A 4,400-year-old settlement uncovered by archaeologists has provided remarkable insights into the pace of urbanisation on the Arabian Peninsula during the Bronze Age.
A recent study indicates that urban development in this region advanced at a slower pace than in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant during the same period, though it was not entirely absent.
In a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by archaeologist Guillaume Charloux, present findings from their study of a small, fortified Bronze Age town known as al-Natah, located near Al-‘Ula in Saudi Arabia’s Hejaz region.
Occupied from approximately 2400–1500 BC, al-Natah spanned an area of around 1.5 hectares, featuring a central district and a nearby residential section enclosed by walls.
Researchers describe how the houses followed a standard layout and were connected by narrow streets in the Khaybar Oasis of north-western Saudi Arabia.
Nearby, a cluster of graves forms a necropolis, with burial practices suggesting a degree of “social stratification,” according to Charloux and his team in the open-access journal.
It is estimated that the town was home to roughly 500 residents.
The design of al-Natah resembles other Bronze Age sites in northern Arabia, though these settlements were generally smaller and less “sociopolitically complex” than their contemporaries in the Levant and Mesopotamia, the study’s authors observed.
“For the first time in north-western Arabia, a small Bronze Age town connected to a vast network of ramparts has been discovered by archaeologists, raising questions about the early development of local urbanism,” wrote the researchers.
The findings suggest that this region was largely dominated by nomadic groups at the time and was “dotted” with walled oases like al-Natah, which points to a “slow” path to urbanisation relative to other areas.
The authors wrote: “By comparison with neighbouring oasis centres, we suggest that north-western Arabia during the Bronze Age—largely dominated by pastoral nomadic groups and already integrated into long-distance trade networks—was dotted with interconnected monumental walled oases centred around small fortified towns.
“And by comparison with the contemporary situation in the Southern Levant, we also envisage that the archaeological record bears witness to a ‘low urbanisation’ (or ‘slow urbanism’), indigenous to North Arabia, evidencing weak but increasing social complexity through the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.”
