This summer's major exhibition at the Louvre in Paris provides an overview of the history of the Arabian Peninsula from prehistory to the advent of Islam, writes David Tresilian The early history of the Arabian Peninsula, roughly from the prehistoric period to the early centuries of Islam, has long fascinated and frustrated students of the region. While a broad consensus has emerged about the main lines of the ancient history of surrounding countries, among them ancient Egypt and the successive civilisations that flourished in ancient Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq, the early history of the Arabian Peninsula, insulated by sea on three sides and by desert on the other and having a sometimes formidable natural topography, has more often than not eluded scholarly agreement. Early Arabia must have shared in many of the larger patterns of regional history, both in terms of the history of human settlement and in terms of the effects of the political changes that affected the region in antiquity, as ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Greek and Persian empires rose and fell. However, in the absence of sufficient evidence from the Peninsula itself it has sometimes been difficult to talk with confidence about how early populations there may have interacted with their ancient neighbours and how they may have been linked to the history of the region as a whole. Today, however, such lacunae are beginning to be filled, particularly on the evidence provided by Routes d'Arabie, a major exhibition at the Louvre in Paris focusing on the history of the Arabian Peninsula from the earliest times to the early centuries of Islam. Bringing together some 300 objects, all of them taken from museums in Saudi Arabia, including the National Museum in Riyadh, and most of them never having been seen outside the country, the exhibition is a marvelous opportunity to learn about the early history of a country still sometimes seen as enigmatic by foreign observers. Organised around the idea of routes, the exhibition draws attention to the Arabian Peninsula's historical function as a crossroads for traders and merchants often from beyond its boundaries, as well as for later religious pilgrims on their way to the holy sites of Islam. Such routes connected local populations to the wider regional economy, notably through the ancient incense and spice trades, while bringing foreign influences back into the heart of the Peninsula and creating the conditions for cultural cosmopolitanism. Such routes also gave rise to a network of early urban settlements, stopping-off points situated in oases on the roads taken by the early caravans. It is from these oases that much of the material evidence of early human habitation of Arabia has been drawn, with excavations carried out over recent decades by joint French, German, American and Saudi teams throwing much-needed light on the men and women who once lived in them. ENTERING THE EXHIBITION, held in the Louvre's prestigious Hall Napoleon, the visitor is brought face to face with some of the earliest materials in the exhibition, such as the anthropomorphic grave markers dating from the IV millennium BCE used on the exhibition's publicity materials. These markers, or stelae, have been found at sites throughout the Peninsula, notably in the south in Yemen. The three on display, now in the National Museum in Riyadh, were found in Ha'il and Al-'Ula in north-western Saudi Arabia, and they are among the earliest testimonies of Bronze Age settlement in the Peninsula. They are complemented by evidence of earlier Stone Age human habitation, in the form of flints and arrowheads from the Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods, excavated at sites near Jubbah, Riyad and Bir Hima and dating to perhaps one million years BP. Petroglyphs, or rock-art engravings, from the beginnings of the Neolithic period, the earliest of which date to around 10,000 BCE, have been found throughout the Peninsula, notably at Jubbah in the north-west. There is a special focus on early settlements in the north-east of the country, dating from around the V to the II millennia BCE. Commercial exchanges with Mesopotamia to the north and Iran and as far away as the Indus Valley to the east seem to have given rise to periods of prosperity, with excavations carried out in the region turning up notable ceramic finds. However, many of the most fascinating materials in the exhibition are in the next section, dedicated to the north-west of the country and the Hijaz. Here, the emphasis is on the trading routes that once brought frankincense and myrrh from Yemen up through the Hijaz for sale in markets throughout the Mediterranean world. These routes supported the development of oasis settlements throughout the Hijaz, excavation of which have yielded information about the region's early kingdoms, among them the Madian, Dedan, Lihyan and Nabatean, which profited from the caravan trade. Among the most important oases are Al-'Ula and Tayma, both of which have been extensively investigated in recent years, Tayma since 2004 by a joint German-Saudi team. The kingdoms of Madian and Dedan are mentioned in ancient sources, the latter in the Old Testament of the Bible, the former in the Qur'an, and, as German archaeologist Arnaulf Hausleiter writes in his essay on the oasis in the vast catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Tayma is also mentioned by the pre-Islamic poet Imru' al-Qais in one of the seven mu'allaqat. The exhibition includes objects found in these oasis settlements, lent by regional museums in Saudi Arabia or by the National Museum in Riyadh. However, for the visitor the real surprise of this part of the exhibition comes in the shape of three colossal human statues found in the Lihyan settlement of Kuraybah north of the Al-'Ula oasis. Excavations were first carried out here by French archaeologists at the beginning of the last century, and they were later continued by teams from the archaeology department at King Saud University in Riyadh. These uncovered a dozen or so colossal statues, some three metres high and dating from the third or fourth centuries BCE. While strongly marked by Egyptian influences, the statues indicate the existence of a flourishing local school of sculpture, and they may indicate something of the wealth that came with controlling the ancient incense trade. In later periods, at least until its decline in the first century CE, the latter was controlled by the Nabateans, who are probably best-known for their monumental rock-cut tombs at Petra in Jordan. However, Hegra in northern Saudi Arabia, today's Mada'in Salih, was also an important Nabatean site, and it too contains many characteristic rock-cut tombs, carved out, like those at Petra, from the sheer rock face of the surrounding hills. Hegra seems to have been an important stopping-off point on the caravan routes that once linked south Arabia to the Mediterranean. First brought to international attention by the English traveler Charles Doughty in his book Arabia Deserta at the end of the 19th century, the site has been the object of joint French-Saudi excavations since 2008, when it was also placed on the list of World Heritage Sites compiled by UNESCO. A Roman inscription found at the site and dating from 175-77 CE is included in the exhibition, this commemorating -- according to the catalogue in not always very good Latin -- the restoration of part of the city during the reign of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Following their annexation of Egypt after the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE, the Romans sent an expeditionary force into the Arabian Peninsula under prefect Aelius Gallus. Two legions, some 10,000 men, crossed the Red Sea as part of a 14-month campaign that took them south to Najran and Marib in 26 or 25 BCE. While the campaign was eventually abandoned, Nabatea, including Hegra, was later annexed by the emperor Trajan in 106 CE, becoming the Roman province of Arabia. The final sections of the pre-Islamic part of the exhibition take visitors to the centre and east of the Peninsula, first to the site of Qaryat al-Faw on the north-west borders of the Rub' al-Khali, the "empty quarter," a vast desert area that occupies the south of Arabia, and the oasis of Najran on the trade route from Yemen, and then to the north-east, where what seems to have been an influx of population from what is now Bahrain, allied to enhanced commercial exchanges in the Gulf, led to the development of thriving settlements from the 4th century BCE. Located some 700km south-west of Riyadh, the site of Qaryat al-Faw, once a commercial centre controlling the trade route leading from the south of Arabia towards the Gulf, was discovered in the 1940s and excavated from the 1960s onwards by archaeologists from King Saud University in Riyadh. The excavations laid bare the remains of a large town, with residential quarters, necropolis, temples and market area. Many inscriptions have been discovered at the site in Sabaic, an ancient south Arabian language, along with bronze figurines of Hercules, Artemis and Harpocrates that testify to the spread of Hellenistic and Ptolemaic culture in the region. Najran, an oasis settlement in south-west Arabia, was particularly important in antiquity because of its location on the route through the Hijaz from Yemen. It was also famed for its temperate climate, and, in the pre-Islamic period, for its intellectual atmosphere and its schools, with the pre-Islamic poet Maymun Ibn Qays al-A'sha apparently liking to spend time in Najran each year. The exhibition includes various pieces found during excavation at the site, now kept in the National Museum in Riyadh. Excavations carried out in north-east Arabia have supported reports found in classical authors of prosperous cities in the region in the Hellenistic period, roughly from the 4th century CE onwards. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, 'Awad bin Ali Al-Sibali Al-Zahrani, director of museums at the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities in Riyadh, gives details of descriptions found in the Greek geographer Strabo and later in the writings of the Roman historian Pliny the Elder of the existence of a city called Gerrha located in the Gulf near Bahrain. The classical authors talk of Gerrha's fabulous wealth, and excavations carried out in 1998 at the Thaj necropolis near modern Dammam have supported the identification of Thaj, argued for in this exhibition, with ancient Gerrha. They have also led to the discovery of multiple gold items, including a striking gold face mask, many of them engraved with representations of Zeus and Artemis and testifying to the influence of Hellenistic culture in the region. THE EXHIBITION'S SECOND PART takes up the story of the ancient routes that once traversed Arabia by looking at the pilgrimage routes that brought pilgrims from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen to the holy cities of Islam. As is well known, the Hijaz cities of Mecca and Medina, called Yathrib in the pre-Islamic period, were themselves important trading centres on the ancient caravan routes during the Prophet Mohamed's lifetime in the early seventh century CE. Later, they became centres of pilgrimage, and pilgrimage routes, converging on Mecca, were constructed to assist pilgrims making the long overland journey down through the Hijaz from Egypt and Syria, or across the centre of Arabia from the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. The most famous of the routes was probably the Darb Zubayda, which led from Kufa and Baghdad in present-day Iraq and was named after Zubayda bint Ja'far, wife of the Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rashid, who financed the provision of water resources for thirsty pilgrims. One of the most important staging posts on this route was the oasis of Al-Rabadha, whose foundation and early history is the subject of a catalogue essay by Sa'd bin Abdulaziz Al-Rashid, a professor of Islamic archaeology in Riyadh. According to Al-Rashid, Abbasid princes and caliphs, among them Al-Mansour, Al-Mahdi and Haroun Al-Rashid, once rested in Al-Rabadha during their travels along the Darb Zubayda. Excavations begun in 1979 have uncovered the remains of palace buildings, mosques and residential areas, with many smaller finds being shown in the present exhibition. Similar staging posts were built on other pilgrimage routes, among them Al-Mabiyat near Al-'Ula on the Syrian route: here, it was the Umayyad caliphs, their capital at Damascus, who took the initiative in building the route that would link the political centre of the Muslim empire with the holy cities of Islam. Excavations at Al-Mabiyat were begun by the Saudi Antiquities Authority in 1984, and they have uncovered a host of finds, many of them on show in the present exhibition, as well as the remains of residential structures and a fortified surrounding wall. According to Hayat bint 'Abdullah Al-Kilabi, writing in the exhibition catalogue, one of the hazards of the Syrian route in later years was the presence of Crusaders in what is now Jordan, forcing pilgrims taking the route south from Damascus to abandon their journey in favour of the Iraqi route from Kufa and Baghdad. This threat was only resolved following the victories of Saladin in the late 12th century, after which the route was reopened and maintained by the Ayyubid sultans in Cairo. Among the major pieces on display in the second part of the exhibition are a set of 18 tombstones dating from the 9th to 16th centuries CE and taken from the Al-Ma'la cemetery north of Mecca. As Carine Juvin of the Islamic Arts Department of the Louvre notes in the exhibition catalogue, these provide fascinating details of the inhabitants of the holy city during this period, when it was under first Egyptian Mamluk and then Ottoman rule. They also show the wide geographical origins of those buried in the cemetery, since Mecca acted as a magnet for individuals from across the Muslim world. Exhibition items 296 and 297, for example, are the tombstones of individuals born in Meknes in Morocco and Tabriz in north-west Iran, dying in Mecca in 1196 and 1217, respectively. The first is the tombstone of a Malikite imam, who presumably would have led the prayers of pilgrims from the Maghreb, where the Maliki school of Sunni Islam was particularly prevalent, while the second is that of a religious judge and mufti of the Shafi'i school. Also in this part of the exhibition is a set of elaborately worked metal doors, commissioned for the Ka'ba in Mecca by the Ottoman sultan Murad IV in 1635. Now kept in the National Museum in Riyadh, these were in use until the middle of the last century. Routes d'Arabie presents the history of the Arabian Peninsula from the earliest times to the early centuries of Islam, showing how Arabia has functioned historically as a commercial and religious crossroads, with caravans bringing goods from south Arabia to Mediterranean markets, or transporting pilgrims to the holy cities of Islam, and relying on oasis staging posts that prospered as a result and became centres for the Peninsula's various sedentary kingdoms. Organised within the framework of a cooperation agreement between the government of Saudi Arabia and the Louvre, the exhibition has been placed under the patronage of President Sarkozy of France and King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia. According to a contribution by Ali I. Al-Ghabban of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities in the encyclopaedic exhibition catalogue, the work of some 40 Saudi and international authors and a work of reference in its own right, recent decades have seen a renewed emphasis on archaeological excavation, research and conservation in Saudi Arabia. An ambitious heritage restoration, conservation and education programme has seen the construction of regional museums in Al-'Ula, Tayma, Dumat al-Jandal, Najran, Sabya and Hofuf, and this culminated in the opening of the National Museum in Riyadh in 1999 and the many joint Saudi and international projects now underway across the country. All this indicates, as Al-Ghabban points out, a keen awareness of the importance of the kingdom's ancient and more modern history, "changing the ways in which people look at the history of the kingdom and inculcating new ways of conceptualising Saudi identity and values." Many visitors to the Routes d'Arabie exhibition, too, may have only partial notions of the Arabian Peninsula's long history, and it seems certain that this exhibition will go a long way towards completing and refining them. Routes d'Arabie, archéologie et histoire du royaume d'Arabie saoudite, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 14 July to 27 September 2010.
