Third edition of AlUla Arts Festival champions public art and cross-cultural dialogue arabnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from arabnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Discovery of immense fortifications dating back 4,000 years in north-western Arabia – Popular Archeology popular-archaeology.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from popular-archaeology.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
<p>The North Arabian Desert oases were inhabited by sedentary populations in the 4<sup>th</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup> millennia BCE. A fortification enclosing the Khaybar Oasis—one of the longest known going back to this period—was just revealed by a team of scientists from the CNRS and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). This new walled oasis is, along with that of Tayma, one of the two largest in Saudi Arabia. While a number of walled oases dating back to the Bronze Age had already been documented, this major discovery sheds new light on human occupation in north-western Arabia, and provides a better grasp of local social complexity during the pre-Islamic period.</p>
<p>Cross-referencing field surveys and remote sensing data with architectural studies, the team estimated the original dimensions of the fortifications at 14.5 kilometres in length, between 1.70 and 2.40 metres in thickness, and approximately 5 metres