A small town 4,400 years old in Khaybar Oasis, Saudi Arabia which dates from Bronze Age discovered by archaeologists in western Saudi Arabia near the city of Al-‘Ula in the Hejaz region.

It is about for the city “al-Natah” as they called it which covers about 3.7 hectares, “including a central district and a nearby residential area surrounded by protective ramparts,” the researchers said in a statement. But the city, which was occupied from 2400 BC, was small, with a population of only about 500 inhabitantsthe team noted in a study published Wednesday (Oct. 30) in the journal PLOS One.

Credit: Charloux et al. PloS One, 2024

The settlement site had a large amount of pottery and grinding stones, as well as the remains of at least 50 dwellings that may have been made of clay materials. The central area had two buildings that may have been used as administrative quarters, the team wrote in the journal. A necropolis was found in the western part of the central area. Large and tall circular tombs that archaeologists call “stepped towers” have been found.

No samples of writing have been found so far at the site, study lead author Guillaume Charloux, an archaeologist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), said in an email to Live Science. Researchers have discovered only a few traces of cereals, but based on findings at other sites it is possible that the al-Natah people cultivated near the site, Charloux said.

The city and the surrounding areas surrounded it by a wall 14.5 kilometers long, which is believed to have protected the settlement from raids by nomads, the team wrote in a previous paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Also, the city was abandoned sometime between 1500 and 1300 BC, but researchers are not sure why this happened. “It’s a related question that I can’t really answer right now,” Charloux said, noting that “we have very few clues about the last phase of the residence there.”

He noted that other projects in the region, such as the Saudi-German mission in the city of Tayma and the Saudi-Austrian mission in Qurayyah, have also provided valuable information on the archeology of the region. For example, excavations at Tayma have revealed thousands of years of occupation and include relics dating back to when a Babylonian king named Nabonidus (reigned 556 to 539 BC) lived in the area.

Slow urbanization

At the time the city was inhabited, cities flourished in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean. Research from al-Natah and other sites shows that urbanization in the Arabian Peninsula moved at a slower pace.

“Settlements in northern Arabia were in a transitional stage of urbanization during the third to second millennium [π.Χ.],” the researchers said in the statement. They called this phase “low urbanization”, describing it as a transitional stage between pastoralism and complex urban settlements.

“While urbanization began in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th millennium BC, our study tends to show that social complexity increased slowly in northwestern Arabia,” Charloux said.

Compared to the large Bronze Age cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt, settlements in Saudi Arabia tended to be smaller. “These were small towns connected by networks of monumental ramparts surrounding large regional oases,” Charloux said.