Pre-Islamic Arabia's forgotten city — Al-Ukhdud's Christian martyrs and Yemeni border landscapes in Arabia's ancient south
Najran is a city of 300,000 in Saudi Arabia's far southwest, bordering Yemen in a fertile valley watered by the Wadi Najran — one of the few permanently cultivated oases in the Arabian interior. The city's centrepiece is Al-Ukhdud, a UNESCO-listed pre-Islamic archaeological site in the city centre: a large walled urban settlement dating from the 4th–6th centuries AD that was an important Christian and Jewish community massacred by the Yemeni Himyarite king Dhu Nuwas in 523 AD — an event referenced in the Quran (Surah Al-Buruj: the People of the Ditch) and one of the earliest documented religi…
Najran was one of Arabia's most important pre-Islamic centres, a crossroads for the ancient incense trade routes linking Yemen's Hadramawt to the Hejaz and the Fertile Crescent. The 6th-century Himyarite massacre of Najran's Christian community was a significant early martyrdom event in Arabian Christianity, prompting Ethiopian intervention and the eventual incorporation of Najran into the Byzantine sphere of influence. The Ottoman-Yemeni-Saudi border disputes over Najran continued into the 20th century — it was formally incorporated into Saudi Arabia only in 1934 under Ibn Saud, and its Isma…