Article table of contents: all
-
Artemidorus Ephesius [Arabia in…]
Artemidorus of Ephesus, Greek geographer. Book VIII of his 'Geography', written ca. 100 BCE, contained a description of the western coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula.
-
Contacts between Assyria and the Arabian tribes took place over a vast area, ranging from the Southern Levant, the Jazīra, and Southern Babylonia to East and South Arabia. Arabs are first mentioned in Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and correspondence from the 9th century BCE onwards. In addition, iconographic material, namely depictions of military campaigns against Arab tribes from the reigns of Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE; Barnett & Falkner 1962: pl. xiii–xvii, xxiv–xxviii), and Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE; see below), can be related to passages from written sources. Aribi, a term written with different spellings (Arabi, Aribu, Arubu), referring to the dwellers of the Syrian and North Arabian deserts, was a general designation for nomads, but could also refer to specific tribes in the Southern Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. In the Assyrian mental map, the region where Arabs dwelled represented the southern border of the empire, and was associated with a natural barrier, namely the desert.
-
Athirat is an Ancient South Arabian goddess. She was venerated in Qatabān and sporadically in the Jawf region and in Sabaʾ. She has been associated with the homonymous West Semitic goddesses – the Ugaritic Athirat and the Biblical Asherah.
-
In the period between the collapse of the Assyrian Empire in the last decades of the 7th century BCE and the consolidation of Babylonian rule at the beginning of the 6th century BCE, the political situation changed substantially. The desert border in Transjordan became defenceless, Egypt raised claim over the Levant, and in the east, the Medes and Persians rose as new political entities. These changes forced the Chaldean Kings Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BCE) and Nabonidus (556–539 BCE) to act against the Arabs in the Levant and in the Arabian Peninsula respectively. The latter was the most famous historical event of Nabonidus’ long and enigmatic stay at Taymāʾ.
-
Identified with ancient Madyan on the basis of Arabic sources, this oasis in north-western Arabia was already occupied in the Prehistoric period and comprises a rich variety of pre-Islamic and Islamic archaeological remains.
-
The Bahrain archipelago, in the Arabian-Persian Gulf, was the centre of two pre-Islamic cultural areas: Dilmun, from the late 3rd millennium BCE onwards, and Tylos, after the classical name the island is known as in ancient Greek sources.
-
A large-scale Arabian lineage group; sub-clans of the Bakr ibn Wāʾil lived between central Iraq's desert frontier and al-Yamāma in eastern Arabia at the dawn of Islam.