abstract
| - The Arabic word nejd literally means "upland" and was once applied to a variety of regions within the Arabian Peninsula. However, the most famous of these was the central region of the Peninsula roughly bounded on the west by the mountains of the Hejaz and Yemen and to the east by the historical region of Bahrain. Medieval Muslim geographers spent a great amount of time deciding the exact boundaries between Hejaz and Nejd in particular, but generally set the western boundaries of Nejd to be wherever the western mountain ranges and lava beds began to slope eastwards, and set the eastern boundaries of Nejd at the narrow strip of red sand dunes known as the Al-Dahna Desert, some 100 km east of modern-day Riyadh. The southern border of Nejd has always been set at the large sea of sand dunes known today as the Empty Quarter (formerly Al-Juz'), while the southwestern boundaries are marked by the valleys of Wadi Ranyah, Wadi Bisha, and Wadi Tathlith. The northern boundaries of Nejd have fluctuated greatly historically and received far less attention from the medieval geographers. In the early Islamic centuries, Nejd was considered to extend as far north as the River Euphrates, or more specifically, the "Walls of Khosrau", constructed by the Persian Empire as a barrier between Arabia and Mesopotamia immediately prior to the advent of Islam. The regions immediately bordering the Iraqi and Syrian deserts, however, were separated from the rest of Nejd by a great sea of sand dunes known as the Nefud, and were inhabited almost entirely by bedouin tribes that had much closer relationships with Iraq and Syria than with the interior of Arabia. For this reason, the term "Nejd" began to be applied more specifically to the "plateau of Nejd", with the Nefud desert as its natural northern border. Therefore, since about the 8th Islamic century (14th century CE) at least, the borders of Nejd have been considered to be the Empty Quarter desert to the south, the mountains of the Hejaz and Asir to the west and southwest, the Dahna desert to the east, and the Nefud desert to the north.
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