From the editorial accompanying the cover-story in the latest New Scientist magazine…

Many of the researchers who work [in the Arabian desert] were told not to bother because “there was no prehistory in Arabia” and were even laughed at. Those researchers are getting the last laugh. As the [magazine’s] feature explains, it turns out there is an enormous amount of prehistory in Arabia: [over just one decade the Palaeodeserts / DISPERSE teams found] dozens of archaeological sites, often with rich collections of artefacts, that date back 500,000 years and perhaps further.

---

Lovecraft in a letter of 1927, outlining the career of the author of The Necronomicon…

the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred [ventured into] the devil-haunted & untrodden wastes of the great southern deserts of Arabia — the Raba el Khaliyeh [‘Empty Quarter’] — where he claimed to have found records of things older than mankind, & to have learnt the worship of Yog-Sothoth & Cthulhu.