Qaryat al-Faw

Listen for a moment. There is almost nothing to hear: a dry wind moving across gravel, the tick of sand against stone, perhaps a bird far off. Under your feet the ground is pale and hard, scattered with small dark pebbles and broken pottery. To one side, a low wall of mud brick runs through the sand. Ahead, the land opens toward the edge of the Empty Quarter, one of the largest sand deserts on Earth. This silence once belonged to a city.

This is Qaryat al-Faw. The name means, roughly, the village of al-Faw. Scholars believe the word al-Faw refers to a gap, an opening where the long ridge of the Tuwaiq escarpment meets the valleys running toward the sands. That gap mattered. Caravans travelling between southern Arabia and the north and east of the peninsula needed a passage, water, and a safe place to rest. For several centuries, this was that place.

The caravans carried something precious. Frankincense and myrrh grew in the far south of Arabia, in what is now Yemen and Oman. These resins were burned in temples across the ancient world, from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Rome. Their value was enormous. Moving them north meant crossing hundreds of kilometres of desert, from well to well. Any town that controlled a good stop on that road could grow rich from trade, tolls, and services. Qaryat al-Faw did exactly that.

The city is linked to the Kingdom of Kinda, an Arab kingdom of central Arabia. Inscriptions found here suggest that al-Faw served as its capital for a long period. Most scholars place the city's main life in the centuries around the turn of the common era, roughly from a few centuries before Christ until the early centuries after. Exact dates are still debated. What is clear is that this was not a simple oasis. It was a planned settlement with power, wealth, and ambition.

Here is the first surprise. For a very long time, almost nobody outside the region knew this city existed. Travellers mentioned ruins, but serious excavation began only in the early 1970s. A team from King Saud University in Riyadh, led by the archaeologist Abdul Rahman al-Ansari, worked here season after season. Their work changed how historians understood pre-Islamic Arabia. The interior of the peninsula, once imagined as empty, turned out to hold an urban culture with its own art and writing.

Look at the layout around you. The excavators found a central market area, a large structure ringed by walls and towers. Inside were rooms that probably served as shops, storerooms, and lodgings for merchants. Nearby stood houses, some with more than one storey. There were temples and altars. There were wells, some of them deep, and channels that once carried water to fields. Picture the noise of camels being unloaded here, the smell of incense, and voices in several languages.

The buildings used local materials. You can see mud brick and stone, often combined. Walls were plastered, and inside some houses the plaster was painted. Fragments of wall paintings survived in the dry ground. They show human faces, figures, and decorative patterns in reds, yellows, and blacks. For an ancient Arabian site, such paintings are rare. They suggest that wealthy families here wanted beautiful homes, and that artists worked in the city.

The objects found here tell the same story of connection. Archaeologists recovered bronze statues and small figurines, some in styles that recall the Greek and Roman Mediterranean world. They found glass, fine pottery, jewellery, coins, and carved incense burners. Some items came from far away, others were clearly made locally. Many of these treasures are now kept in Saudi museums, including the National Museum in Riyadh. Several pieces have also travelled abroad in exhibitions about the archaeology of Arabia.

Now the second surprise, and perhaps the most important. Qaryat al-Faw is full of writing. People here carved inscriptions on stone, on walls, and on tombs. Most use the ancient South Arabian alphabet, a script with sharp, geometric letters. But at least one tomb inscription is written in a language very close to early Arabic, using those South Arabian letters. For historians of the Arabic language, this is a precious clue. It shows Arabic taking shape here, in the centre of the peninsula, centuries before Islam.

The dead were also given care. Beyond the living city lie cemeteries with tombs of different sizes. Some belonged to ordinary people, others to important families, with chambers cut into the ground. The grave goods and inscriptions show social ranks, family names, and religious beliefs. Several gods were worshipped here, and the inscriptions name some of them. Standing near the tombs, you can sense how much this community wanted to be remembered.

The story of this place is older than the city itself. In the surrounding landscape, researchers have recorded rock art, stone tools, and ancient structures from much earlier periods. Some traces reach back to prehistoric times, when the climate was wetter and the valleys held more life. In 2024, UNESCO added the wider Al-Faw archaeological area to its World Heritage List as a cultural landscape. The listing protects not only the ruins, but the whole setting of desert, ridge, and valley.

Why did the city fade? No single answer is certain. Trade routes shifted over time. Sea travel along the coasts of Arabia grew more important, and fewer caravans needed the inland roads. Political changes across the peninsula also played a part. Slowly, the merchants left, the wells were neglected, and the sand moved in. The desert kept what remained. That dryness is the reason the paintings, wood, and inscriptions survived at all.

Before you leave, stand still once more. Turn slowly and look along the line of the escarpment, then out toward the sand. Notice the colour of the mud brick against the pale ground, and the broken pottery at your feet. Leave every fragment where it lies, because each one still holds information. As you walk back, imagine the caravans arriving at this same gap, tired and thirsty, and seeing the walls of a city rise from the desert.