Archaeologists discover ancient highways in Arabia

There are tombs in the al Ha'it Oasis. The University of Western Australia.

Archeologists from The University of Western Australia have discovered people who lived in north-west Arabia in the Early to Middle Bronze Age built funeral avenues that were long distances from one another.

The lead author of the findings is a researcher from the School of Humanities at the University of Wyoming.

erary avenues were the major highway networks of their day, and show that the populations living in the Arabian Peninsula 4,500 years ago were far more socially and economically connected to one another than we previously thought.

Satellite imagery, helicopter-based aerial photography, ground survey and excavation were used by the team to locate and analyze the funerary avenues.

The team located avenues over an area of 160,000 square km, with more than 17,800 tailed 'pendant' tombs recorded in their primary study areas of AlUla and Khaybar counties in Saudi Arabia.

The highest concentrations of funerary monuments on these avenues were located near permanent water sources, with the direction of the avenues indicating that populations used them to travel between major oases.

The routes were used to move herds of domestic animals into nearby pastures during periods of rain.

Some of the densest concentrations of funerary monuments known worldwide can be found in the oases.

The number of Bronze Age tombs built around them suggests that populations had already begun to settle in these favorable locations.

The project director from the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia said the research was a great success.

The papers published in the year 2021, show that AlUla and Khaybar were characterized by a rich and dynamic occupational landscape.

The archeological finds coming out of these regions have the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the early history of the Middle East.

Matthew Dalton and his co-authors wrote about the Middle Holocene 'funerary avenues' of north-west Arabia. There is a DOI for this.

Archaeologists discovered ancient highways in Arabia on January 14, 2022.

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