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A small 4,400 - year - old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age multitude in this region were irksome to urbanise , unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia , a raw study witness .
archeologist see the internet site near the city of Al-‘Ula in the Hejaz region of westerly Saudi Arabia and telephone it " al - Natah . " The settlement covered about 3.7 acres ( 1.5 hectares ) , " include a central territory and nearby residential district surrounded by protective bulwark , " the research worker enounce in a statement . But the town , which was occupied starting around 2400 B.C. , was diminished , with a population of only around 500 people , the team noted in a study , bring out Wednesday ( Oct. 30 ) in the journalPLOS One .
A virtual 3D reconstruction of al-Natah, a Bronze Age settlement in Saudi Arabia.
The residential surface area had a magnanimous amount of pottery and dig stones , as well as the clay of at least 50 dwellings that may have been made of earthen material . The central country had two building that may have been used as administrative expanse , the squad wrote in the newspaper publisher . In the western part of the cardinal area , a necropolis was found . It has large and high circular tombs that archaeologist call " stepped pillar tombs . "
No object lesson of committal to writing have been establish so far at the site , study tether authorGuillaume Charloux , an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research ( CNRS ) , told Live Science in an email . Researchers have unearth only a few trace of cereals , but based on finds at other sites it ’s likely that al - Natah ’s mass grew crop near the land site , Charloux enounce .
The town and its nearby area were surrounded by a 9 - mile - long ( 14.5 km ) bulwark , which would haveprovided defending team from raidscarried out by nomads , the squad wrote in an earlier theme write in theJournal of Archaeological Science : paper .
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The townsfolk was give up sometime between 1500 and 1300 B.C. , but researchers are n’t sure why this materialize . " It ’s a pertinent interrogation that I ca n’t really answer at the mo , " Charloux said , noting that " we have very few clew about the last form of occupation . "
Slow urbanization
At the time the town was inhabited , city were flourishing inMesopotamia , Egyptand the easterly Mediterranean . Research from al - Natah and other sites indicates that urbanisation on the Arabian Peninsula moved at a slower pace .
" Settlements in northerly Arabia were in a transitional stage of urbanization during the third to 2nd millenary [ B.C. ] , " the researchers pronounce in the statement . They called this phase " low-down urbanization , " describing it as a transitional stage between pastoralism , in which nomadic masses follow grazing kingdom for stock , and complex urban settlement .
" While urbanisation began in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the fourth millenniumB.C. , our study tends to show that social complexity increased late in compass north - western Arabia , " Charloux said , noting that urbanization did n’t start on the peninsula until the 2d half of the third millennium B.C. , when some groups on the Arabian peninsula adopted a sedentary lifestyle and come out using agribusiness on larger scales . People in Egypt andMesopotamia adopted sedentary lifestylesin earlier times .
Compared to the large Bronze Age cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt , settlement in Saudi Arabia tend to be smaller . " These were small townsfolk connected to networks of monolithic ramparts surrounding the large local oases , " Charloux said .
Juan Manuel Tebes , the theater director of the Center of Studies of Ancient Near Eastern story at the Catholic University of Argentina , praise the inquiry .
" The archaeological undertaking at Khaybar is a most significant study that follows and expands the conclusions of dig and surveys that have been carry out in magnetic north - west Saudi Arabia during the last 20 yr , " Tebes , who was not involved in the study , told Live Science in an e-mail .
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He take note that other projects in the region , such as the Saudi - German expedition at the city of Tayma and the Saudi - Austrian expedition at Qurayyah , have also supply valuable information about the region ’s archeology . For case , excavations at Tayma have revealed thousands of geezerhood of occupation and include remains that date to when a Babylonian queen named Nabonidus ( reigned 556 to 539 B.C. ) lived in the area .
Robert Andrew Carter , a senior archeology academic and fieldwork development specialist at Qatar Museums who was not involved in the field , also commended the team ’s work . " We only have a unelaborated apprehension of the Bronze Age and the origin of urbanism in the [ Hejez sphere of western Saudi Arabia ] and this sketch goes a long fashion in provide master data , and improving our theoretical understanding , " Carter secernate Live Science in an email .
