Pre-Islamic Arabia
The era of pre-Islamic Arabia encompasses human history in all parts of the Arabian Peninsula before the rise of Islam. During the prehistoric period, humans first migrate and settle into the peninsula. In the early first millennium BC, writing and recorded history are introduced into the Peninsula, along with the rise of the first kingdoms in the south. In the early seventh century, the pre-Islamic period quickly comes to a close, from the beginning of Muhammad's preachings of Islam, to his establishment of the first Islamic state in 622 in Medina, and the subsequent conquest and political unification of the peninsula shortly after Muhammad's death, in the 630s. Some strands of Islamic tradition interpret the pre-Islamic period as a barbaric, morally un-enlightened period known as the "Jahiliyyah", but historians have not adopted this convention.
Pre-Islamic Arabia's demographics included both nomadic and settled populations, the latter of which eventually developed into distinctive civilizations. Eastern Arabia was home to the region's earliest civilizations, such as Dilmun, which is attested as a prominent trade partner of Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age; and its later pre-Islamic history is marked by the reign of consecutive Iranian empires, including those of the Parthians and the Sasanians. From the early 1st millennium BCE onward, South Arabia became home to a number of kingdoms, such as Sheba and Ma'in; while part of North Arabia became home to the Nabataean Kingdom, which was conquered and annexed by the Roman Empire in 106, becoming the province Roman Arabia, and starting a period of Roman influence.
Arabian tribes and the southern kingdoms structured much of pre-Islamic society, and memory of these societies is filtered today through Islamic literature and pre-Islamic poetry. Pre-Islamic tribes engaged in warfare and formed alliances, and for most of history, practiced Arabian religions. Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia was diverse. Polytheism was prevalent for most of the region's history, with beliefs and practices having a common origin in ancient Semitic religion. Christianity, Judaism, and monotheism became common in the region in the fourth century, a trend driven by Christian proselytization from the Eastern Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Aksum, as well as the conversion to monotheism and Judaism by the elite of the Himyarite Kingdom.
Territory
The Arabian Peninsula is a region of great ecological and environmental diversity and gave rise to distinct forms of human occupation throughout the region. It has an area of 2.5 million km2 and includes the modern-day regions of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and parts of Jordan. The Peninsula has 7,000 km of coastline, and most of the interior is covered by vast wastelands called dunes.Before Islam, the territory implied by the word Arabia was different across many surviving sources, but it was not a synonym for the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, in the earliest sources, it encompassed both the peninsula, in addition to the steppe and desert wastes on the borders of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. For Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian in the 5th century BC, "Arabia" refers to the areas as far out as eastern Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Negev. The Arabâya mentioned in Persian administrative sources includes the territory described by Herodotus, in addition to the areas of the Syrian desert. For Pliny the Elder, the Syrian desert itself was the territory of the "Arabia of the nomads".
Prehistoric Arabia
Prehistoric Arabia is the era of the history of the Arabian peninsula before its earliest documented civilizations. Early human migration into Arabia took place during the Paleolithic period. Human occupation was not continuous, but punctuated, heavily influenced by changing patterns of rainfall and precipitation, resulting in expansions, contractions, and migrations of early Arabian populations of humans. Among the earliest human settlements that have been found date back to 240–190 thousand years ago, and the oldest human fossils known from Arabia are over 80,000 years old. The earliest human populations likely migrated into Arabia from Africa, settling into the Eastern coastline. In the Neolithic period, Arabia witnessed a large demographic expansion, and humans began to widely settle the south and inland regions of Arabia. Eventually, by 6,000 years ago, the Arabian economy transitioned into one of nomadic pastoralism, but it continues to be debated if this technology spread into Arabia through the migration of Levantine populations where this practice had already been established, or if it was an internal development that may have come about from trade with the Levant.Eastern Arabia
Eastern Arabia is a geographic region that generally refers to the territories covered by modern-day Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the east coast of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. The main language in this region among sedentary peoples was Aramaic, Arabic, and to some degree, Persian. The Syriac language also came to be spoken as a liturgical language.Many religions were practiced in the area. Practitioners included Arab Christians, Aramean Christians, Persian-speaking Zoroastrians and Jewish agriculturalists. One hypothesis holds that the contemporary Baharna are descendants of Arameans, Jews, and Persians from the area. Zoroastrianism was also present in Eastern Arabia. The Zoroastrians of Eastern Arabia were known as "Majoos" in pre-Islamic times. The sedentary dialects of Eastern Arabia, including Bahrani Arabic, were influenced by Akkadian, Aramaic and Syriac languages.
Bronze Age (3000 – 1300 BCE)
During the Bronze Age, most of Eastern Arabia was part of the land of Dilmun, including modern-day Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the adjacent coast of Saudi Arabia. Its capital was located in Bahrain. Dilmun is the earliest recorded civilization from Eastern Arabia, mentioned in written records in the 3rd millennium BCE, with archaeological evidence indicating activity from the fourth to first millennia BCE, its importance faltering after 1800. Dilmun is regarded as one of the oldest ancient civilizations in the Middle East in general.The Dilmun civilization was an important trading center which at the height of its power controlled the Persian Gulf trading routes. This was enabled by a number of natural advantages to the region, and part of this was its abundant underground water supplies and easy anchorages for ships. It became a center for long-distance trade and all types of commodities passed through it, including a variety of exotic goods. As a result, Dilmun became legendary in Mesopotamian literature. The Sumerians regarded Dilmun as holy land. The Sumerians described Dilmun as a paradise garden in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Sumerian tale of the garden paradise of Dilmun may have been an inspiration for the Garden of Eden story. Dilmun, sometimes described as "the place where the sun rises" and "the Land of the Living", is the scene of some versions of the Eridu Genesis, and the place where the deified Sumerian hero of the flood, Utnapishtim, was taken by the gods to live forever. Thorkild Jacobsen's translation of the Eridu Genesis calls it "Mount Dilmun" which he locates as a "faraway, half-mythical place".
File:Baranamtarra Dilmun AO 13725.jpg|Sumerian cuneiform tablet recording shipments of wool and silver by Queen Lagash to Dilmun c. 2350 BCE found in a tel in Girsu|right|thumb|250px
Dilmun was mentioned in two letters dated to the reign of Burna-Buriash II recovered from Nippur, during the Kassite dynasty of Babylon. These letters were from a provincial official, Ilī-ippašra, in Dilmun to his friend Enlil-kidinni in Mesopotamia. The names referred to are Akkadian. These letters and other documents, hint at an administrative relationship between Dilmun and Babylon at that time. Following the collapse of the Kassite dynasty, Mesopotamian documents make no mention of Dilmun with the exception of Assyrian inscriptions dated to 1250 BCE which proclaimed the Assyrian king to be king of Dilmun and Meluhha. Assyrian inscriptions recorded tribute from Dilmun. There are other Assyrian inscriptions during the first millennium BCE indicating Assyrian sovereignty over Dilmun. Dilmun was also later on controlled by the Kassite dynasty in Mesopotamia.
In 19th and early 20th centuries, some historians believed that the Phoenicians originated from Eastern Arabia, particularly Dilmun. However, this theory has since been abandoned.
Iron Age (1300 – 330 BCE)
Upon the Late Bronze Age collapse, the major powers across the Near East lost much of their power and this allowed many smaller and far-flung states to become more independent and a number of minor states to emerge. In addition, new scripts and alphabets were developed, which were of great utility to merchants for producing contracts and conducting other and related economic affairs. In turn, the Middle Assyrian Empire became much more prominent and undertook an aggressively expansionist policy. In the second half of the 13th century BCE, Tukulti-Ninurta I took on the title "king of Dilmun and Meluhha". Dilmun disappears from Assyrian sources until the reign of Sargon II, king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Here and across the next century, Dilmun appears as a polity that is not directly ruled by Assyria, although it sends tribute to the Assyrian rulers in exchange for peace and independence. When the Neo-Babylonian Empire overthrew the Assyrian Empire, its influence on Dilmun is also attested. Finally, Dilmun falls under the sway of the Persians after the rise of the Achaemenid Empire which replaces the Babylonian one.Greco-Roman/Parthian period (330 BCE – 240 CE)
After Alexander the Great returned from his conquests that reached India, settling in Babylonia, it is said by the historian Arrian that he was turning his attention towards an invasion of the Arabian peninsula. Although he died too soon for this campaign to take place, Alexander did dispatch three intelligence-gathering missions to gather knowledge about the peninsula, and it was these missions that greatly enhanced information about the peninsula to the Hellenistic world. Alexander, and his Seleucid successors who took control of the relevant region near Arabia after his death, took an interest to Arabia because of trade happening there involving luxury products.Image:Asia 001ad.jpg|thumb|300px|Gerrha and its neighbors in 1 CE.In this context, Gerrha was an ancient city of great importance in Eastern Arabia. It was located on the west side of the Persian Gulf. Soon after the conquests of Alexander the Great, it became the most important center of trader for the Hellenistic world in the Gulf region, known for its transport of Arabian aromatics and goods from India further away. It retained its prominence until the first centuries of the common era. While there is no certainty as to which archaeological site the Gerrha of Greek sources can be identified with, the most prominent candidates have been Thaj and Hagar. The Greeks also described Bahrain in their writings, referring to it by their exonym, Tylos. Tylos was the center of pearl trading, when Nearchus came to discover it serving under Alexander the Great. From the 6th to 3rd century BCE Bahrain was included in Persian Empire by Achaemenians, an Iranian dynasty. The Greek admiral Nearchus is believed to have been the first of Alexander's commanders to visit these islands, and he found a verdant land that was part of a wide trading network; he recorded: "That in the island of Tylos, situated in the Persian Gulf, are large plantations of cotton tree, from which are manufactured clothes called sindones, a very different degrees of value, some being costly, others less expensive. The use of these is not confined to India, but extends to Arabia." The Greek historian, Theophrastus, states that much of the islands were covered in these cotton trees and that Tylos was famous for exporting walking canes engraved with emblems that were customarily carried in Babylon.It is not known whether Bahrain was part of the Seleucid Empire, although the archaeological site at Qalat Al Bahrain has been proposed as a Seleucid base in the Persian Gulf. Tylos was integrated well into the Hellenised world: the language of the upper classes was Greek, while Zeus was worshipped in the form of the Arabian sun-god Shams. Tylos even became the site of Greek athletic contests.
Another important player in this time was the Parthian Empire, which emerged from northeastern Iran and relinquished a significant amount of territory from the eastern borders of the Seleucids. The Seleucids would be eventually vanquished by the Roman Empire over the course of the 1st century BCE, leading to the Romans and Parthians being the main power contenders in the region, separated by the Syrian desert. Parthian influence extended over the Persian Gulf and reached as far as Oman. Garrisons were established at the southern coast of the Gulf to help extend their power.