The bazaar is redolent with the fragrance of spices, frankincense smoke and vendors calling every passerby to look at their wares. A solitary musician plays his harp in the corner, and the merchant prods his horses to make haste – this is how an ancient city in Al-Ula in northwestern Saudi Arabia would have looked like 2000 years ago. These sights and smells of bygone Arabian towns may no longer be visible, but the stone carvings and inscriptions of Jabal Ikmah paint a vivid picture of life and culture from that era.
Located just 20 minutes north of the Old Town of Al-Ula, Jabal Ikmah, or the “Mountain of Wisdom”, is a narrow and deep gorge in the middle of a cluster of red sandstone mountains. The valley walls and fallen boulders are home to hundreds of rock inscriptions, many over 3000 years old, which give rich insights into religious, economic and social life from that era.
“In antiquity, many people travelled through Al-Ula and some made it their home like the people of the Kingdoms of the Dadanites and Lihyanites”, says Wedad Yaseen, a local tour guide who works for the Royal Commission for Al-Ula (RCU)--dedicated to preserving and protecting the culture and heritage of this ancient region. “They left their marks on these stones for us to decipher thousands of years later”, she adds.
Between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC, the capital city of Dadan rose to great power in northern Arabia. Reason: the burgeoning trade of frankincense from southern Arabia to Egypt and beyond. Dadan, right in the middle of the trade route, made huge profits from frankincense tolls. During this prosperous era, writing and art developed—the evidence of which is still visible on the mountains today.
“Several stone inscriptions at Jabal Ikmah are about people giving offerings to deities, mostly the Lihyanite deity Dhu Ghaybat, and asking for either prosperity or forgiveness”, Yaseen says. For instance, there are numerous carvings that depict prayers for rain by both men and women who owned agricultural land in Al-Ula.
“In a desert environment rain is vital for sustenance. People often performed a ceremony called the zll for their palm trees and other crops,” write Dr. Munirah Almushawh, Archaeology Survey Manager, RCU. In another example, Minaean traders from Yemen wrote about their offerings to Dhu Ghaybat, asking for profits and prosperity.
It is interesting how traders, musicians, artists, and penitents often poured their hearts onto the red sandstone cliffs of Jabal Ikmah, engraving tales about ceremonies, prayers, offerings and myriad rituals with a purpose to please the deities. However, sometimes these stones were etched without a purpose, as if to simply represent the natural world in art. “There are so many drawings that depict animals like ibexes, deer, cattle, camels and even ostriches,” Yaseen says, pointing to the art on the rock. Hunting and farming tools like spears and urns also make it to the rocky canvas.
An interesting carving is that of a musical instrument similar to a harp, which points to the importance of music and entertainment thousands of years ago. Dr. Almushawh writes, “Each inscription is a window to the past, viewing a vibrant picture of their way of life, beliefs, and social structures.”
Majority of Jabal Ikmah’s epigraphs are in the ancient Dadanitic script including some in Aramaic, Thamudic, Minaic and Nabataean. According to Yaseen, “this points to a rich intercultural dialogue between people of different regions and communities.” It is not hard to see how this large collection of scripts in Jabal Ikmah serves as a key connection between modern Arabic and its predecessors—bearing witness to the evolution of languages and alphabets in this region.
Today, Jabal Ikmah has one of the largest concentrations of Dadanitic and Lihyanite inscriptions in the world. These engravings are remarkably well-preserved owing to their location inside a natural gorge which has not been affected by the vagaries of time. This has not only bagged Jabal Ikmah a spot on the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register but also earned it the unique moniker of an “open-air library”, also unofficially known as the “whispering canyon”.
Despite being a place of great historical significance, Jabal Ikmah still remains a hidden gem in Al-Ula. Walking through this open-air library of inscriptions and rock art is like leafing through the worn pages of an old book that is still whispering tales of yore!