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The Arabian desert reveals long-hidden jewels
Until the twentieth century, Arabia was regarded as an arid land with abundant underground resources, criss-crossed since time immemorial by nomadic herdsmen. A seemingly timeless, sunbaked landscape, whose monotony was broken only by the odd lush oasis, such as AlUla or Khaybar, along with alignments of stones and enigmatic inscriptions. Remains that were undoubtedly intriguing, but not enough to warrant any excavation campaigns. At least, not at first sight.
In the last 25 years however, the region, long neglected by researchers, has become an archaeological Eldorado, and Saudi Arabia is gradually rediscovering part of its pre-Islamic past.
The initial impetus for this came in the late 1990s, as a result of increasingly close collaboration between French and Saudi academics. This was followed, in 2002, by the establishment of the first joint mission between the two countries under the authority of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Saudi Department of Antiquities. In 2017, fresh momentum was provided by the “Vision 2030” plan launched by the Saudi authorities, which included the promotion of the Saudi cultural and archaeological heritage as part of an ambitious tourism programme, showcased by the AlUla region, with its iconic oasis.
France was invited to take part in the venture, which resulted in the creation of the French Agency for Alula Development (AFALULA) in 2018. Its substantial budget (€60 million for 2024) enabled it to commission several CNRS teams to work with their Saudi counterparts, leading to an increasing number of discoveries and a transformation of the region's image, long described as isolated.
Defending the interests of archaeology
A central figure in French archaeology in Saudi Arabia, Laïla Nehmé, an archaeologist at the Orient et Méditerranée laboratory1, has been carrying out research in the AlUla region since 2002, particularly with the French-Saudi mission she heads.
Nehmé explains that she was able to gain respect in a country where women are traditionally treated as minors by establishing bonds of trust from the outset with her colleagues in Saudi Arabia, while the fact that she speaks fluent Arabic (her father is Lebanese) undoubtedly helped. Her strong personality did the rest.
"I have a simple principle: I defend the interests of archaeology first and foremost, without any preconceived ideas, in the interests of both France and Saudi Arabia. This has enabled me to build frank and friendly relations in this country," she says. "We have shared so many things: the same table, the same scientific concerns, and even the same sandstorms!"
She emphasises that her independence as a researcher has always been respected. "In over 20 years of work, I have never been subject to censorship." However, she regrets the intrusive presence of certain private archaeological organisations.
"It's not a question of refusing competition," the archaeologist insists. "The problem is that these private companies don't share our views about the accessibility of data and reports, for the simple reason that, as the Americans say, 'data is money'. This calls into question an essential principle of research, namely, working in the public interest and quickly making the resulting data available to society as a whole."
Hegra, Petra's little sister
Nehmé is a specialist in the Nabataeans, a people who first appeared during the second half of the first millennium BC. These caravan traders specialised in the long-distance trade of the most sought-after products of the time: frankincense, myrrh, and spices. They controlled their transport from Arabia Felix (“fertile Arabia”, now Yemen) to the port of Gaza, on the Mediterranean.
From the fourth century BC until the beginning of the second century AD, their kingdom was independent. Its capital, Petra, now in Jordan, is a testament to its wealth. Hegra, located in an oasis some twenty kilometres north of AlUla, is its little sister. The site, known in Arabic as al-Hijr (or Mada'in Salih) boasts around a hundred tombs carved into the rock. Pilasters with capitals and intricate mouldings adorn their majestic monumental façades.
The excavations co-directed by Nehmé have shed new light on Hegra in a number of ways. We now know how the Nabataeans carved their magnificent tombs in the rock – from the top downwards – as well as the tools they used, and also what their funeral rites were. In addition, we have a better understanding of their day-to-day lives, the extraordinarily elaborate water network they set up (with its 130 wells up to 7 metres in diameter), as well as the residential area covering some fifty hectares, mainly built of mud bricks. "The layout is very different from anything found in the Greek or Roman world, characterised by right-angles. Here, the streets are curved. It's an obviously more Eastern style of town planning," the researcher explains.
The origins of the Arabic language
As well as being an archaeologist, Nehmé is also an epigraphist. For the past fifteen years, she has been documenting inscriptions in Nabataean characters found in the region. Her research has shown that this alphabetic script of 22 consonants is undoubtedly the ancestor of written Arabic.
After identifying and analysing some 250 inscriptions, Nehmé was able to demonstrate how the Nabataean script underwent a transition to Arabic between the third and sixth centuries AD. All that remained to explain was why this happened.
The archaeologist's hypothesis is a compelling one: "From the third century AD onwards, the Romans began to withdraw from Arabia. However, the Arab tribes, who now controlled vast territories, needed to communicate in writing. To do this, they chose the Nabataean script, which they held in high esteem because it originated in a kingdom that had remained independent and powerful for several centuries." The fascination exerted by Hegra should not, however, blind us to the fact that other major kingdoms successively ruled in these regions of north-west Arabia.
Dadan, a monotheistic kingdom
One of them was the kingdom of Dadan, located 20 kilometres to the south, in the heart of the AlUla oasis. Its prominence in the seventh and sixth centuries BC earned it mention in several books of the Bible. Since 2019, the archaeologist Jérôme Rohmer, also from the Orient et Méditerranée laboratory, has been leading the Dadan Archaeological Project alongside his Saudi colleague Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani, from the Royal Commission for AlUla.
"We had evidence about the history of Dadan," Rohmer says. "We knew that from the fifth to the first century BC it was under the control of a regional tribal kingdom, the kingdom of Lihyan. It was then annexed by the Nabataeans. But, before and after that, there were lots of gaps in our knowledge."
Camels victims of a dietary taboo
One of the major revelations concerns late Antiquity, just before the Islamic period. "Around 250 AD, occupation of the site suddenly ceased," the scientist points out. "We were wondering what this abrupt interruption meant. But then things became clear: we discovered that the inhabitants had moved to a new village, one kilometre south of the original site."
And that wasn’t all. A few clues provided the researchers with some more information about the people who lived there. "In a building in the village, we identified rubbish dumps comprising, among other things, food remains. These contained bones of caprine animals (goats, sheep and chamois - Editor's Note), but no camelids (the family that includes camels, dromedaries and llamas - Editor's Note). However, we knew that, in earlier times, the latter had been an important part of the diet of Dadan's inhabitants," the archaeologist stresses. "It would therefore appear that camels were the victims of a dietary taboo. In Judaism, camelids are considered unclean, because they are ruminants that don't have cloven hooves. Some Christians in the Middle East shared this aversion. This means that we can, at the very least, hypothesise that the inhabitants of this village were monotheists."
Rohmer is outwardly enthusiastic: "We're beginning to understand the 3500-year-old history of this site, all the way from the Bronze Age to the advent of Islam!"
Khaybar and Tayma, fortified oases from the Bronze Age
Like Hegra and Dadan, Khaybar is located in the middle of an oasis, 200 kilometres south of AlUla. The region is home to around ten major oases. Several recent excavations suggest that these environments were hotbeds of innovation.
Guillaume Charloux, another researcher at the Orient et Méditerranée laboratory, has been leading the Oasis de l'Arabie déserte (“Oases of the Arabian desert”) project since 2010. Together with Rémy Crassard, Deputy Director of the Archéorient laboratory2, and Munirah AlMushwah, of the Royal Commission for AlUla, he jointly directs excavations at the Khaybar oasis and its surrounding area.
For Charloux, oases are not only a scientific subject, but also an opportunity to contemplate a breathtakingly beautiful landscape, with its contrasting colours "between the brownish, and sometimes bluish colours of basalt, and, next to it, palm trees that are incredibly green, almost fluorescent at certain times of day".
The birth of cities and the end of a myth
In 2024, excavations at the Khaybar oasis yielded their share of surprises. Charloux and his colleagues unearthed a 14.5-kilometre-long rampart encircling part of the oasis. Inside, they found a fortified village covering 1.5 hectares, dated to between 2400 and 1500 BC, i.e. during the Bronze Age. Not quite yet a city, but not far off.
"There wasn't yet any writing or government," the archaeologist says, "but we can see the emergence of social stratification and signs of complex spatial organisation. This was the beginning of a process known as ‘low urbanisation’, in other words, slow or low-intensity urban development." In fact, in another oasis, Tayma, a vast Bronze Age fortification had already been identified by a German team working there since 2004.
Charloux is convinced that Tayma and Khaybar are not isolated cases: "I believe that as early as the third millennium BC there was a general pattern of fortified, interconnected oases moving towards urbanisation."
An increasingly arid climate
Climate fluctuations also played a role in the development of the oases. After thousands of years characterised by relatively humid conditions during which the desert somewhat resembled a wooded steppe, temperatures started to rise and the weather pattern became increasingly arid. "The effects of this warming started to make themselves felt between 6000 and 4000 BC," Charloux explains. “So, it was necessary to adapt."
All these discoveries have shattered a long-held historical myth, that of a pioneering incense trade route that was thought to have revitalised a long-isolated region. In fact, it had all started much earlier. "Long before then, very old trans-Arabian routes connected the whole region. The desert has never been the impassable barrier that it is sometimes described as," the scientist concludes.
Hunting gazelles in the Neolithic
As an archaeologist, Crassard has been conducting excavations in Saudi Arabia since 2010. Within the framework of the international Globalkites project, he has been focusing on the enigmatic lines of stones that, seen from the air, are reminiscent of kites (which is why they are referred to as “desert kites”), with very long walls converging on geometric enclosures covering several hectares. These enclosures are lined with small cells a few metres in diameter.
While no-one knew the purpose of the desert kites until recently, it was these cells that provided the researchers with the key to the mystery. "At first, we couldn't tell how deep they were, as they were filled with sediment. In fact, they were pits," Crassard says. "The whole structure acted as a huge trap."
The discovery in the region of layers filled with bones shows that the target was gazelles. But just who built these ingenious death traps? And how old are they? Dating showed that they were much older than anyone had imagined, with, astonishingly, some of them going back as far as 7000 BC, in other words right in the middle of the Neolithic period.
Precision-planned traps
From then on, one discovery followed another, each more fascinating than the last. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Crassard and his colleague Wael Abu-Azizeh came across plans showing scale engravings of desert kites, making them the oldest plans drawn to scale ever discovered. They also unearthed dwellings linked to the users of the kites, which could also have had ritual significance, as shown by an astonishing anthropomorphic stele at the site of Khashabiyeh, in Jordan, for example.
No one expected to find a human group specialising in gazelle hunting in the Neolithic Age, at a time when the other populations of the Middle East had turned to agriculture and animal husbandry. "The conventional view of that period is based on what we see in the Fertile Crescent," Crassard points out. "However, as is demonstrated by the gazelle hunters of the Khaybar region, the Neolithic Revolution may have come about in different ways, sometimes independently, as was probably the case in the Arabian Peninsula."
This series of discoveries is challenging long-standing assumptions, revealing an Arabian peninsula far removed from its commonly held image. In fact, for thousands of years, north-west Arabia has never ceased to be a transit route rather than the isolated region it was once thought to be, which explains the abundance of archaeological remains.
Unrestricted collaboration
This productive collaboration between CNRS researchers and their Saudi counterparts is set to continue in the years to come. "We share our methods, our knowledge and our experience with our Saudi colleagues," says Charloux. "We do this without any restrictions, and Saudi archaeology is already operating in the field to the highest standards."
Crassard is just as enthusiastic: "There is so much to do here, so many places that haven't yet been explored, such as cavities. We know that the best preserved prehistoric settlements are found in caves, and these are present in the Arabian Peninsula. But so far hardly any of them have been excavated. The archaeological potential of this whole region is immense." ♦
See also
Breathing life back into Antiquity
A glimpse of everyday life in the Neolithic
Camels emerge from the dusts of oblivion (slideshow)
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