Apostate prophet asks the Greeks; anyone been to Mecca?

In answer to the video "The Truth About The Kaaba"

Again, we have a 1st centuryBC author, Diodorus Siculus, writing about ALL Arabs revering a singular Temple. The only one which ever commanded the universal homage in Arabia, was the one in Mecca. If that is the case then the very idea that there was none until a few years prior to Islam is a statement divorced from reality and not grounded in any historical or traditional evidence.

We're not speaking of pyramids or some monuments no longer used, but of a living monument kept in high regard by an entire population past, present and future. We're not talking of a single person making a grandiose claim on the origins of a population and its hometown, but of an entire population's claims based on ancestral knowledge. Diodorus places that 1st century BC temple in an area of simple people who hunt land animals, off a particular coast in the Red Sea.

The accounts of those that live by the coast and eat fish are also mentioned, without mention of the Temple being in their area, which gives further evidence that the Temple was located inland. He doesn't equate it with the northern Nabateans and he doesn't do it with the Southern Arabian kingdoms. Something very important to noteis that Diodorus isn't even an authority on Arabia, he didn't venture into Arabia but was simply relating history according to 2nd-3rd hand records. But assuming Diodorus did not mean the Meccan Kaaba as the singular Temple revered by all the Arabs, how does one explain the error of judgment committed by the likes of Muir and Gibbon, the same error, when neither of them are known to be sympathetic to Muslims, meaning they had every reason not to admit to Diodorus' allusion to the Kaaba? Gibbon was known for his accuracy in quoting primary sources, providing in-depth detail regarding his use of sources for his work, which included documents dating back to ancient Rome. So, again where is the single temple revered by all of Arabia in the 1st centuryBC, if it wasnt the one in Mecca?  Although William Muir viewed the story of Ishmael's settlement in Mecca as "A travestied plagiarism from Scripture" he still could not deny the antiquity of that belief among the Arabs of Hijaz. He maintained that Abraham’s association with the Kaaba “must be regarded as of ancient date even in Mahomet’s time". Others yet like Nöldeke and Schwally, suggested that the Kaaba's Abrahamic connection may have been created before the Prophet by Arabian Jews or Christians who, despite abandoning paganism, would have wanted to continue participating in the Kaaba’s rites. Muir therefore posits that Muhammad could not have invented it, rather that it was brought by the northern Nabateans after they settled in the area of Mecca.

Then there is another Greek writer, Ptolemy, writing in his 2nd century work on geography that also covers the western region of the Arabian Peninsula, of "Macoraba". He puts it at a Latitude of 22 and another city which he calls "Lathrippa" at 23. Historians reading Ptolemy's work know that a margin of error of around 2 degrees was common to him, as happened with other known cities like Byzantium. If we correct the 2 degree margin, we get extremely close to where both Mecca and Yathrib actually are. There is unanimity that Lathrippa stands for Yathrib, or Medina, but the views vary concerning Macoraba, although more scholars lean in favor of it being a reference for Mecca. Many different etymological suggestions were proposed to explain the connection between Mecca and Macoraba, they are all irrelevant to the fact that nothing historically can account for mentioning a city at that location but Mecca. Also, Mecca and Macoraba arent further from oneanother phonetically than “Lathrippa” is from “Yathrib”. The word mkrb, and which sounds close to Macoraba, is known from late Sabaic texts (Old South Arabian language spoken between c. 1000 BC and the 6th century AD) with the meaning “shrine, temple, synagogue, assembly hall”. Ptolemy wasnt an Arab anyway. He was transliterating his own phonetical perception of a word he heard either from an Arab who might have stated the name with a description, in his own dialect, such as Makka al mukarrama, which is close phonetically to Macoraba, or from a non-Arab who reported to him about the city and who was in turn repeating the name as he understood it. To further corroborate, in ancient 7th-8th century Greek and Syriac texts, Christian writers used Magaritai and Mahgraye as cognates for the Arabic "Muhajirun", in reference to the early Muslim conquerors.

Also and throughout time, the name of one and the same place might vary. The Quran itself attests to this with Mecca, formerly known as Becca.

Nothing is certain but the simple fact that Macoraba is placed geographically near modern Mecca and the fact that the name itself sounds plausibly close enough, should in and of itself raise eyebrows. And it is evident that almost every thing – apart from longitude which is a general problem with Ptolemy’s Geography-fits well with Mecca and that is where the consensus came from; Yathrib a little to the north and a river bed a little to the south.