Riyadh The Old City

Aimed alike at specialists and general readers, this book presents a continuous history of Riyadh since pre-Islamic times. It tells the story of Riyadh’s emergence, its growth as Saudi capital in the 19th century, and its development into the capital of the young, state of Saudi Arabia in the 20th century, It ends with the engulfing of the old mud-build walled city by the rush towards modernisation in the 1950s. With its wealth of archive photographs and plans of the old city, most of them previously unpublished, it paints a unique historical portrait of Riyadh and its people before the transformation of recent decades.