working in the basalt desert of southeast Syria in 1999 got him hooked on epigraphy and he has written a number of articles on early Arabic inscriptions and what they can tell us about the society and culture that produced them. He is the author of Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), Arabia and the Arabs (2001) and In God’s Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire.