During the Bronze Age, northwestern Arabia, the region between Mecca and Aqaba, was home to interconnected city walls centered around small fortified cities, such as the recently discovered town of al-Nata in the Khyber Oasis in the Medina province of Saudi Arabia. There were oases dotted around the area.
3D virtual reconstruction of the Bronze Age town of Arnatar. Image credit: Charloux others., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309963 / AFALULA-RCU-CNRS.
The development of metropolitan settlements was a major step in the evolution of human civilization.
This urbanization process can be difficult to study in northwestern Arabia, in part due to the region's lack of well-preserved archaeological sites compared to better-understood regions such as the Levant and Mesopotamia. I understand.
However, excavations in recent decades have uncovered exceptional ruins that provide insight into the early stages of urbanization in northwest Arabia.
In a new study, CNRS archaeologist Guillaume Charroux and colleagues focused on the Bronze Age town of Al Nataa, which was inhabited from around 2400 to 1500 BC.
The town is approximately 1.5 hectares in area and includes a central area and nearby residential areas surrounded by a protective wall.
According to researchers, about 500 people lived in Arnata.
Although similar in size and composition to other sites of similar age in northwest Arabia, these sites are smaller and less sociopolitically complex than modern sites in the Levant and Mesopotamia.
Scientists suggest that Al Nata represents a state of “hypo-urbanization”, a transition period between nomadic pastoralism and complex urban settlement.
Archaeological evidence so far indicates that small fortified cities dotted northwestern Arabia during the Early to Middle Bronze Age, a period when other regions were showing later stages of urbanization.
Further excavations throughout Arabia will provide more detailed information about the timing of this transition and the changes in social structure and architecture that accompanied it.
“Archaeologists have discovered the first small Bronze Age town (c. 2400-1300 BC) in northwest Arabia connected to an extensive network of walls, raising questions about the early development of local urban planning,” the authors said.
Their paper was published in the online journal PLoS ONE on October 30, 2024.
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G. Charroux others. 2024. Bronze Age towns in the walled oasis of Khyber: A discussion of early urbanization in northwestern Arabia. PLoS ONE 19 (10): e0309963;doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309963
Source: www.sci.news
