Harry St John Philby
The explorer who crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter in 1932 and found the Wabar craters and their iron meteorites.
Key facts
- Born
- 1885
- Died
- 1960
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Explorer and Arabist
Harry St John Bridger Philby was a British colonial officer who became an adviser to Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia, and spent much of his life exploring the Arabian Peninsula. He was the father of the spy Kim Philby.
Philby had heard Bedouin stories of a lost city called Wabar, said to have been destroyed by fire from heaven. In 1932 he set out to find it and made the first crossing by a European of the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, a vast sea of sand dunes.
At the place his guides called Wabar he found no city. Instead there were two large, partly sand-filled craters, scattered with black glass, white rock and pieces of iron. Philby collected samples and took them back to the British Museum in London, where the iron was confirmed as meteoritic and the glass shown to be sand melted by an impact.
The Wabar craters are one of only a few places where an impact into pure sand can be studied. The impact is thought to have happened only a few hundred years ago. In 1965 a large iron mass of about 2.2 tonnes, nicknamed the Camel's Hump, was found nearby and is now displayed in Riyadh.
On the timeline
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Wabar craterWabar in the catalogue