This magnificent history of the desert relates the human consequences of its remorseless spread. As a result of the past several thousand years, the Great Desert now stretches in almost unbroken continuity from Mauritania's Atlantic seaboard through the Middle East and Central Asia to the Great Wall of China. The author seeks to understand how the great civilisations in the original 'green lands' of North Africa, Ancient Egypt, the Middle East, South Asia and China responded and changed under the pressure of invaders fleeing growing environmental degradation in the surrounding deserts.

In fascinating detail, Brian Griffith's cultural history of the deserts of Africa and Asia shows how the expanding wasteland fundamentally reshaped people's images of nature, women, politics and religion. He charts what desertification has done to human society -- the very different religious beliefs that became dominant; a huge shift in the relative standing of men and women; new, more antagonistic attitudes to Nature; and much more authoritarian systems of government. He describes how successive waves of refugees from the arid lands -- Aryans, Huns, Mongols and many others -- were launched on an aggressive path of migration and conquest, and put overwhelming pressure on neighbouring, more settled societies in more benign environments.

Like all good history, this book contains a striking lesson for our own times -- the necessity not of coping with the environmental problem, but of taking timely steps to forestall environmental pressures from putting humane institutions under irresistible pressure.