AlUla: The Middle East's once- incomprehensible ancient wonder
Set in a stunning valley, this ancient desert oasis has birthed flourishing civilizations. Now, after years of being closed, it's starting to reveal its secrets.
In the Middle East, humans have found ways to survive and even thrive in these harsh environments for millennia, and perhaps nowhere is this creativity more evident than in one of the Arabian Peninsula's most significant cultural cradles.
Set in the AlUla Valley amid the soaring sandstone and granite mountains of north-western Saudi Arabia's Hijaz region, this ancient desert oasis has supported human life for the past 200,000 years. The area's fertile soil and access to water amid the arid, mountainous desert helped multiple civilisations blossom. The Dadan and Lihyan kingdoms that flourished here between 800 and 100 BCE were followed by Hegra, an important city in the Nabataean civilisation whose capital, Petra, was located farther north, in modern-day Jordan.
Yet, it wasn't until 2019 when Saudi Arabia began issuing tourist visas for non-religious travel that foreign visitors were able to witness this long closed-off and unexplored valley. Today, echoes of AlUla's long and mysterious past are everywhere, and as archaeologists slowly begin to uncover the many burial mounds, tombs and rock inscriptions scattered throughout AlUla's numerous sites, this ancient oasis is finally starting to reveal its secrets.
Rock-carved kingdoms and ancient messages
A stone-built city grew in the AlUla Valley as early as 800 BCE. Dadan, the capital of the eponymous Dadan and later Lihyanite kingdoms, quickly became popular as a major trading hub for frankincense en route to Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.
The Dadanites developed their own script, and today these inscriptions – some of which are more than 2,500 years old – are preserved remarkably well at the nearby site of Jabal Ikmah, which is often called "AlUla's open-air library". These etched messages range from simple graffiti to elaborate records documenting offerings to the gods.
By the 1st Century BCE, the Nabataean civilisation from the southern Levant (modern-day Jordan) had expanded into north-west Arabia. While Petra remained the kingdom's capital city, the Nabataeans' most important city to the south was Hegra – Saudi Arabia's first Unesco World Heritage Site.
For some 200 years, skilled masons worked inside Hegra's necropolis on majestic monuments like Qasr al-Farid, an unfinished, yet beautifully preserved tomb which, according to inscriptions, likely belonged to a prominent member of Nabataean. Hegra's sprawling 1.6-hectare archaeological complex contains 111 tombs that travellers
