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NARRATOR: Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, Arabian horses and sculpted deserts. In the heart of this, hides an ancient mystery. Archaeologists Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani and Jérôme Rohmer are here to search for lost kingdoms. The AlUla region hides traces of an advanced pre-Islamic society, in the dark for more than 2,000 years. Who were the people living here? They come from a time of myth and legend. (yelling) Who destroyed them and why? Why were they buried here? The archaeologists are on a quest to uncover the secrets of these ancient kingdoms.
They will travel more than 2,000 years back in time, using cutting-edge technology to reconstruct what happened here, in the Ancient City of Dadan. (theme music playing). NARRATOR: An ancient site has been uncovered here, it turns out that this was part of a group of kingdoms full of mysteries. The royal commission of AlUla has called in archaeologists Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani and Jérôme Rohmer to lead a five-year archaeological mission in the Ancient City of Dadan.
They want to find out what happened here more than 2,000 years ago. JÉRÔME: What we're doing is trying to reconstruct ancient civilizations based on broken buildings and the dump left by people. NARRATOR: The AlUla region lies in the middle of the desert. The ancient kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan made the area an important oasis along trading routes. But, why was this valley the birthplace of ancient civilizations? Jérôme, Abdulrahman and their team want to investigate how these ancient kingdoms worked. Dadan is mentioned in the Bible, in the Book of Ezekiel, where it was noted as an important trading nation or kingdom.
2,000 years ago, an advanced civilization called the Nabataeans carved numerous monumental sandstone tombs at Hegra just 20 kilometers away from the Ancient City of Dadan. But now, archaeologists are looking for other Kingdoms, the ones that came before the Nabataeans. The civilizations that settled in the city of Dadan were called the Dadanites, followed by the Lihyanites, ruling the region from probably about 1,000 BCE to 200 BCE. NARRATOR: To sustain themselves in this dry environment, the caravans needed a place to recover and protect themselves from the blistering sun and potential robbers.
REBECCA: People in this arid part of the world, would be chasing the water supply largely, and grazing land for their herds. From watering hole to watering hole, basically, is how people would have travelled. So it's, would have been a highly desirable place. NARRATOR: Over thousands of years the city had many occupants, one of the main goals for the team is to figure out how many different civilizations lived here and to understand their importance. JÉRÔME: This area is a very complex area, and we haven't sorted out its organization and its phasing so far. And it seems that it's, it devolved a lot through time, it changed from phase to phase, and we want to investigate that further.
NARRATOR: At the outer limits of the city, Abdulrahman and archeologist Said uncover new clues related to the layout of Dadan. ABDULRAHMAN: This is, uh, uh, what we think is, uh, the southern entrance. If we can see here we have a very long wall from the east to the west. The entrance could, could, you know, contain a status in the, in the sides of the entrance. So, this is an able that the status where stand actually in the right and in the left of the entrance.
We have this part of status that appears now with some let's say, freeze of ibexes, I think it collapsed from somewhere from here maybe from those structures or from that wall actually on this orientation so there is something happened here but still we need to go deeper to understand. NARRATOR: An important city such as Dadan needed one thing in abundance, water. Abdulrahman has found ancient technology.
JÉRÔME: How could they bring this colossal piece of rock throughout the very dense urban neighborhood? Yeah, it's, it's really an amazing technical achievement. ABDULRAHMAN: So what we are trying to, to know here, we are going to go deeper. Understand the function of those additional walls. We hope that we will know when the first settlement has been established, and when they left actually from the site. So who took over and why?
NARRATOR: Many stones were needed to build a city this size. Jérôme goes to study a nearby quarry where anthropologist Chloé Girardi is leading the excavation. Could this be where the stone for the ancient basin came from? JÉRÔME: The whole area here is an ancient quarry, so a place where people would extract stone for construction. But this area is not only a quarry, you also have the features suggesting a religious and funerary context. NARRATOR: Jérôme and Chloé are trying to decipher the meaning of this ancient writing in Dadanitic script, the language of the local people at the time.
JÉRÔME: So. (speaking in native language). And here we have a. (speaking in native language). So it was. (speaking in native language). As a tomb. JÉRÔME: So, we'd very much like to excavate a, a tomb and its broader context. So this is a, an exceptional opportunity to do so, because those two inscriptions mentioned a tomb and a funerary monument, and statues associated to them. And we cannot see any tomb around, so the simplest hypothesis is that the tomb still lies below the ground, so it remains to be excavated.
NARRATOR: Jérôme and his team need to find other elements aside from the tomb such as evidence of ritual practices and a burial element so that they can confirm funerary practices in the city. Less than 1,000 meters away from the city of Dadan lies a breathtaking man-made construction the locals know as, "The Lion Tombs." Site co-director Abdulrahman is working to uncover information on the burial practices during the Dadanite and Lihyanite period.
Were the ancient inhabitants of Dadan buried in places like this? ABDULRAHMAN: So you can see a lot of holes, like, these ones all along of the rock face of the mountain. All of these holes are considered as tombs. The tombs you can see here are a proof that burial practice were very important, and it shows that people had a strong belief in the afterlife. NARRATOR: The effort it took to carve these out and the height of the tombs, shows the experts that they would probably have been meant for wealthy or important residents of Ancient Dadan.
ABDULRAHMAN: The problem is that all of these graves are empty, and all the evidence is gone or destroyed. So, there is a big chance that someone else took whatever was inside. NARRATOR: Evidence at these tombs suggest that some of the residents were wealthy, experts believed Dadan became so successful because they were master tradesmen, the businessmen of their time. And there was one product in particular that was highly desirable in the region. JÉRÔME: Dadan drew most of its wealth from controlling part of the trade route of incense. NARRATOR: From Ancient Egyptians to Babylonians, incense was thought to appease the gods and was used in ceremonial practices.
JÉRÔME: Incense is produced only in south Arabia, that is modern Yemen and Oman and in the horn of Africa. So you have a limited supply, a high demand, that makes it a very, very lucrative trade. NARRATOR: Clearly the experts believe that this was a prospering trading hub and successful kingdom, so why did they disappear? NARRATOR: For more than 30 years, two Saudi pioneers, Hussein Abdul Hassan and Said Al-Said, have studied the Dadanites and the Lihyanites script in the region.
These experts helped to unveil a site known as Jabal Ikmah, a place with hundreds of inscriptions, one of the largest concentrations found in AlUla. REBECCA: The Saudi pioneers really did quite literally groundbreaking work, at a period before pre-Islamic culture was something that most Saudis were interested in. One of the biggest contributions has been in the study of the ancient languages of the region. NARRATOR: Studying this more than 2,000 year old writing gives new insights to the heritage of Saudi Arabia, teaching us about daily life.
But also how their society was organized. REBECCA: Literacy is a huge hallmark for the Dadanite and Lihyanite civilization. The way in which we know most about them because we don't have any written records, any historical accounts, we just have this writing in stone. There's nothing on a papyri and full accounts of historical events. NARRATOR: Thanks to this early pioneering research from Hussein Abdul Hassan and Said Al-Said, experts have began to understand these ancient forgotten kingdoms.
Back at the quarry dig site the search for the tomb continues, what other clues could lead them to the tomb that the inscriptions mention? Chloé has uncovered another artifact, she calls site co-director Jérôme to discuss. JÉRÔME: Yeah, I think it is Dadanitic, but, uh, kind of, uh, more a cursive version of it? Actually the, the letter shapes are, are, are quite strange, so I can just read a couple of letters at the beginning.
It's. (speaking in native language). But then I must admit I'm a bit lost. This inscription can be very important because it can give us information about the identity of the person who was buried here, uh. So we're really eager to, to read it carefully. But I think we need a better specialist than me to, to read it. This is a very, very interesting discovery. CHLOÉ: So here, as you can see just, uh, we have this weird, uh, stone. Which called it an offering table. And this space could have been used to put some solid offering, but also liquid offering because, as you can see, there is this spout here.
And the fact that it was just there could mean that it was used in a ritual context. NARRATOR: Chloé's dig site at the quarry holds even more mysteries. Archaeozoology's Hervé Monchot is studying animal bones that were found onsite. Hervé believes that these are not just random bones but a handpicked selection with a very special meaning. JÉRÔME: It's maybe related to the offering of, of food to the gods. We know that because we found offering tables, and it's not unlikely that meat was also offered to the gods protecting the tombs, and these tibias may have been
part of such offerings to the gods. NARRATOR: In their search for answers about the ancient Dadanite and Lihyanite kingdoms, the survey team has told Jérôme of some inscriptions found on the mountain next to the Ancient City of Dadan. He goes to look for further clues about how these people lived, a surprise awaits him. (speaking in native language)
JÉRÔME: What's very interesting about these inscriptions, because there are several of them, is that they are not written in the local, uh, scripts and, and language. It's not Dadanitic. It is a South Arabian script and language called Minaic. It's the script and the language of the people from Minaean in Yemen, who were master merchants, and who controlled the trade of incense. NARRATOR: Like the Silk road, a trade route that linked China with the near east, this incense route was particularly lucrative in ancient times.
The Minaeans traded mainly in frankincense, myrrh and spices. JÉRÔME: So, there's really a very, uh, direct link between the, uh, trading colony here at Dadan and the Motherland Minaean in, in Yemen. NARRATOR: This Minaean trading colony left their mark with writing inscribed in stone, and may also have built other monumental constructions to showcase their wealth. JÉRÔME: So this is the, the last staircase linking the, the peaks in this area, and ending up on the highest peak, uh, over there. When we first saw the staircase, we thought that it was leading to something very important, to a very big construction,
because the investment that was done to build these staircases, carved in the rock, is really huge. NARRATOR: This staircase is a testimony of sheer craftsmanship. But where does it lead to? NARRATOR: In the AlUla region, lies Hegra, famous for its's many tombs carved by the Nabateans, French archaeologist Laïla Nehmé has been excavating in the region since 2008, she made a remarkable discovery here in 2019. NARRATOR: She found human bones buried in a tomb. But why was this person buried so high up in the mountain? LAÏLA: See?
LAÏLA: I think the person who was buried in the tomb, uh, must have been a guard. So guard meaning, uh, being stationed on a watch post, which I assume is this tower which is just in front of us. And the, the other thing that, um, points this to us is the, the fact that the mountain inscriptions which are carved on the, on the blank panel which is over there, they mention the fact that they are the guardians of Dadan. So they say. (speaking in native language). Dadan. From here, he has a beautiful view. And anybody who would come from the north, they would see.
We knew that the, in this kind of landscape, um, there were ways of, um, telling from one watch post to the other with fire signals. They would tell possibly the capital and tell Dadan, be ready, there are people coming who are not friendly. NARRATOR: Much like modern cities such as London or New York, Dadan was an important hub that people would pass through. How did the Dadanites and Lihyanites control access and trade to their ancient kingdoms and more importantly, how did they benefit from this?
Jérôme is investigating another nearer site, which could provide some answers. JÉRÔME: Here we are inside the territory of Dadan, so we're dealing more with something like a, a checkpoint, or, or something like that. This is the, the main access from the city to the mountain and from the mountain to the city. So obviously they wanted to, to control it in some way.
Dadan was one of these places where people needed to stop. One of the major sources of, of income for Dadan was probably the taxes which were levied on the caravans heading north or heading south, back to South Arabia with other merchandises. That's why Dadan, uh, did not remain a, a, a modest town in the middle of an oasis, and that's why it developed into this large city with monumental buildings and with a very developed oasis around it. NARRATOR: Experts have learned that these people were leading a good life during the Dadanite and Lihyanite Kingdoms, but this would've been impossible to maintain without local agricultural production.
Soil specialist, Louise Purdue is investigating at the oasis nearby the Ancient City of Dadan. LOUISE: Each time we see a pile of dirt pretty much we always try to see a different story in the pile of dirt so we scrape things and see is it cultivated or not? And that is actually often how we pinpoint areas that could be interesting. NARRATOR: How did all these people sustain themselves and grow food for such large settlements nearby? LOUISE: So right here we have, um, what we call a beautiful agricultural soil and this is indicative of an ancient surface which was located right here, and the base of the layer which is located right here on top of which people settled
and developed agriculture. NARRATOR: Louise has finally found traces of agriculture dating back more than 2,000 years, the same period Jérôme is investigating at the dig site. JÉRÔME: So, this means that there were fully fledged palm trees growing in the area of Dadan so we're dealing with fertile, productive, uh, agricultural soils. NARRATOR: The archeologists are closer to finding out where the staircase carved into the rocks led and what it was use for.
JÉRÔME: When we first climbed the, the staircase we found virtually no built structure at the top of the peak. JÉRÔME: This place has definitely no economic function. It's inaccessible area, so nobody would path through here for trade reasons. NARRATOR: The people that built this must have gone to a huge effort to carve this monumental staircase into the rocks, so what would they have used this place for?
JÉRÔME: So I think that the, the only function left for this place is religious. And indeed, inscriptions confirm that people came here to worship the Minaean gods. So it seems that we have here just an open air sanctuary. People just wanted to, to be on this high place, maybe to be closer to the gods. But no real temple was, was found. (thunder rumbling) Chloé's area is just down the cliff. And when it rains, uh, there's a real torrent pouring over there. Water can infiltrate into the walls and make them collapse. When you're excavating a site, with the archaeological layers exposed, rain can do a lot of damage.
NARRATOR: Chloé and her team have discovered an important statue, they must now act fast to take it away for protection. CHLOÉ: Now we are just going to dig just under the statue so we can remove it easily. I think it's gonna be complicated to have it, uh, without any trouble. JÉRÔME: So we have the statue. We found it. We have the cultic activities because we found all these, uh, cultic artifacts in their original context. And so I don't see any reason why the third component mentioned by the inscription,
namely the tomb, would be missing. So the tomb is probably not far away. NARRATOR: The statue is taken away for protection, but the rest of the dig site is still exposed and could be damaged by the rain. (thunder rumbling) A few hours later, the inevitable happens. The team can only hope the rain won't damage the archaeological site. (pouring rain)
NARRATOR: After a night of bad weather, Chloé and her team are assessing the damage to the dig site. CHLOÉ: It seems okay. It seems that there is no, no water underneath the, the plastic sheets. So I think we did well to, to protect everything. NARRATOR: So far the team have found inscriptions describing a nearby tomb, a statue and some offering tables at the quarry dig site. As the season progresses, the hunt for the elusive tomb continues. But site co-director Jérôme is starting to get concerned.
JÉRÔME: We have to wait for the soil to dry up before we resume the excavations. We have a, a limited amount of time, so, um, if we lose three days of work because of the rain, um, it, it's really, really problematic. NARRATOR: While the team waits for the soil to dry out, another archeologist, Yan Aksoy, an expert in ancient warfare, metal weaponry, and the rock art of Saudi Arabia is here to look for traces of war in the kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan. Who were their enemies? How would they have defended themselves? Yan is studying some ancient drawings carved into the rocks.
ÖMER: So, uh, rock arts gives us a window to look into how the ordinary people were thinking about warfare in the past. Well, here we see a foot archer, and this is a very typical way of displaying warriors in the Northwest Arabian rock art. So holding a bow and, of course, it has the same kind of dagger like figure with the similar kind of pummel. The rock art in this region, they offer us information about the weaponry, possible tactics, how they were engaging in conflict, which is usually missing in the archaeological evidence. NARRATOR: The landscape made it hard for human life to sustain in this arid environment.
Dadan was next to the oasis, and this attracted a lot of attention. ÖMER: Nomadic tribes would target Dadan, or would see Dadan as a lucrative, uh, target in the times of drought, because as you can see there will be really few places to graze their herds. They will be starving, they will need water sources, so this will be also attractive for the Nomadic tribes to target this region. NARRATOR: During warfare, troops needed to be mobile, but the landscape posed some challenges. ÖMER: Looking at this rough terrain, we could assume that wheeled vehicles like chariots and carts were not liked to be used.
The horse was a major war animal. You can maneuver your forces much faster than the foot soldiers, and attack from different directions, which was important thing for the race. NARRATOR: They were using the landscape to hide from their rivals, and to gain a strategic advantage. ÖMER: In such an open terrain, people would see the hills as key locations to observe the landscape, to search out for raiding parties, and also to keep an eye on their possessions.
NARRATOR: Jérôme discovers a large construction in the middle of the mountain pass, but what is its purpose? JÉRÔME: So here we have a massive stone wall preserved to a height of four meters here, and it is built on the pass, blocking one of the largest valleys leading to the Ancient City of Dadan. The wall spans the whole width of the, of the valley, it is approximately 85 meters long. There surely was a reason why they built so massive walls here. We're probably dealing with a defensive wall, which was meant to, uh, block the access to the ancient city.
NARRATOR: Much like the Great Wall of China, this large wall was not built to protect them from regular raiding parties. This suggests threats on a larger scale. But who were they at war with? JÉRÔME: The Dadanites obviously had to protect themselves from, from other people, uh, for instance we, we know from inscriptions found at Tayma, the neighboring oasis located 150 kilometers to the Northeast, that there were walls between Tayma and, and Dadan.
These two oasis are both important stations on the incense route. They're very close to each other, and they were probably competing for the control of the northern branch of the incense route. (yelling) (smashing) NARRATOR: There is no evidence of a victor in the rivalry between Tayma and Dadan but we know that another hostile threat was approaching Dadan. JÉRÔME: Something happened afterwards, but we don't know what exactly because, well, the new power was, uh, hostile to this former dynasty and wanted to erase it.
NARRATOR: This new threat was even bigger and it came from outside Arabia. The Ancient King of Babylon, Nabonidus, started to move toward the region, probably to take control of the trade routes. King Nabonidus had a strong force and conquered large parts of Northern Arabia all the way south to Tayma. But what happened to the city of Dadan? JÉRÔME: We have several written accounts of Nabonidus' campaign to Northwest Arabia. We know from these sources that Nabonidus killed several kings in these oasis. And one of the sources, uh, mentions, uh, the king of Dadan but unfortunately, uh,
this text is incomplete. The text doesn't specify what he did to the king of Dadan, but it's very likely that he, he overthrew him and killed him. We actually don't know what were the actual consequences of Nabonidus' campaign on Dadan. We don't know if he destroyed the city, if he just took it over peacefully. We have no clue and we hope that we get clues from the excavations. NARRATOR: Back at the Ancient City of Dadan, archeologists are using advanced technology to help them understand the history of the ancient settlement.
(camera clicking) NARRATOR: Photogrammetry is the scientific process of recording multiple, overlapping, georeferenced photographs and converting them into a 3D model. MAN: Stop. NARRATOR: Co-director, Abdulrahman has travelled to a storage facility in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi, to take a closer look at a monumental statue discovered in Dadan, dating to the Dadanite or Lihyanite period.
JÉRÔME: From a cultural point of view it's, it's very interesting because we see an original artistic culture developing by borrowing elements from all the neighboring civilizations and combining them into something unique. NARRATOR: At the quarry dig site Jérôme and Chloé bring in Fokelien Kootstra, an epigraphist, who specializes in deciphering inscriptions in ancient north Arabian languages, like the mysterious one they found earlier in the dig season. Will this get them any closer to finding the tomb? FOKELIEN: So we have. (speaking in native language). Then we have. (speaking in native language). Who we saw on the inscriptions above as well.
JÉRÔME: Yeah. FOKELIEN: Yeah, maybe. (speaking in native language). JÉRÔME: Are these names? FOKELIEN: They should be. (speaking in native language). FOKELIEN: But it's. That's very different than what we usually get. It's crush and destroy. That means that. (speaking in native language). Has to be some sort of deity because he would be the only one who could do the destruction. JÉRÔME: Okay. FOKELIEN: And.
JÉRÔME: So let. (speaking in native language). Crush and destroy? FOKELIEN: May. (speaking in native language). Crush and destroy the descendants. And then this, so we go to the next line. JÉRÔME: Mm-hmm. FOKELIEN: And it's a curse. JÉRÔME: A curse? Amazing. CHLOÉ: Yeah. JÉRÔME: I guess you're cursed then. CHLOÉ: But you are too. JÉRÔME: This new inscription is very exciting because it's a curse against whoever would do something to it. So, yeah, people try to protect the tombs as much as they could.
NARRATOR: Does this curse mean that the Tomb is nearby? With the end of the dig season approaching, will they be able to find it in time? NARRATOR: With the end of the dig season approaching Jérôme puts all of his hopes on the quarry dig site. It's their last chance to find the tomb before the end of the season. JÉRÔME: Yeah, so in Chloé's area, there's a bit of stress in the air, of course, because we all want to find that tomb by the end of the season, uh, but I'm trying, uh, not to put too much pressure on her. So, yes, it's stressful and this is frustrating.
NARRATOR: Early the next morning Chloé Girardi requests both directors on site. CHLOÉ: We started to remove some, some stones, I thought were part of the quarry and below those stones we, we found, a finger. JÉRÔME: Chloé just made a, a very interesting discovery. She found a, a hand sticking out from a layer of stones. So it looks like we have a burial here. ABDULRAHMAN: I hope that the body will be in a good state it is not to very fragile. CHLOÉ: But the fact that we have at least one burial here mean that we are in a funerary context, so that's quite interesting for me, yes.
NARRATOR: After ten long weeks of excavating, the reward is huge. They have finally found the elusive tomb they ' ve been looking for. JÉRÔME: It, it will provide a clue to the, the burial practices and the, the funerary rituals, um, which were in use in Ancient Dadan. CHLOÉ: Here the, the bones are very badly preserved, so when I just brush them, all the, the bone is, uh, crushing. So, uh, we have to be very careful.
NARRATOR: It was buried under layers of sand and stone, hidden from daylight for probably more than 2,000 years. What did the archaeologists learn from this new discovery? JÉRÔME: So Chloé will do a thorough study of these bones, and she'll be able to determine the age of the deceased, um, his or her sex, and probably detect some illnesses which might give us some clues to the health status of the ancient population. CHLOÉ: This individual was fully grown when he died, so it's an adult. We will say that he's at least 20 years.
NARRATOR: Thanks to this seasons findings the team knows more about the Ancient Kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan, the archaeologists will continue to investigate this and other mysteries during the next dig season. JÉRÔME: What's really fascinating with archaeology is that you never reach the absolute truth. You always have to be cautious, and never pretend that you found the truth. You're only making a hypothesis.
NARRATOR: The region of AlUla is only starting to reveal its secrets about the lost treasures of North Arabia. Captioned by Cotter Media Group.
