Brave new world explores old
Ancient Arabic history bolsters Islamic society, not undermines it as some think
THE OMENS were ominous. Rebels had fired a rocket at the airport. The Crown Prince had purged 11 princes – effectively his own siblings – and scores of top officials in what was officially a hammer blow against corruption.
Into all of this, archaeologists from around the world were flying into the first ever Saudi Archaeology Convention – a three-day colloquium looking not just at Islamic history, but pre-history.
As South Africa’s Lee Berger pointed out on the sidelines of the King Abdul Aziz historical centre last week: “When it comes down to most things, hardcore fundamentalism – wherever it is – will always conflict with science”.
It’s something that the head of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, Prince Sultan bin Salman, has spent much of his life trying to fight. The past 10 years, in particular, have seen more than 30 multi-national, multi-disciplinary archaeological teams working across and throughout the kingdom; finding antiquities, then preserving and analysing them for the benefit of the generations to come.
Some of the projects include the restoration of the historic Hejaz railway, which was built in 1900 and ran from Damascus to the holy city of Medina. It was supposed to go on to Mecca to spare the pilgrims their arduous 40-day journey but, because of the war and TE Lawrence’s (the famous Lawrence of Arabia) continual efforts to blow it up, it never did – and soon lapsed into disuse. The new line will run through to Mecca, while the old station in Medina, the workshops and some of the old trains have been restored to the benefit of pilgrims and now tourists.
Other projects have looked at the Bronze Age, forcing scientists to review the popular view of oases as palm trees and camel herds.
The Arabian peninsula is now being seen as a fully functional cultural and economic highway, linking the Levant with Egypt and Babylonia, well before the much storied incense routes a millennium later. Going back further in time, there have been significant palaeolithic sites, some dating back a million years, showing incontrovertible evidence of a green Arabia, redolent with life, from fish to birds, hordes of hippos and giant elephants supported by a network of at least 10 000 lakes served by a network of rivers. There’s evidence of early man hunting animals.
The conclusions are that the peninsula was the gateway not just to the rest of the world for original man, but into Africa too, overturning accepted theories of human dispersal, putting Arabia right into the foreground of academic debate.
Elsewhere in the kingdom, rock art has provided a fascinating glimpse into the past: pictures of men riding elephants and texts in Arabic, Hebrew and Greek written not by visitors, but by permanent populations. The Arabic script, examples of which predate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad to whom the holy Qur’an was divinely revealed, is only one of the reasons Sultan feels vindicated.
Remembering the genesis of his fascination with archaeology as a youngster, he told how he had worked to restore an old clay home on his family farm.
“Adam was the father of mankind. God told the angels, ‘I’ll make a man from clay’,” Sultan mused, “Adam and Eve were distorted stories that we’d quote from the Qur’an and say the first human house was in Mecca, now we know that there were people there at the beginning of time, just as we know Ibrahim rebuilt the ka’aba and how Abraha destroyed it riding on the back of elephants.”
The prince’s passion is to see the Saudis speaking about and debating archaeology and the origin of man with the same passion they now give ecology, which was also once taboo. His speech found a ready ear among his predominantly Saudi audience, many of whom were leaders, both of the cloth and secular. This once highly conservative and religious society is changing following the appointment of Sultan’s brother Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince in June, becoming heir apparent to the ageing King Salman in the process.
Known as MBS, the crown prince is only 32 and has taken a highly public stand to modernise the country, starting with allowing women to drive cars. Many foreign news websites were stunned by his summary swoop on many of his family a fortnight ago, though, ostensibly to curb corruption, seeing it as a cover to eradicate any possible threat to his ultimate succession to the throne, but for a young Saudi graduate, the arrests could not have come at a better time.
“These people, you know, were untouchable. This sends a very real message,” he said.
He hopes they will be brought to book. One of those arrested is a minister who squandered millions set aside for flood relief and then allowed unscrupulous developers to build houses for poor people on the floodline. When it rained, people perished – 500 of them. But none of the guilty were ever brought to book.
For him and many other young Saudis, MBS is a hero, a visionary and a beacon of hope. For the old guard he’s a danger. Outside of the Middle East, opinion is split. Some are wary, others think he’s a warmonger in the thrall of the most unpopular man in modern history, US President Donald Trump.
MBS is an unashamed domestic reformer. Women can now drive in the kingdom – for the first time ever. Foreign women still don their abayas or full-length cloaks on arrival at King Khalid International Airport, but they no longer wear their hijabs as shawls, only as scarves, leaving their heads bare – something that would have been unthinkable a year ago. The infamous religious police are nowhere near, nor as powerful as they once were.
At King Abdul Aziz historical centre his brother, Sultan, was taking pains to paint his vision for the future; of a people that knows the scientific underpinnings to its heritage as well as the heritage itself. The discoveries, said the prince, should not detract in any way from Islam – on the contrary, they should further bolster the Islamic belief that the revelations to the prophet were to be the last and sealing religion for all mankind and just why, scientifically, this had occurred in Arabia and why the language was in Arabic.
Sultan is keen though to ensure that the discoveries should not just spur debate across Saudi Arabia and beyond, but also stimulate a tourism economy, which explained the presence of Berger at the convention.
The man behind the Homo Naledi discovery has never worked in Saudi Arabia, but is the consummate modern scientist able to blend scholarship with an unprecedented showmanship to make his work accessible across an array of media platforms from traditional to social, that puts flesh on the bones of his discoveries, unlike other archaeologists who tend to do the exact opposite.
The prince’s talk, in Arabic, about the need for scientific discovery and the need to conserve and preserve, was immensely brave, Berger said.
“The Qur’an has plenty of arguments for what we do. Look,” he said, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket, “I wrote this down in my hotel room last night: ‘Roam the earth and observe how the creation was initiated (29:20)’. There can be no greater call to conservative Islamic society to know their pre-history – and not to destroy it.
“We know of fundamentalist Islamic movements that want to destroy artefacts from pre-history. The prince – and the King – have taken a very bold and a very brave, incredibly necessary, stand.”
The discoveries of the antiquities should spawn a tourism economy that could benefit the kingdom, Berger said: “We all know that oil can’t last forever, but there’s the Mada’in Saleh, with a necropolis that’s bigger than the one in Petra in Jordan, that’s as impressive and yet unknown. Only 160 000 tourists visited last year, that number should be 3 million a year and that’s just one of the sites.”
Berger wants a chance for his team to work in Saudi.
“I’ve been fascinated by the Arabian Peninsula ever since a friend of the family’s returned home from working with Aramco (the petrol company) and gave me, a little boy in rural Georgia in the US, a fossil. Anyone can look at a map and see that this region must have been a critical player between Eurasia and Africa.”
“I want to do here what we have been doing in South Africa that the world so admires, working with young scientists, developing capabilities, forging international bonds for scientific co-operation so that everyone can benefit.
“My mission is to inspire a new generation of explorers to understand that things aren’t rare, they just demand people to look for them. I want to take the object lessons that we’ve learnt, not just about creating tourism, but getting millions and millions of people enthused about palaeo-anthropology.
Human evolution, he said, wasn’t the lineal version seen on T-shirts of apes walking into men: “Everything we’ve been finding in southern Africa says that isn’t true. It’s complex and dynamic on a multi-continental level. This place has all the potential and me and my team (in Johannesburg) are very good at finding it. My instinct tells me the potential is tremendous.
“This place has all the makings of a perfect storm.”
Roam the earth and observe how the creation was initiated