Milan (AsiaNews) – A small, seemingly modest stone weight was found in Hillit, an ancient mining settlement in the Al-Dawadmi Governorate, Riyadh region, during the fourth excavation campaign conducted by the Saudi Heritage Commission. A word is engraved on it, ratl, an ancient unit of weight that reveals more than a long chronicle.
The script is what archaeologists call Jazm, an ancient form of Arabic writing. The artefact likely dates back to the 1st or 2nd century AH (after Hijra), the event that marks the start of the Islamic era.
It is clearly not a relic linked to the life of Muhammad, and for this very reason, its interest is perhaps even greater. A standard weight, used in a mining settlement, stems from everyday life: trade, work, goods, an economy that needed to measure and regulate exchanges.
Along with the small object, archaeologists unearthed 18 dwellings: rooms, passages, and structures that make up a permanent settlement. Glazed and unglazed ceramics, glass, ornaments, beads, bracelets, millstones, and pestles complete the picture of a community that did not simply live by travel, but had organised spaces, productive activities, and a complex domestic life.
This is the focus of an increasingly significant aspect of archaeology in Saudi Arabia today: reconstructing, through material traces, the Arabia in which Islam was born and spread.
Not only Makkah and Madinah, not only the places directly linked to the Prophet's biography, but also mines, oases, villages, caravan routes, markets, and rest stops; in other words, the human, economic, and social environment that defined the Arabian Peninsula between the pre-Islamic era and the first centuries AH.
For a long time, knowledge of ancient Arabia and the early Islamic era depended primarily on written sources: the Qur‘an, Islamic traditions, biographies of the Prophet, later chronicles, geographical and historical literature.
These are valuable sources, of course, but often compiled after the events narrated and, in many cases, focused on major players of history. Archaeology now adds another voice, that of houses, roads, tools, inscriptions, measurement systems, and routes.
In Hillit, this voice is that of a mining community; elsewhere, it is that of pilgrims and merchants.
At the site of Al-Juhfah, one of the ritual stopping places along the pilgrimage route, a mission by the Heritage Commission and the University of Exeter uncovered over 1,700 artefacts: ceramics, glass, stone objects, shells, kilns, a water channel, and funerary inscriptions from the Umayyad and Abbasid periods.
The provenance of some of the materials – the Levant, Egypt, Ethiopia – reveals a picture of a peninsula crossed by people and goods far beyond the confines of local communities.
Al-Juhfah was a transit point on the network of pilgrimage routes (which saw Makkah as a pre-Islamic centre of worship), and its growth in the 2nd century AH shows how the birth of Islam progressively organised new religious and economic spaces.
The same is true for Qurh, in the AlUla area, an important commercial centre located along the ancient routes connecting the southern peninsula with the north.
Research is revealing buildings, markets, and roads from the early Islamic era, demonstrating the role of cities and oases in the trade network that crossed Arabia.
Thus, the history of early Islamic expansion begins to be seen from the bottom – not only through caliphs, battles, and conquests, but through the infrastructure that enabled movement, supplies, and trade.
This perspective challenges an often oversimplified image of 7th-century Arabia. The peninsula was not a uniform desert populated exclusively by nomadic tribes. Pastoral mobility was certainly a fundamental component of Arabian society, but it coexisted with agricultural oases, cities, crafts and mining centres, ports, markets, and long-distance trade networks.
The latest archaeological research shows, moreover, that the transition from mobility to sedentary life was a long and complex process.
In the northwest of the Peninsula, for example, excavations at the Khaybar oasis have documented a fortified Bronze Age city, dated between 2400 and 1300 BC, a sign of a history of stable settlements and urban organisation far older than Islam.
The goal, therefore, is not to seek in archaeology material confirmation of the episodes narrated by sources (religious and otherwise). This would be a methodologically weak claim (or temptation). Archaeology can, however, help reconstruct the world in which those events took place: the geography of movement, the density of settlements, economic relations, technologies, the circulation of people and ideas.
In this sense, the Hijra, 622 AD, when Muhammad and his followers left Makkah for Madinah, is not only a date, but also the start of a new historical geography. The routes travelled by the first Muslim communities, the rest stops, wells, oases, and trading centres become part of a history that archaeology can help make visible.
It is significant that in recent years, Saudi Arabia has been investing increasingly in research into its heritage. The excavation and reconnaissance programme not only concerns the most famous sites, such as AlUla and Hegra, but extends to an immense and still largely unexplored territory.
From this perspective, even the small weight found at Hillit takes on a special meaning. The word ratl engraved on the stone does not recount a battle, nor does it preserve the name of a ruler or leader. It speaks to the very human need to measure, to exchange, to organise work. It is a tiny yet fundamental trace of a society undergoing transformation.
Saudi archaeological research is seeking precisely this: not a single origin, but the thread of many origins, and, through such a thread, a more concrete historical foundation for understanding how, in the 7th century, Islam was able to emerge in Arabia and rapidly transform into one of the great religious, cultural, and political experiences of history.
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