The Age of World Empires

Between Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achae-menid Empire in the late fourth century BC and the coming of Islam, the different sub-areas of the Arabian peninsula experienced highly variable interaction with the empires of later antiquity. In eastern Arabia, there are visible signs of contact with the post-Alexander Seleucid Empire, based in central Mesopotamia, and with the later Parthian and Sasanian Empires that originated in Iran. A small Seleucid garrison that has yielded Greek inscriptions and coins, imported Hellenistic pottery and figurines of Greek deities, was established on Failaka island. Similar sorts of finds are attested on Bahrain, particularly at Qalat al-Bahrain and in hundreds of burial mounds, while in the UAE and Oman the degree of Hellenistic influence is considerably less, amounting to a small quantity of imported pottery (e. g., the stamped handles from Rhodian wine amphorae) and a small number of coins. A local dynast named Abiel minted his own coins at the site of Mleiha, in the interior of Sharjah, where a sprawling settlement with private houses and monumental, mud brick graves, generally reminiscent of Palmyrene funerary towers in Syria, has been excavated. Large quantities of imported Parthian pottery, along with Characene coins from southern Iraq, Namord ware from southeastern Iran, Indian Red Polished Ware from the Indian subcontinent, and quantities of Roman glass, have been found in excavations at the large (c. 4 x 1 km2) site of ed-Dur, on the Persian Gulf coast north of Umm al-Qaiwain. Later occupational evidence in southeastern Arabia is scarce. Although a large settlement mound at Kush, in Ras al-Khaimah, has been excavated, as well as numerous graves around Samad in Oman, the last few centuries before the coming of Islam are poorly documented, perhaps because climatic conditions deteriorated and population declined.

Given the distance from Yemen to the rest of the Near East, south Arabia was rarely threatened by her neighbors and its later history is marked more by internal military strife than external threats. Although diplomatic relations are attested in the Assyrian period, and an alliance between the Hamdanid dynasty and the Axumites in Ethiopia is attested in the second century AD, the Roman expedition against Marib of 26/5 BC was the first foreign incursion into south Arabia. Increasingly, however, south Arabia was drawn into a web of international political competition between the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, in which Christianity, Judaism, and international trade all played a role. Archaeologically, the last few centuries before Islam are poorly known. The maj or site of Zafar, capital of Himyar, has never been excavated, and only cursory investigations have been undertaken at Najran, scene of an infamous massacre of Christians by Dhu Nawas, a Jewish ruler in south Arabia who came to power through a coup in 521-522 AD. The conquest of south Arabia by the Sasanians in 575 is archaeologically ‘invisible’.

The last great ‘civilization’ in pre-Islamic northwestern Arabia was that of the Nabataeans. Although normally associated with their capital Petra in southern Jordan, the Nabataeans exercised control much further south. Madain Salih, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, about 110 km southwest of Tayma, is a major site with rock-cut tombs and a large settlement mound. Smaller Nabataean sites are also known in the region.

See also: Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant; Mesolithic Cultures; Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Akkad; Paleolithic Cultures; Africa, North: Egypt, PrePharaonic; Animal Domestication; Asia, South: indus Civilization; Political Complexity, Rise of.