Discover a 4,000-year-old fortified city hidden in a modern oasis Saudi Arabia Archaeologists said Wednesday that their findings show that life at the time was slowly changing from nomadic to urban life.
The ruins of this town, called al-Nata, were long hidden by the walled oasis of Khybar, a lush, fertile point surrounded by desert in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula.
A 14.5-kilometer-long ancient wall was subsequently discovered at the site, according to a study led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charroux published earlier this year.
In a new study published in the journal PLOS One, a French and Saudi research team provided “evidence that these walls are organized around habitats,” Charroux told AFP.
The large town, home to up to 500 people, was founded in the early Bronze Age around 2400 BC, according to researchers.
Charloux et al., 2024, PLOS One
It was abandoned after about a thousand years. “No one knows why,” Charroux said.
When Al-Nata was founded, cities were flourishing in the Levant, along the Mediterranean Sea from present-day Syria to Jordan.
At the time, northwestern Arabia was thought to be a barren desert, populated by pastoral nomads and dotted with burial grounds.
That was until 15 years ago, when archaeologists discovered walls dating back to the Bronze Age in the Taima oasis north of Khyber.
This “first important discovery” prompted scientists to take a closer look at these oases, Charroux said.
“Slow urbanism”
A black volcanic rock called basalt successfully concealed the walls of Al Nataa, “protecting the site from illegal excavations,” Charroux said.
But observing the site from above revealed potential trails and house foundations, suggesting where archaeologists needed to dig.
Charroux said they had found a foundation “strong enough to easily support at least a one- or two-story house,” and that there was still much work to be done to understand the site. emphasized.
But their preliminary findings paint a picture of a 2.6-hectare town with about 50 houses perched on a hill and its own walls.
Tombs within the necropolis contain metal weapons such as axes and daggers, as well as stones such as agates, indicating a relatively advanced society in the distant past.
The study said the pottery shards “suggest a relatively egalitarian society.” These are “very pretty, but very simple pieces of pottery,” Charroux added.
The size of the walls, which can reach around 5 meters (16 feet) in height, suggests that al-Nata was the seat of some powerful municipality.
These findings reveal a process of “slow urbanization” during the transition period between nomadic life and more settled village life, the study says.
For example, in areas still dominated by nomadic groups, fortified oases may have been in contact with each other. Such exchanges may even have laid the foundations for the “incense route” in which spices, frankincense, and myrrh were traded from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean.
Al-Nata was still small compared to the cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt at the time.
But these vast deserts seem to have had “another path to urbanization” than such city-states, one that was “more modest, much slower, and very specific to northwestern Arabia.” It was something,” Charroux said.
