The late second millennium BC is now seen by many as the formative period in both northwestern and southern Arabia, leading directly to the emergence of state-level societies in Yemen during the Iron Age and major tribal confederations (e. g., the Midianites) in the Hejaz that interacted on a variety of levels with the peoples of Syro-Palestine and Egypt.
On the Tihama coast (Red Sea) and around the southwestern tip of Arabia toward Abyan, to the east of Aden, a unified, Late Bronze culture known as the ‘Sabr’ culture (after the type site of the same name, c. 20 km north of Aden) shows clear links in ceramic shapes and punctate or combed decoration with African material, particularly at pre-Aksumite sites in Ethiopia and Eritrea, from which the Yemeni coast is separated only by the narrow Bab al-Mandab, and on sites of the Pan Grave culture in Nubia. Less oriented toward the highlands of Yemen than toward the Red Sea, the Sabr culture represents an important phase of development prior to the rise of Saba in the early first millennium BC. The trajectory that led in the direction of the ‘classical’ south Arabian states (Awsan, Saba, Ma’in, Qataban, and Himyar) is, however, apparent in the highlands at Yala and Hajar Bin Humeid, where calibrated C-14 dates push the beginnings of settlements utilizing irrigation agriculture and making ceramics which prefigure later south Arabian material, back to the twelfth century BC. Some scholars have pointed to early occuation at Raybun and Shabwa in the Wadi Hadramawt which appears not merely pre-Sabaean but noon-Sabaean, evincing links, to judge by the ceramics, with the southern Levant. Such links are long suspected by linguists who point to a probable common ancestry for the Phoenician and the south Arabian alphabet and similarities between alphabetic Ugaritic and the south Semitic alphabet and letter order. These clues, along with ceramic parallels, have convinced researchers that an important stimulus leading to the appearance of classical south Arabian civilization derived from overland contacts along what would become the western ‘incense’ route leading from Gaza in Palestine to Marib in Saba.
Certainly at the time proposed for such links, northwestern Arabia was inhabited, but there has been no excavation at key sites such as Qurayyah, east of the Gulf of Aqaba in northwesternmost Saudi Arabia, where the visible remains of fortifications, a citadel, agricultural fields, ceramic production area, and an associated settlement are known only from brief surface investigations. Both Late Bronze Age Aegean and Egyptian parallels, and with ‘Midi-anite’ wares from the copper-smelting site of Timna near Aqaba, suggest nevertheless that a date in the thirteenth-twelfth centuries BC is highly probable. Relations with Egypt and Israel, attested to in written sources, will unfortunately remain invisible from an archaeological perspective until excavations are undertaken at Qurayyah and other sites in the region.
Turning to the east, by the Late Bronze Age, Bahrain had come under the control of the Kassite dynasty in southern Mesopotamia. Archaeologically, this is manifested by a fundamental change in the ceramic repertoire, as classic Kassite shapes replace those of the Barbar-Dilmunite tradition. Several dozen cuneiform texts found in the reused palatial building on Qalat al-Bahrain, surely the seat of provincial administration at this time, attest to the use of writing for local recording purposes by Kassite officials, but, apart from this, writing seems not to have become more widespread in the local community. Failaka, too, was well within the Kassite sphere of influence, and the settlement there, consisting of densely packed, multiroomed houses built of locally available beach rock (Arabic farush), shows the same predominance of Kassite ceramic forms as Bahrain.
Southeastern Arabia, on the other hand, remained beyond Kassite control. At the end of the Late Bronze Age, local ceramic forms and fabrics find few parallels outside the region and with the exception of a small number of sherds resembling Elamite material from southwestern Iran, as well as one manifestly Elamite cylinder seal of faience from Tell Abraq, evidence of ties to other regions is lacking.
World History
