Archaeologists discover Al-Natah, in the Khaybar oasis of north-west Arabia

New archaeological analysis has revealed an distinctive Bronze Age city in the Khaybar oasis of north-west Saudi Arabia. The discovery by a group led by Dr Guillaume Charloux of the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project and Dr Munirah Almushawh from the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) confirms a significant transition from cell, nomadic life to settled, city life in the second half of the third millennium BCE.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, the new analysis supplies important proof to additional problem the image of cell pastoral-nomadism as the dominant financial and social approach of life of northwest Arabia in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.

Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saud, Governor of the Royal Commission for AlUla and Minister of Culture for Saudi Arabia, acknowledged: “This important archaeological discovery highlights the Kingdom’s global significance in the field of archaeology and confirms the depth of civilisation that the land holds. This discovery reinforces the Kingdom’s efforts in protecting cultural and historical heritage and emphasises the importance of exchanging knowledge and expertise with the world to enhance awareness of our shared human heritage.”

He added, “This discovery confirms the Kingdom’s commitment to preserving the world’s heritage and promoting cultural heritage in accordance with the provisions of Saudi Vision 2030. It also highlights the importance of strengthening international partnerships to present this rich legacy to future generations and the world.”

It additionally implies that oases equivalent to Khaybar have been fastidiously managed and extremely valued landscapes that, with the creation of agriculture, supported everlasting populations and should have been dynamic centres for regional exchanges and different interactions with the native cell communities. This nascent urbanism and rising social complexity had a profound influence on socio-economic organisation in the area.

While northwest Arabia in the Bronze Age was largely populated by pastoral cell teams, the area was additionally dotted with interconnected, monumental walled oases centred round small fortified settlements, equivalent to Tayma and Qurayyah.

Known as al-Natah, the newly found city in Khaybar is the first to offer clear proof for differentiated practical areas – notably residential and funerary – inside fortifications. Al-Natah was constructed round 2400-2000 BCE and endured till 1500-1300 BCE. The small city was house to some 500 folks in its 2.6 hectares and was protected by the 15-kilometre stone rampart that encircled the Khaybar oasis.

The new analysis was sponsored by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) and the French Agency for the Development of AlUla (AFALULA). The Archaeology, Collections and Conservation group at RCU is directing one of the world’s largest and most bold archaeological analysis programmes, fulfilling its purpose to broaden world consciousness of the AlUla area as a premier cultural heritage panorama and vacation spot.

The cultural heritage of north-west Arabia is wealthy, complicated and vital to Saudi Arabia and past. By commissioning and championing revelatory analysis on human exercise in the previous, equivalent to the mission that produced these new findings in Khaybar, RCU demonstrates its management in regional archaeological analysis and its accountable custodianship of cultural heritage belongings and panorama.

The Khaybar oasis is located at the edge of the Harrat Khaybar lava discipline and fashioned by the confluence of three wadis amid an in any other case largely arid space. At the northern outskirts of the oasis, al-Natah lay buried beneath piles of basalt boulders for millennia.

The analysis group recognized the al-Natah website in October 2020, although the constructions and its structure have been tough to discern. By February 2024 the group had employed discipline surveys, focused excavation, and high-resolution pictures to realize an understanding of what lay beneath. More in depth excavation in the future might sharpen the image.

Dr Charloux, from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), acknowledged: “Our discovery challenges the ancient model of north-west Arabia in the Bronze Age as a vast desert populated by groups of nomadic pastoralists. The discovery of the al-Natah site, dated to the late Early and Middle Bronze Ages, confirms that rural urbanism arose earlier than previously believed in this region. Directly accessible below the surface, al-Natah town represents almost a thousand years of use that for the first time makes it possible to consider the complexity of a sedentary settlement in a walled oasis during the Bronze Age.”

The findings by the RCU-AFALULA-CNRS group paint a preliminary image of what life was like for folks in al-Natah. They lived in dwellings maybe reminiscent of conventional Arabian tower homes, with the floor stage presumably used for storage, and the dwelling areas on one or two storeys above. They walked alongside slender streets to achieve the centre of city. They buried their lifeless in stepped tower tombs, grouped collectively to type a necropolis. In some tombs they paid tribute to a maybe ‘warrior’ class, by laying valuable items in these tombs – equivalent to ceramics, beads and metallic weapons, together with axes and daggers.

The folks wore beads, ready meals with mortar and pestle, and made and traded pottery, travelling the regional alternate community by donkey. They labored metals, grew cereals and raised animals – the native food plan was heavy on sheep and goat. They labored communally to bolster their rampart with dry-laid stones (no mortar) and uncooked earth.

The analysis group included two Saudis working for RCU, Dr Munirah Almushawh, a co-director of the mission, and Saifi Alshilali, a historian and a member of the local people in Khaybar.

The new findings add to a flurry of research which since 2018 have explored options of historic AlUla and Khaybar together with monumental ritual constructions often called mustatils, large-scale searching traps known as ‘desert kites’, long-distance ‘funerary avenues’ that linked settlements and pastures by pathways lined with tombs, and Neolithic dwellings often called ‘standing stone circles’.

Together the research present that the early societies of north-west Arabia have been extra complicated and related to the wider area than beforehand believed. During the coming autumn fieldwork season, RCU is supporting 10 archaeological tasks comprising greater than 100 archaeologists and related specialists in AlUla County and Khaybar.

The discovery furthers the emergence of AlUla and Saudi Arabia as world centres for archaeological analysis and intercultural dialogue. It follows the AlUla World Archaeology Symposium (AWAS 2024) which came about on Oct 30-31 and noticed an interdisciplinary group of archaeologists and cultural heritage practitioners from round the world to discover the theme “Moving forward: past, present and future in the archaeology and heritage of mobile communities”.