A team of archaeologists led by Guillaume Charloux of France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) has revealed details of an ancient urban settlement in northern Saudi Arabia.
According to the study published in PLOS ONE, the site of al-Natah, located in the Medina Province and dated between 2400 and 1500 BCE, shows how some communities in the region began establishing early forms of urban organization during the third millennium BCE.
Urbanization, which marks a milestone in the evolution of human civilizations, has been more easily studied in archaeologically rich areas such as the Levant and Mesopotamia. However, in northern Arabia, traces of this transformation have been more challenging to identify and analyze due to a lack of well-preserved sites.
This new discovery, revealing a settlement of approximately 1.5 hectares surrounded by protective walls and a necropolis with indications of social hierarchy, allows researchers to explore the process of urbanization in this region in an unprecedented way.
Charloux and his colleagues point out that al-Natah is representative of a “low-level urbanization” or intermediate stage, a step between nomadism and the complex urban settlements seen in other ancient Middle Eastern regions. With around 500 inhabitants, al-Natah featured a spatial organization that included a central district, residential areas, and a cemetery, which shows a model of compact and defensive settlement.
This type of fortified settlement was common in northern Arabia during the Early and Middle Bronze Age, when other regions were already showing higher levels of social and architectural complexity.
The discovery of al-Natah is significant not only for its architecture but also because it may be part of a wider network of small fortified towns in the region. Archaeologists hope that future excavations will help determine how these settlements evolved and what factors drove their transition toward an urban lifestyle.
The presence of defensive structures, ramps, and sector divisions suggests that the inhabitants of al-Natah were already responding to the need to protect their resources and maintain a certain internal organization.
This study, funded by the French Agency for the Development of AlUla (AFALULA), opens a new chapter in the region’s archaeology by showing that northern Arabia, while not developing large cities like those of Mesopotamia, did experience a gradual urbanization process adapted to its own cultural and geographical conditions.
SOURCES
Charloux G, Shabo S, Depreux B, Colin S, Guadagnini K, Guermont F, et al. (2024) A Bronze Age town in the Khaybar walled oasis: Debating early urbanization in Northwestern Arabia. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0309963. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309963
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