The discovery of a 4000 year old fortified town, hidden in an oasis in the contemporary Saudi Arabia reveals how life at that time slowly changed from a nomadic to an urban existence, archaeologists said Wednesday.
The remains of the city, called al-Natah, were long hidden behind the walled oasis of Khaybar, a green and fertile speck surrounded by desert in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula.
An ancient 14.5 kilometer long wall was subsequently discovered at the site, according to research led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charloux and published earlier this year.
For a new study published in the journal PLOS One, a French-Saudi team of researchers “has provided evidence that these ramparts are organized around a habitat,” Charloux told AFP.
The large city, which had a population of up to 500, was built around 2400 BC during the Early Bronze Age, the researchers said.
About a thousand years later it was abandoned. “Nobody knows why,” Charloux said.
When al-Natah was built, cities were flourishing in the Levant region along the Mediterranean Sea, from modern-day Syria to Jordan.
Northwestern Arabia was thought at the time to be an arid desert, crossed by pastoral nomads and dotted with cemeteries.
That was until 15 years ago, when archaeologists discovered ramparts dating back to the Bronze Age at the oasis of Tayma, north of Khaybar.
This “first essential discovery” led scientists to take a closer look at these oases, Charloux said.
“Slow urbanism”
Black volcanic rocks called basalt hid al-Natah’s walls so well that it “protected the site from illegal excavations,” Charloux said.
But observing the site from above revealed possible paths and the foundations of houses, indicating where the archaeologists should dig.
They discovered foundations that were “strong enough to easily support houses of at least one or two stories,” Charloux said, stressing that much more work needed to be done to understand the site.
But their preliminary findings paint a picture of a 2.6-hectare town with about 50 houses on a hill, equipped with its own wall.
Graves in a necropolis contained metal weapons such as axes and daggers, as well as stones such as agate, which indicated a relatively advanced society from so long ago.
Pieces of pottery “suggest a relatively egalitarian society,” the study said. It is “very beautiful but very simple ceramics,” says Charloux.
The size of the ramparts – which could reach a height of about five meters – suggests that al-Natah was the seat of some kind of powerful local government.
These discoveries reveal a process of “slow urbanization” during the transition between nomadic and more settled village life, the study said.
For example, fortified oases may have been in contact with each other in an area still largely populated by pastoral nomadic groups. Such exchanges could even have laid the foundation for the ‘frankincense route’, in which spices, frankincense and myrrh were traded from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean.
Al-Natah at that time was still small compared to cities in Mesopotamia or Egypt.
But in these vast desert areas, it appears that there was “a different path to urbanization” than such city-states, one “more modest, much slower and quite specific to northwestern Arabia,” Charloux said.