The rebirth of AlUla

It was among the “vast mountainous labyrinthine solitude of rainless valleys” of the Sinai that the 19th-century British explorer Charles Montagu Doughty first saw them.

Written in a long-dead language, the mysterious and “often strangely scribbled” inscriptions on the “sand-wind burnished rocks and stones” meant nothing to him.

Doughty, a poet, fancied he might be gazing upon “the names ... and salutations of ancient wayfarers.” As archaeologists would demonstrate decades after his death, he was absolutely right.

He had found the marks of the Nabataeans, a people lost in the mists of antiquity, carved into the rocks more than 2,000 years earlier as they had travelled the trading routes of the ancient world.

Petra in modern-day Jordan, the “rose-red city half as old as time” as it would be immortalized by a British poet in 1845, was already well known in the West, having been “discovered” in 1812 by Johann Burckhardt, a Swiss traveler.

But in 1877, in the shadow of the Hijaz Mountains Doughty was to stumble upon a lost city of the dead, rich with rock-carved tombs and monuments, wholly unknown in the West.

In his book “Travels in Arabia Deserta,” published in 1888, Doughty recalled that at the settlement of Ma’an, some 30 km southeast of Petra, he heard of “other Petra-like sculptured cliff-monuments, bearing many inscriptions,” at a distant place called Mada’in Salih.

This, he learnt, was a lonely water-station “of the Damascus yearly pilgrims’ caravan, in their long desert way to Madinah and Makkah; lying some few days’ journey southward from Ma’an, but difficult to be reached, at other times, for danger of the wild Bedouins.”

Undeterred, Doughty “resolved to accept the hazard” of visiting the monuments at Mada’in Salih. For protection, he joined “the great Damascus caravan,” travelling in the company of the faithful, bound south along the old pilgrim trail for Makkah and finally arrived at Mada’in Salih “after three weeks’ tedious riding."

There, Doughty discovered evidence of a settlement that had clearly thrived in antiquity, but which had been all but swallowed by time and sand – the ancient city of Hegra. Like Petra, it had been built by the Nabataeans, a people who, from about the fourth century B.C. until the Roman invasion of Arabia in A.D. 106, had controlled the profitable trade routes that crossed the Arabian Peninsula from east to west and north to south, creating a vast desert kingdom.

Surrounding the “old ruinous sand-plain” where a people had once thrived, Doughty found spectacular tombs, “full of men’s bones,” hewn out of the towering sandstone outcrops that overlooked the site of the old city.

Doughty lingered at the site for two whole months, awaiting the return of the pilgrimage caravan, visiting the monuments and carefully recording many of the ancient inscriptions on the site.

For Hegra, which for the past decade has been the subject of one of the most exhaustive archaeological investigations ever mounted, Doughty's discovery was the beginning of a long journey back into the limelight from the obscurity of antiquity.

As for the Nabataeans, however, mystery continues to surround the origins of a people who for 400 years commanded a vast kingdom that in size and scope foreshadowed that of Saudi Arabia – and whose written language was one of the final steppingstones in the evolution of Arabic.

“The history of the Nabataeans before 311 B.C. remains a mystery because of a lack of sources,” said Robert Wenning of the University of Munster’s Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies. “They are not mentioned in any source before that date.”

Wenning’s research has led him to conclude that, wherever the Nabataeans came from, they had become involved in the valuable trade in incense and aromatics by about 380 B.C. Growing wealthy, by 311 B.C. they had become a target for powerful forces.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for an archaeologist, Laila Nehme, a faculty member of France’s prestigious National Center for Scientific Research and co-director of the Hegra archaeological project since 2008, has never been much of a fan of the fantasy TV series “Game of Thrones.”

Real history, she finds – especially the history that she and her multinational, multidisciplinary team have been unearthing in the AlUla Valley for the past decade – is far more amazing than fiction. 

A little while ago, however, she read an article in the French newspaper Le Monde about “Game of Thrones” and its mythical land of Westeros, bordered to the north by a wall of ice raised to keep out the dreaded supernatural hordes of White Walkers, and it made her think about one of the many discoveries made by her and her team at Hegra.

“The article drew parallels with Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, built by the Romans to keep out the barbarians to the north – the ‘White Walkers’ that threatened the empire,” she said.

The wall, built on the orders of the Emperor Hadrian between A.D. 112 and 118, marked the northwestern limit of the Roman Empire. More than 4,000 km to the south, the Hegra archaeologists made a discovery that redrew the map of that empire – the remains of a legion’s fortified camp that proved beyond doubt that the southern limit of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea was farther south than anyone had previously known.

“So, if Hadrian’s Wall in the cold climate of northern Britain was the Romans’ ice wall,” Nehme said, “what we have found here at Hegra in the heat of Arabia is the empire’s fire wall.”

Few people know as much about ancient Hegra and the Nabataeans as Nehme. Now 53, she first came to Syria on the trail of the Nabataeans when she was 19, as an archaeology student specializing in epigraphy, the interpretation of ancient inscriptions, and in 1994 she wrote her doctoral thesis on Petra.

In 2001 Nehme and Dhaifallah Al-Talhi, an archaeologist from the University of Hail, were appointed co-directors of the Mada’in Salih Archaeological Project. Between 2002 and 2005 a team of French archaeologists, working in collaboration with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, carried out the first comprehensive survey of the site of Hegra, which lay the groundwork for the methodical archaeological exploration of the site that began in 2008 and has continued ever since.

The survey also informed Saudi’s successful application in 2007 to have Hegra listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the first to be inscribed in the country.

In 2018 the archaeological collaboration between France and Saudi Arabia at Hegra led to the creation of the French agency, Afalula, which has been founded to support Saudi Arabia in the economic, touristic and cultural development of the AlUla region, in which Hegra sits.

Some 200 km inland from the Red Sea, Hegra is situated on a large plain southeast of the Hijaz Mountains, studded with hills of sandstone, isolated or grouped together to form massifs that have been dramatically sculpted by the northwesterly winds that have blown through the region every spring and early summer since the dawn of time. The largest is Jabal Ithlib, in the northeast of the site, which towers almost 100 meters above the plain.

The winds have also created strange and evocative shapes, such as the three-storey rock 10 km northeast of the modern town of AlUla, sculpted over millions of years to resemble an elephant.

In the center of the site, once served by the 130 wells driven into the rock that made possible the sprawling oasis that once supported the ancient city, is the residential area. Although very little remains above the surface of buildings that were made in antiquity largely from mudbricks, geophysical surveys between 2002 and 2005 revealed tantalizing evidence of underground structures, while parts of the city wall could still be seen with the naked eye.

Without doubt the stars of Hegra highlighted in the UNESCO nomination were the necropoles that surround the residential area – cities of the dead, featuring more than 90 monumental tombs carved out of the rocks surrounding and overlooking the city of the living, and dating from about 1 B.C. to A.D. 75. 

Of the four main necropoles, Qasr Al-Bint, home to 31 tombs dated from the year nought to A.D. 58, is the most visually dramatic – both from a distance and up close. The exterior facades of many of the tombs feature carved monsters, eagles, other small sculpted animals and human faces. 

As at Petra, many of the tombs feature spectacular carved facades. However, unlike at Petra many of the facades carry dated Nabataean inscriptions, in many cases naming the dead and offering a unique insight into the lives of the people who once called Hegra home.

For Nehme, one of the most interesting things about the Nabataeans is the variety of architectural influences apparent in the tombs they carved, which borrowed motifs from Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician, Roman and Mesopotamian architecture.

“The Nabataeans were like a sponge, absorbing things from their surroundings and creating something that is completely theirs, such as the architecture,” she said. “The result is something that you see nowhere else, and it’s the same with their pottery, their writing and their religion.”

This cultural crossover attests to just how widely travelled the Nabataeans were as they went about the profitable business of managing and controlling the trade routes of ancient Arabia. 

“They were travelers,” added Nehme. “Independent for about 400 years, until the early second century, they came into contact with the Romans, and with the Greeks before that, saw what they were doing and copied them.”

The excavation since 2008 of several of Hegra’s monumental tombs, which has yielded a large quantity of human bones, leather and textiles, has allowed the archaeologists to piece together Nabataean funerary rituals, from the death of an individual to their burial.

One tomb in particular, designated IGN 117 by the archaeologists, has given up many secrets. Above the door was a carved tablet, dated to A.D. 60 or 61, that read: “This is the tomb which Hinat daughter of Wahbu made for herself and for her children and her descendants for ever. And no-one has the right to sell it or give it in pledge or write for this tomb a lease. And whoever does other than this, his share will revert to his legitimate heir. In the twenty-first year of King Maliku, King of the Nabataeans.”

Under the sand that covered the floor of Hinat’s tomb archaeologists discovered the remains of no fewer than 80 individuals, adults and children, who had been buried there between the first and the third centuries.

One poignant and unexpected find, discovered among the folds of material wrapped around the skull of one of the women in the tomb, was the remains of a necklace of dates on a string of twisted palm-tree leaves – a gift for the journey to the afterlife and a practice unique to Hegra and the Arabian Peninsula. 

In a paper published in 2015 the archaeologists recorded that, hauntingly, in the contours of the folds in the fabric and leather wrapped around the skull, “the negative of a face can be discerned, along with the presence of some strands of hair.”

This and other explored tombs may help to solve the mystery of the origins of the Nabataeans. DNA analysis of bone samples taken from 40 individuals is now underway at Harvard Medical School as part of a project studying the ancient DNA of Arabia.

Hegra did not, of course, stand alone. The range of languages in the many inscriptions found during an exhaustive survey of the Darb Al-Bakrah, the old camel trading route that ran between Hegra and Petra, bears witness to the multicultural nature of the ancient spice trade and to the ebb and flow of different nationalities that passed that way, leaving their mark not only on the rocks but also on the ancient history of Saudi Arabia.

The scripts and languages left for posterity along the way include Imperial Aramaic, adopted by the Persians in about 500 B.C. as the language of officialdom following their conquest of Mesopotamia and beyond, Greek, Palmyrene, Taymanitic, Dadanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic, Nabataean and Nabataeo-Arabic – a transitional language that eventually evolved into Arabic.

In 2004, Nehme and a team of seven Saudis spent three days retracing the route first identified in 1999 by Saudi archaeologist Dr Ali Al-Ghabban. Sleeping in the desert, taking hundreds of photographs and recording more than 900 inscriptions, they followed the 300-km trail from just north of the modern-day city of AlUla to the border with Jordan. From there, the ancient travelers would have faced a further 150-km journey before reaching Petra, the northern sister city to Hegra.

In 2018 a complete catalogue of the inscriptions was published as “The Darb Al-Bakrah – A Caravan Route in North-West Arabia,” a weighty book of more than 300 pages edited by Nehme. Along the way, she said, she came to know the ancient Nabataeans intimately.

“I was following in the footsteps of people from antiquity, and at times I found myself following the same person in different places,” she recalled. “At one place and then 30 km further on, the same man would write his name again. I even found a place where one man’s name appeared twice, seven years apart in dated inscriptions from the early Roman period.”

Some of inscriptions along the length of the trail from Hegra to the Jordanian border are nothing more than names – an ancient “I was here” – but others offer tantalizing glimpses of another age. Some names are accompanied by the phrase “may be safe,” others urge that the traveler “may be remembered,” while one, suggesting something of the dangerous times in which it was written, expresses the hope, “may any man who went to Ḥegra and any camel be safe.” Another writer records the ghostly presence of his “companions the cavalrymen in charge of the guard.”

Some individuals, unwittingly securing for themselves a kind of immortality, left a record of their profession. The signatories included military men, servants, scribes, farmers, camel breeders, a priest and an embalmer – perhaps on his way to prepare the dead for burial in the rock tombs at Hegra.

As spectacular as the rock-carved tombs of Hegra are, the past 17 years of exhaustive archaeological investigation of the approximately 30-square-kilometer site has been the prelude to a breathtakingly ambitious archaeological survey of the entire AlUla region – not only of the oasis valley to the south of the ancient city but also of the surrounding area of more than 22,000 square kilometers.

This is the task that has been taken on by American archaeologist Dr. Rebecca Foote, who in late 2017 was appointed director of archaeology and cultural heritage preservation at the newly formed Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU).

“There hadn’t been a comprehensive archaeological survey of AlUla county, not even of the central oasis valley, though much had been registered there,” she told Arab News. “So, my first job was to find out what we have – to protect in the face of the imminent development, to potentially activate for tourism and to identify what is there for future in-depth scholarly research.”

From the outset, she realized that she and the survey teams of initially 20 people, and now more than 40, faced a huge task. “What’s particularly remarkable about this survey is the sheer scale of it. To be covering an entire county about the size of Sardinia in just two or three years is unusual and challenging.”

To make it manageable, they divided the vast search area into three separate zones, each of which would be approached slightly differently and tackled by different teams. By far the largest was the area designated the “hinterland,” more than 19,000 square kilometers of rugged terrain stretching from the peaks of the Hijaz Mountains in the west to the deserts in the east.

The next largest site was the central “core” area of about 3,300 square kilometers. Within the core lies a 48-square-kilometer strip of ancient oasis that snakes approximately 30 km from the ancient Dadanite city of Qurh (modern-day Al-Mabiyat) to just south of Hegra. The detailed survey of this area began in October. The abandoned settlement known as the Old Town of AlUla, 17 km south of Hegra, is also being examined separately.

Occupied until the 1980s, when the occupants abandoned the town for the creature comforts of the newly built modern-day AlUla, a few kilometers to the south, the old ghost town is an intriguing part of the area’s heritage and will doubtless prove a draw for tourists.

“The focus of what we’re doing right now is recording the buildings in detail and stabilizing them to prevent further collapse,” added Foote. “Decisions will be made about how it will figure in the ultimate reinvigoration of the area by the stakeholders and master-planning.”

As to how old it is, “that’s what we’re trying to figure out at the moment. We know from Ibn Battuta, for example, who wrote in the early 14th century that it was then a ‘big village,’ but it is certainly older. The date of earliest occupation is what we’re hoping to find out from targeted excavation.”

Although centuries of repairs make it difficult to assess, it is possible that some of the walls that are still standing could date back at least 800 years.

Originally well-built out of mudbricks on stone foundations, the houses were small – most are one large room on each floor – and packed together. For generations, said Foote, “every family there would have had a farm in the oasis. They’d have lived in the Old Town in the winter and on their farm in the summer.”

It is not just the physical size of the project that Foote and her team are undertaking that is impressive. The timeline they are examining extends from pre-history right up to World War I – for the simple reason that the 1,300-km Hijaz Railway, built by the Ottomans and opened in 1908 to speed the journeys of pilgrims from Damascus to Madinah, runs through the AlUla Valley. 

With such a vast and disparate area to survey, Foote’s teams have drawn on the very latest archaeological techniques, utilising satellite images, drones used to conduct photogrammetric surveys, in which photographs are captured from multiple angles and transformed by software into 3-D images, and aerial laser scans – a technique known as LIDAR, light detection and ranging, that enables ground features to be “seen” through foliage. Together with high-resolution orthophotography, these techniques identify any sites that appear to be the product of human activity more than 100 years old.

The survey began in the spring of 2018. As an indication of the wealth of material that is out there, after just two years it has identified an astonishing 23,000 sites, many of which have more than one item of interest.

In the core area, by far the biggest category of finds is categorised as “artistic/communication” – rock art and inscriptions. So far, the team has identified inscriptions in nine different languages, whose use spans millennia: Thamudic, Aramaic, Dadanitic, Minaean, Nabataean, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.

All the finds are being logged in a specially designed database, developed by the University of Oxford. “Our focus is to get it all recorded accurately in the database,” added Foote. Designed primarily as a heritage management tool for the RCU, the database will also be shared with academics hoping to carry out research projects in the area. 

One of the intriguing mysteries the survey team hopes to solve is why, unlike in other parts of the Middle East, settlement in the AlUla Valley was not consistent.

“There are four main settlements that we know of so far,” said Foote. “Settlement begins at Dadan, which is in the center of the valley, then it moves up to Hegra. Then it goes down to Qurh and then it comes back up to what’s called Old Town today, which was inhabited until the 1980s. Why is it that we are seeing that pattern of settlement in this valley, rather than one primary settlement site?”

The answer, which may yet emerge from the soil, could be related to war, politics, religion or even a catastrophic earthquake, which may have contributed to the destruction of ancient Dadan.

The city of Qurh flourished from the sixth century, the eve of the Islamic era, until the 12th. Its occupation overlapped with that of Al-Dirah, AlUla’s Old Town, which was occupied from about the 10th century until its abandonment in the 20^th century. In their time, both were flourishing communities that welcomed pilgrims travelling to and from Makkah and Madinah.

The other puzzle waiting to be solved is the relationship between the Lihyanites, the tribe that predated the Nabataeans and ruled Dadan, and the Nabataeans themselves. Inscriptions tells us that the language of each, while similar, was different.

Between at least 600 and 200 B.C., “Dadan was a major flourishing city, the capital of the Dadanite and Lihyanite kingdoms, and they were making money on the incense trade and controlling it long before the Nabataeans,” added Foote. “It’s unclear exactly what the relationship between them was, and why the 15 km shift from Dadan to Hegra happened."

Two years into the great survey, the true depths of AlUla’s historic roots are already becoming apparent. Although a few stone tools that date back to the stone age – between 150,000 and 200,000 B.C. – have been recovered, the handful of sites that have been excavated so far have been dated to between 2,000 and 5,200 B.C.

The material used for radiocarbon dating the oldest of these sites to about 5,200 years B.C. offers a poignant reminder of the everyday lives of the people who once lived in the land that, more than 7,000 years later, would become Saudi Arabia – charcoal from a hearth, and two animal teeth, possibly from a sheep or a goat.

“Most everyone who comes here will want to see the World Heritage Site of Hegra,” said Foote. “But we want everyone who comes to AlUla to know the larger context of this area. There is so much more, both in a natural and a cultural sense, that will make this place a major destination.”

Part of that is the ancient city of Dadan (modern-day Al-Khuraybah), even older than Hegra and barely 20 km away down the AlUla Valley. Dadan has been the subject of excavations by King Saud University in Riyadh for more 15 years, but now an enhanced archaeological program at the site, with principal investigators from the French National Center for Scientific Research and the RCU, is due to begin in February.

The co-director of the ambitious five-year program is Abdulrahman Al-Suhaibani, a 34-year-old assistant professor of archaeology at King Saud University and a heritage consultant to the RCU.

Dadan, a city that predated Nabataean Hegra and thrived in the AlUla Valley from at least 600 to 200 B.C., before mysteriously disappearing from history, has long been a puzzle – and one that Al-Suhaibani and his colleagues are determined to solve.

“One of the most important questions is about the origins of the Nabataeans and the relationship between the Dadanites and the Nabataeans,” said Al-Suhaibani, who obtained his Ph.D. on the architecture of Dadan at the Sorbonne in Paris.

The Nabataean civilization was preceded by the kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan, but the extent to which these peoples overlapped is unclear. “We know the Nabataeans came from Petra to Hegra around the second half of the third century B.C. So, the question now is, what is the relationship between the end of the Lihyanites and the coming of the Nabataeans in this region?”

So far, archaeologists have been long on speculation, but short on facts. “Is it, perhaps, that the Nabataeans are in fact the same as the Lihyanites?” added Al-Suhaibani.

If ever an answer is to be found, it is likely to emerge from the rich soil of the AlUla Valley over the next five years during the most concentrated archaeological investigation Dadan has ever seen.

Ultimately, Al-Suhaibani believes, Dadan will become “one of the most important sites in AlUla, for tourism and for our heritage.

“One of the things that archaeology can do is to clarify the cultural identity of our nation. We need to go to our people to show them their heritage and their history; we need to work with our children, to let them know that we have a big history, no less than our neighbors in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Yemen, and that we should be proud of it.”