The struggle for Saudi Arabia’s buried past

Follow the road north from Medina, over rose-pink peaks and through villages called Magattyah and Al-Abraq, and you’ll spot it eventually. There it is: carved from a gigantic slab of sandstone, its columns poised like they’d been chiselled yesterday, its grand doorway like it’s faced the sand forever. And in a sense – it has. This, after all, is Qasr Al-Farid, an unfinished Nabatean tomb built around the first century. One of several ancient sites, scattered across a barren stretch of west Arabian desert, this is a burial place that symbolises the peninsula’s deep history.

Buoyed by a liberalising political climate, and an eagerness to welcome tourists and their cash, Qasar Al-Farid and ruins like it have become icons of a new Saudi Arabia. Alongside the tour groups, moreover, archaeologists are coming too, their digs revealing much about the fascinating variety of ancient Arabian life. Yet if that’s shadowed by related work across the peninsula, dethroning old myths about the region’s pre-Islamic past, how secure this bounty truly is remains unclear. For if politics has carried Qasr Al-Farid to global prominence, politics can change, and past experience suggests that local rulers shouldn’t necessarily be trusted to protect their heritage.

It’s tempting to think of ancient Arabia as a David Lean fantasy: tents and swordsmen and camels wobbling through the desert. But imagine you’d taken a tour through the region around the time of Christ – what would you actually have seen? Some lonely nomadism certainly existed, especially in the uplands around modern Riyadh. Beyond that, though, you’d likely have been struck by the peninsula’s worldliness. Travelling southeast from Jerusalem, you’d first have encountered the Nabateans. Theirs was a society of traders, who survived the desert heat by storing rainwater in cisterns and pipes. That dovetailed with a special type of waterproof cement – so durable it survives today. And if, to quote one Roman writer, they made their wealth carrying ‘the most valuable kinds of spices’ from inland to the Mediterranean, the Nabateans borrowed from their neighbours in return. That’s obvious enough at Qasr Al-Farid, and also at Petra in Jordan, with their Hellenistic pediments and capitals.

The Nabateans are perhaps Arabia’s most famous pre-Islamic group. But there are others. If, for instance, you’d left Qasr Al-Farid and journeyed south, past the rocky Red Sea coast, you’d soon have encountered groups such as the Sabeans. Making their home in the green hills to the south of the peninsula, and speaking a distinct family of Semitic languages, these peoples grew plump from frankincense and myrrh. They were also consummate builders. Consider, for instance, the Mar’ib Dam. An engineering wonder already centuries old by the time of our tour, it was about 550 metres long and irrigated thousands of acres of land. First-century visitors would also have been impressed further east. Like the Nabateans, the inhabitants of the later Gulf States were keen cosmopolitans. They sold incense to Greece – the poet Nicander praised it as an antidote to poison – and traded across the sea to India.

Your tour would have been religiously diverse too. Bordering the Roman Empire, the Nabateans embraced foreign deities, particularly the Egyptian goddess Isis. New arrivals slotted amiably into the region’s native polytheism. At Palmyra, the local god was called Yarhibol, associated with the spring that gave the oasis life. Elsewhere, people worshipped deities named Kahl and Manat, while other communities preferred local guardian spirits. Rituals involved everything from camels to metal to milk. Cult sites encompassed sacred palm groves and stone circles – and the Kaaba before the arrival of Islam.

Avoiding drought was one unsurprising focus of worship, but emotional torment also featured. In some places, mourners seemingly drank water mixed with dust from a relative’s grave, desperately hoping it could soften their pain. And though several pagan customs survived late enough to be referenced in the Quran, which describes how one tribe made decisions based on the movement of birds, the centuries before Muhammad also saw the tentative rise of monotheism. By 400, the Himyarites of Yemen had possibly adopted a form of Judaism. Further north, closer to the Levant, the ‘Saracens’ looked to Jesus. As one sixth-century monk gleefully recalled, the former ‘wolves of Arabia’ were converted to sheep in the Christian flock.

Historians have surveyed all this with awe. Writing in 1927, the splendidly named De Lacy O’Leary stressed that ‘Islam had its cradle in a district where civilisation of an advanced type had percolated from remote ages’. All the same, academics have generally struggled to evoke the sheer complexity of ancient Arabia. Introducing his own narrative history of the region, published in 2001, Robert Hoyland said he could only recall two previous examples by Western scholars – and one was O’Leary’s survey, written back when much of the peninsula was still under British rule. And if scholarship has doubtless advanced since then, there are areas where academics long remained like mice in a sandstorm. About the role of Aksumite Ethiopians in Yemen, for instance, we know fairly little. Evidence from western Arabia has traditionally been sparse too, frustrating given the region birthed Muhammad and his faith.

How can these difficulties be explained? One reason is the lack of sources. With some exceptions – Nabatean tomb carvings, monumental inscriptions further south – the only writing we have from ancient Arabians are short scribbles, painstakingly scratched onto rocks or cliffs. In their way, these are intensely evocative. ‘He was very love-sick for a maiden and had joyous sex with her,’ says one. The problem, though, is that these carvings are by their nature terse. That, in turn, has forced historians to borrow the accounts of outsiders, foreigners who characterised Arabians as mindless barbarians. ‘They left Israel nothing to live on, not a sheep an ox or a donkey,’ laments the Old Testament. Assyrians and Persians were scathing in their turn, a disdain shared by their Christian successors. ‘They practise no craft, trade, or agriculture at all,’ said one monastic account of the fifth century or sixth century, ‘but use the dagger alone as their means of subsistence.’

Though drawn to the richness of its oral poetry, and its lively culture of hospitality, early Muslims assailed the world of their grandparents too. ‘For the unbelievers had planted in their hearts a zealotry,’ says the Quran, ‘the zealotry of lawlessness.’ These ideas, which characterised the Arabs as rampaging pagans, can be summarised in a single word: jahiliyya. Roughly translated as the ‘age of ignorance’ – and leavened by its focus on unconfirmed practices like female infanticide – it has enjoyed a long polemical afterlife across the Muslim world. As the thirteenth-century theologian Ibn Taymiyya explained, for instance, the Mongol khans were guilty of jahiliyya despite nominally converting, while the term has proved equally popular among modern Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb.

Especially in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, these attitudes have been an archaeological disaster. In 1994, a council of local clerics issued an edict arguing that preserving historical sites could lead to polytheism and idolatry, both capital offences in the kingdom. Fifteen years later, one prominent imam said that any non-Muslim archaeological discoveries are best left underground, an approach often extended to active vandalism by the Saudis themselves. According to the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, over 98 per cent of the nation’s historical and religious sites have been destroyed since 1985. And if the diggers have been happy targeting symbols of non-Wahhabist Islam – Mecca’s eighteenth century Ottoman castle was flattened in 2002 – about 150 important pre-Muslim sites have vanished too. Even where heritage wasn’t trashed, it was neglected. In the 1970s, the area around Qasr Al-Farid was subject to an official fatwa warning Muslims not to visit. Nearby roads were lined with billboards urging people to discover Islam instead.

To be fair, neighbouring countries took a more relaxed approach here: Qatar and Bahrain have welcomed curious archaeologists for decades. But between the isolation of desert sites, and the scholarly preoccupation with Egypt and Mesopotamia, to say nothing of roiling instability from Sana’a to Syria, many of Arabia’s ancient marvels have remained unexplored. That has obliged scholars to instead lean on literary sources. These, of course, are the very sources that dismiss the pre-Muslim centuries as an age of ignorance – and which suggest Islam appeared fully-formed, dramatically overwhelming all that came before.

‘Our people,’ proclaimed Mohammed bin Salman in 2021, ‘will amaze the world again.’ That again perhaps says more than he intended. For amid the radical social reforms, and the gleaming new cities in the sand, MBS equally hopes to unveil his country’s deep heritage. His ambition is obvious financially: Al-Ula, a vast ancient site encompassing Qasr Al-Farid, is set to receive investments worth $20bn. That’s echoed by academic conferences, and research centres, and a scheme encouraging young Saudis to become archaeologists. There’s even a movie, replete with soaring drone footage, and narrated by Jeremy Irons at his most august.

This bubbling activity can be understood in two ways. The first is economic. With oil no longer a sure bet, the government is rushing to divest. Yet if Qasr Al-Farid, and places like it, will hopefully bring 150 million tourists to the kingdom by 2030, MBS is enthusiastic about his country’s past for political reasons too. Keen to distinguish his rule from his Wahhabi forebears, and crush the power of conservative clerics, pre-Islamic ruins are vivid symbols of the new Saudi Arabia. Over recent years, senior government officials have sometimes made these connections explicit. As the then CEO of the Royal Commission for Al-Ula explained in January 2022: “The more we learn about the ancient inhabitants of northwestern Arabia, the more we are inspired by the way our mission reflects their mindset.”

That official has since been arrested for corruption – but these shifts have nonetheless conjured an archaeological storm. There are a bewildering number of examples here, each offering tantalising clues about the people who once called Arabia home. At Al-Ula alone, researchers are finding tens of thousands of artefacts a year, from tiny mother-of-pearl pendants to grand statues of broad-shouldered kings. Other findings are just as intriguing, notably a set of Nabatean graves aligned to the rising and setting of the sun and moon. Archeologists elsewhere in the kingdom have had their own successes. At Al-Abla, not far from the frontier with Yemen, they’ve found gypsum-lined channels used to catch rainwater. In the Empty Quarter, the unsettled wasteland south of the capital, they’ve found remains of a stone temple. This geographical spread is matched chronologically. Al-Abla remained an important mining centre after the coming of Islam, whereas a recently uncovered stone monument at Al-Ula might date to the Neolithic.

Beyond the innate value of such research, it could soon help experts answer fundamental questions about how Arabia developed – something arguably happening already. Relying on a new batch of inscriptions, scattered around Mecca and Medina, the philologist Ahmad Al-Jallad has convincingly argued that worship in late antique Arabia is even more fine-drawn than the tripartite division of pagans, Christians and Jews. Rather, Al-Jallad claims, some pagans were cautiously adopting obscure forms of monotheism (carvings reference ‘Alh’ and ‘Lh’) before they ever embraced the Allah of Islam.

Other discoveries, beyond the kingdom’s borders, are dismantling jahiliyya myths too. In the United Arab Emirates, a team of archaeologists hunting for a mosque or fort instead stumbled upon an ancient monastery. Occupied until the mid-eighth century, it suggests that the two great monotheisms coexisted long after Muhammad’s revelation. The scale of the site, complete with a church and refectory, equally hints at its role as a centre of Christian learning, possibly rivalling more established places elsewhere in the Middle East. Nor is Arabian religion the only field to be transformed here. At a remote site near Al-Mandaq, about 230 miles south of Jeddah, recently unearthed inscriptions show that Arabic calligraphy was partly shaped by Middle Persian, with Nabatean adding its own flavour too.

Together with more practical developments – the Saudi National Antiquities Register lately announced it was adding 70 sites to its roster – these findings could have immense consequences for our understanding of the region. Particularly around the birth of Islam, that’s bound to be controversial, not least when the evidence points to a far more sophisticated cultural wellspring than the jahiliyya stereotypes imply, and indeed one Muslims haphazardly sipped from. As in other areas, MBS’s megalomaniacal brand of autocracy makes public criticism of his regime hard to find. But there are signs that conservative Saudis are deeply uneasy about how the Crown Prince has hawked their nation’s past. Last year, to give one example, a prominent cleric was forced to flee abroad after accusing MBS of ‘replacing’ his country’s Muslim identity. On the relative safety of the internet, you’ll notice similar sentiments from regular Saudis. ‘What’s happening at Al-Ula is very dangerous,’ wrote one in 2022. ‘I believe that jahiliyya has returned to the Arabian Peninsula.’ Quoting the Prophet, another agreed. ‘O Turner of hearts,’ he said, ‘keep my heart firm upon Your religion!’

MBS’s political dominance aside, in short, regime change in Riyadh could threaten icons such as Qasr Al-Farid. Nor should we necessarily be confident in the Crown Prince’s own agenda. If, after all, we take history as a guide, his fellow Sauds have proved consummate wreckers for literally centuries. And while Mohammed bin Salman is surely not a Wahhabist, he may yet be tempted to call out the bulldozers. Recall, for instance, that the Ottoman fortress in Mecca was demolished partly for ideological reasons – but also because the land was needed for a $15bn hotel complex. Remarkably, MBS’s landmark Neom project already seems to be putting profit before patrimony. As experts at the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa group have warned, archaeological surveys of the planned city have been minimal, even though the area could conceal monuments spanning thousands of years.

MBS hasn’t shown much regard for heritage elsewhere either. During their long bombing campaign in Yemen – an action supported by the Crown Prince – Saudi warplanes razed several ancient sites. Not even the Mar’ib Dam was spared: an airstrike in 2015 left a yawning gap where bricks should be. More to the point, some of this destruction looks deliberate, resulting in what one scholar calls the ‘erasure’ of Yemen’s cultural identity. Combined with the iconoclasm so favoured by jihadi extremists, and the future of southern Arabia’s extraordinary history looks bleak. No wonder UNESCO last year put the Sabean ruins at Mar’ib on its List of World Heritage in Danger. For the moment, as the tourists rumble in, Qasr Al-Farid looks safe from such a fate. But the great tomb has seen much over its 20 centuries, and the next could yet bring more trouble.