A history written in the sand

From the first crossing of the Rub‘ al-Khali in the 1920s to the most modern technologies such as satellite radar, numerous expeditions have uncovered the remains of ancient landscapes and settlements now buried beneath the sands, revealing a past rich in life. The Arabian Peninsula is often imagined as a vast, empty and inhospitable desert. Its most ancient history, however, tells of a far more variable scenario — a mosaic of different environments, crossed and inhabited by human groups since very remote times.

Palaeolithic

In archaeology, the period called “Prehistory” recounts the long journey of human beings before the invention of writing. For the Arabian Peninsula, this means studying the communities that lived before the 8th century BCE.

The Peninsula is often imagined as a great desert. Yet for millennia its climate was governed by the monsoons of the Indian Ocean. Phases of extreme aridity alternated with warm, humid periods during which the desert gave way to rivers, lakes and savannahs populated by hippopotamuses and elephants: an extraordinary landscape that scientists call “Green Arabia”.

Situated between Africa, Europe and Asia, the Peninsula was a fundamental geographic bridge for the first human migrations out of the African continent. Of these ancient hunter-gatherers, what mainly survives are stone tools (bifaces, flakes and points). The only skeletal evidence of hominins known to date comes from the site of Al Wusta 1 in Saudi Arabia, where a finger bone was found associated with around 400 lithic artefacts, dated to between 95,000 and 85,000 years ago.

In the Middle Palaeolithic, sophisticated lithic technologies appear, such as the Nubian Levallois — a knapping method that allowed the core to be prepared and flakes or points of predetermined shape to be obtained. This technology is documented above all in Dhofar, on the Nejd plateau, where hundreds of surface sites have been recorded.

Neolithic

With the end of the last glaciation and the beginning of the Holocene, between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, Arabia experienced its last great humid phase.

In the Neolithic, communities no longer lived solely by hunting, fishing and gathering: they also introduced the herding of cattle, sheep and goats. This change, however, did not everywhere lead to stable farming villages as in other regions of Western Asia, such as Mesopotamia. Depending on the area, herding was integrated with hunting, fishing, shellfish gathering and seasonal movements between coast, interior and mountains. This mixed economy was not a “delay” relative to agriculture, but an adaptive choice consistent with the Arabian environment.

Some glimpses of daily life are evocatively documented by rock art, in which central and northern Arabia are particularly rich (e.g. the Camel Site, Jubbah/Jebel Oraf, Bir Hima). The engraved images of bovids, gazelles, oryx, ibex, dogs, ostriches and human figures suggest landscapes richer in fauna than today, documenting aspects of social life, ritual practices and the environment of the time.

Among the most fascinating discoveries of recent years are the so-called “mustatil”, from the Arabic for “rectangle”: large rectangular stone structures built between 7,000 and 6,000 years ago — genuine monumental open-air enclosures linked to ritual practices such as the selected deposition of animal remains, especially cattle.

As partly anticipated, between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago humidity decreased and the climate became progressively more arid again. The northern areas felt this change first, while southern Arabia maintained more favourable conditions for longer. Communities responded in different ways: some strengthened pastoral mobility, others concentrated around springs, and still others specialised in exploiting marine resources, increasing their familiarity with the ocean and opening the way to navigation.

Between the 5th and 4th millennia BCE, eastern Arabia came into contact with Mesopotamia. Imported painted Ubaid-type pottery has been found at several Gulf sites. In Kuwait, boat models, depictions of vessels and bitumen bearing reed impressions indicate nautical skills and maritime exchange.

At several sites, from the north to the south of the Peninsula, the use of grinding stones to process local wild plants for food is documented. This is not yet true agriculture. The oldest macro-botanical remains of dates linked to human consumption are concentrated in the Arabian Gulf area, at sites such as Dalma Island and Marawah, dating to around 5000 BCE. The gathering and consumption of wild dates begins in the Neolithic, while the morphological traits of the cultivation and domestication of the date palm consolidate only between the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, in the Bronze Age.

At the same time, signs of growing social complexity emerge. In the north of the Peninsula, the anthropomorphic stelae found near al-‘Ula and Ha’il point to new forms of representation of the body, of memory and perhaps of collective identity.

At the end of the Neolithic, between the late 5th and 4th millennia BCE, a growing regionalisation can be observed: contacts between groups from different environments seem to diminish, while local traditions become more pronounced. From this point on, south-eastern Arabia follows its own developments, distinct from those of the great civilisations of the East — even though the new political systems born in Mesopotamia, Iran and the Indus Valley also stimulated a strengthening of the exchange economy in Arabia.

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age in Arabia represents a crucial phase in the formation of the region’s complex societies. Culturally, four main periods are identified: Hafit (3100–2700 BCE), Umm an-Nar (2700–2000 BCE), Wadi Suq (2000–1600 BCE) and finally the Late Bronze Age (1600–1250 BCE).

The Arabian Peninsula was integrated into the trade system of the Near East, as documented in Sumerian and Akkadian tablets. These name Magan (Oman) and Dilmun (Bahrain) as key places for the supply and trade of copper in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE. The Ur tablets record that tonnes of raw copper entered the royal warehouses, where it was weighed and then distributed to local smiths to produce bronze (an alloy of copper and tin). During the Akkadian Empire, control of the trade routes within the Persian Gulf became a strategic priority — to the point that rulers organised military campaigns against Magan. Millennia later, modern archaeology in Oman and the United Arab Emirates has confirmed what was written on the clay tablets: alongside the excavation of extensive copper-extraction and -working sites (such as Al-Maysar or Sohar), the copper ingots found in Mesopotamia bear a chemical signature matching the ore deposits of the Omani mountains. The Arabian coasts were a hub between Mesopotamia, Iran and the Indus Valley Civilisation — like the island of Failaka in present-day Kuwait, Tarut in Saudi Arabia and Umm an-Nar in the Emirates.

The absence of evidence for a centralised administrative system and complex urban networks — as seen instead in contemporary neighbouring regions, for example in the Near East — has led scholars to favour the hypothesis of less hierarchical, more fluid social organisations. The monumental, multiple burials convey a strong collective consciousness in which the relationship with the ancestors and with the territory is a central element of social and geographic identity. In the oases, such as Hili (UAE), which has yielded a vast archaeological deposit, agriculture was practised thanks to the construction of a special microclimate created by the date palm and to water management in the form of channels or dams according to the basins available. The coasts, by contrast, attest to fishing and even long-distance maritime trade. The site of Qal‘at al-Bahrain (Bahrain), capital of the legendary Dilmun civilisation, served as a “free port” and a place for experimenting with commercial accounting, as attested by the circular stone seals. The discovery of pieces of bitumen bearing the impressions of reeds and ropes, also at the site of Ras al-Jinz (Oman), has made it possible to reconstruct the appearance of vessels suited to ocean navigation.

Funerary architecture is among the most telling testimonies of the period. Tumuli, necropolises and monumental tombs — such as those of the Awam temple cemetery at Marib, where thousands of graves bear funerary stelae with stylised portraits and dedicatory inscriptions — reveal an almost obsessive concern with eternal memory and with the name of the deceased. A striking phenomenon is that of the so-called empty tombs, or cenotaphs, found at sites such as Baraqish: monuments raised for merchants who died on the long journeys along the Incense Road and whose bodies could not be brought home, showing that memory and honour mattered more than the physical presence of the body. The tombs also acted as landmarks, marking boundaries and routes across the desert and turning the territory into a “cultural landscape” in which memory, trade and identity were interwoven.

The typology of burials evolves over time: from collective tombs, indicative of clan identity, the period shifts towards individual burials linked to status, prestige or personal wealth — a sign of growing social differentiation that nonetheless never produced centralised states or rigid hierarchies. Grave goods, exotic objects and secondary burials point to elaborate rituals that could last months, making the tombs instruments of social and political cohesion as much as means of consolidating economic relations and marking the land.

The coastal sites reveal how urbanised and interconnected these societies could be. Qal‘at al-Bahrain, capital of the legendary Dilmun civilisation, grew into a fortified “free port” and pivot between Mesopotamia and the Indus, where circular soapstone seals and a standardised Dilmun weight system attest to advanced notions of property and mercantile accounting. The island of Umm an-Nar, eponymous site of the culture that spread across northern and eastern Arabia between 2700 and 2000 BCE, specialised in smelting and exporting copper from the interior mountains and is famous for its monumental circular collective tombs in finely worked stone. At Tell Abraq, occupied continuously from the Bronze to the Iron Age, an imposing circular fortress of stone and mud brick protected accumulated wealth and yielded finds from across the known ancient world — cuneiform seals, Indus Valley pottery and ivory.

The Bronze Age is also characterised by the domestication and spread of the dromedary (around the 10th century), which revolutionised the possibilities of movement across the desert. Pastoralism was still widely practised. New techniques in food preservation, such as smoking and drying, were also developed, allowing food to be transported on long desert journeys. These technological innovations enabled merchants and herders to move across Arabia — between oases, coastal sites and inland routes — creating more extensive and stable networks of interaction. Mobility thus became a genuine organising principle for the better exploitation of the territory.

Towards the close of the Bronze Age, in the transition to the Iron Age, the region underwent a progressive aridification, with declining rainfall caused by a shift in the path and intensity of the monsoon currents.

Iron Age

The Iron Age, generally dated between the 1st millennium BCE and the advent of Islam, marks a period of consolidation of social and political structures in Arabia. One of the most evident features of this period is settlement stability in some regions: the south of the Peninsula sees the emergence of urban aggregations — tribal confederations led by a ruler, such as Saba, Qataban, Hadramawt and Ma’in — which gained control over trade routes and local resources, while in northern Arabia they concentrated in the oases and the more fertile agricultural areas. In southern and north-western Arabia a monumentality of buildings and temples can be observed that is rare in the eastern part, where a village-based settlement organisation prevailed instead.

The monumental necropolises take on an even more prominent role as instruments of political and social identity. The Awam temple cemetery at Marib, with its thousands of tombs, is emblematic: funerary stelae with stylised portraits and dedicatory inscriptions point to an extreme attention to the memory and prestige of the dead, often tied to influential families or high-ranking merchants. Such monuments also consolidated the kingdoms’ presence on the land and marked symbolic boundaries, turning the tombs into veritable “lighthouses” of the desert landscape. Alongside tombs holding real bodies, cenotaphs continued to be built for merchants who died on trade journeys — empty buildings that again placed the memory and recognised role of the deceased above the body itself.

External influences — from the Levant and Mesopotamia, and later from the Hellenistic and Roman worlds — were assimilated and reinterpreted without overturning local structures. Some loculus or kokhim tombs echo foreign traditions yet were absorbed into local funerary practice, producing an original heritage adapted to Arabian conditions. Cultural interaction did not imply subordination: the Arabian kingdoms remained the protagonists of their own choices.

During the Iron Age, Arabia consolidated trade routes with connections crossing the entire Near East and reaching as far as the Mediterranean. The oasis of Dadan (al-‘Ula, Saudi Arabia) was the northern terminal of an overland route linking Yemen with Palestine. The Arabian kingdoms controlled the trade in precious goods — frankincense, myrrh and spices — along caravan routes. The production area for the highest-quality frankincense and myrrh lay between north-eastern Yemen and south-western Oman, in the present-day Dhofar region, favoured by the seasonal monsoons. Navigation became more frequent towards the north-west: around the 1st century BCE an anonymous Greek author compiled a portolan known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a commercial guide for sailing and trading between the Arabian Peninsula, Africa and India. Recent Greek and Roman influences were assimilated and reinterpreted by the Arabian populations without overturning local structures: around 230 BCE, the king of Gerrha, Abiyata’, minted coins portraying himself as a Macedonian sovereign.

The development of writing in Arabia occurred during the Iron Age: between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE a South Arabian alphabet became established, while the first North Arabian graffiti are dated to the 6th–4th centuries BCE. Although graffiti and small statuettes already attested a complex religiosity in earlier periods, epigraphic sources allow us to recognise a multitude of deities celebrated by the local populations — with a strong personal relationship between the worshipper and the deity, each with specific characteristics and dedicated places of worship, whether large buildings or natural recesses.

A significant trait of the Iron Age is also its cultural preparation for the transition to the Islamic era. Although pagan rituals continued for centuries, funerary practices gradually tended towards simplification, with fewer grave goods and a growing attention to equality before death — a sensibility that anticipates the uniform practices of Islam. Taken together, the tombs of the Iron Age tell a story of prestige, memory and cohesion, attesting both to the participation of the Arabian kingdoms in complex cultural and economic networks and to their will to consolidate local identity and the bond with the territory.

Islam

In the 6th century the Peninsula was characterised by the absence of a unified political structure, fragmented into a multitude of political entities.

To the north, the Near East was divided between the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, competing not only for territorial control but also on the cultural and religious plane. In the border territories, tribes such as the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids — who would later play a fundamental role in the spread of Islam — acted as intermediaries with the Arab world. Cities such as Mecca and Yathrib gained growing importance as commercial and religious nodes. Mecca in particular was home to the Ka‘ba, a cube-shaped sanctuary that housed the statue of the god Hubal and was an object of pilgrimage. The religious landscape was remarkably varied: alongside local polytheistic and animist cults, there were Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian communities.

The prophet Muḥammad was born around 570; he belonged to the Hashim clan, a branch of the Quraysh, the dominant tribe of Mecca. Around 610, during a periodic retreat dedicated to meditation and reflection, he began to have religious experiences. These divine revelations were later collected in the Qur’an, the sacred text of Muslims. Because of his preaching he was expelled from his clan, and in 622 he moved to the oasis of Yathrib, known as Medina, from the Arabic madinat an-nabi, “the city of the Prophet”. With the Prophet’s migration, known as the Hijra, Muḥammad became the leader of the umma, a cohesive community founded on bonds of faith rather than blood — marking a break with tribal ties. Within a few years Muḥammad managed to consolidate his authority in the western regions of the Peninsula, while the northern and eastern regions, Yemen, the Hadramawt and Oman began to respond positively to his message.

On Muḥammad’s death in 632, his first successors — known in Islamic tradition as caliphs (khalifa: “successor/representative”) and called the “Rightly Guided” (rashidun) — launched a policy of repressing the secessionist impulses of the Bedouin tribes, who held that their agreements with the Muslims had lapsed on the Prophet’s death. Campaigns of expansion unexpectedly led to the formation of a vast empire stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia, partly exploiting the political weaknesses of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Under the Umayyad (661–750) and Abbasid (750–1258) caliphates, the political centre shifted to Damascus and Baghdad respectively. The Arabian Peninsula remained largely on the margins of the main political dynamics of the Islamic empires, but retained a central role above all on the religious and commercial plane. The cities of Mecca and Medina became fundamental poles of Islamic pilgrimage.

Coastal ports such as Suhar (Oman), Aden (Yemen) and Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) were involved in Indian Ocean trade, connecting East Africa, South Asia and the Gulf, while inland communication routes continued to favour trade, pilgrimage and tribal alliances. In several localities of the Hejaz, local dynasties settled, giving rise to small principalities, or emirates, while elsewhere autonomous tribal structures persisted.

In the 12th century, the Ayyubids of Egypt invaded Yemen, taking control of several local dynasties. The Rasulid sultanate was founded by the descendants of the Ayyubid emir ‘Alī ibn Rasūl and extended along the southern coast of Yemen as far as Dhofar in Oman, marking the most flourishing era of the area in Islamic history.

The destruction of Baghdad in 1258 and the killing of Sultan al-Musta‘sim by the Mongols brought about the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. By contrast, the defeat of the Mongols by the Egyptian armies conferred unprecedented prestige on the Mamluk sultans, who became the dominant power in the Hejaz during the 14th and 15th centuries.

At the beginning of the 16th century, having defeated the Mamluk armies, the Ottoman sultan Selim proclaimed the Hejaz and its holy cities part of the Ottoman domains. In those same years Portuguese ships reached the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, threatening to interrupt the spice trade from India to Europe and permanently damaging the region’s economy. Coastal Arabia gradually came into direct contact with other European maritime powers as well — the Netherlands, England and France — which, in the wake of the Portuguese, were launching their commercial expansion in the Indian Ocean.

In the 18th century, a religious reform movement emerged in the Najd led by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who advocated a return to a rigorous form of Islam. The alliance between this movement and the Al Sa‘ud family gave rise to a new political entity destined to play a decisive role in the following centuries. Despite the defeats suffered at the hands of the Ottomans, this alliance managed to consolidate its position over time.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Arabian Peninsula was drawn into European expansionist dynamics, in particular the British, which aimed to control strategic routes and areas. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War inaugurated a period of political reorganisation and centralisation of power: Yemen came under the control of Yaḥyā; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which encompassed much of the Peninsula, was proclaimed by Ibn Saud in 1932; the rest became a British protectorate.

The discovery of oil marked the last profound transformation. Over the course of the 20th century, energy resources made Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states key players in the global economy. Oil revenues fuelled rapid modernisation, leading to the construction of complex state apparatuses, infrastructure and education systems. At the same time, specific political and social models took hold in the newborn states, often based on a balance between tradition and innovation.