Documentary Heritage in AlUla
AlUla’s documentary heritage showcases more than the spectacular architectural achievements of the Nabataean Kingdom. A closer look at its heritage reveals rich and unique mountain inscriptions tracing back the origins of the Arabic language and the use of the Arabic alphabet, whose form has shaped Saudi Arabian and Arab cultural evolution.
Jabal Ikmah
The inscriptions of Jabal Ikmah (Ikmah Mountain) are considered by AlUla’s native residents as a vast open-air library stretching across the rock formations of the mountain. Boasting the region’s most abundant concentration of and the largest variation of inscriptions, Jabal Ikmah was a crossroads of civilizations, containing nearly 300 inscriptions of the ancient region’s pre-Nabataean Arabic languages, namely Aramaic, Dadanitic, Thamudic, and Minaic.
Its rocks were also a canvas upon which the earliest forms of the Arabic script were inscribed.
The educational significance of such documentary heritage is palpable in its utility as an archive that enables researchers to retrace the ways in which the region's languages evolved into and influenced Arabic, as well as how the Arabic language was written in the early stages of its evolution.
Inscription of Zuhair
Along the trade and pilgrimage route that connected AlUla Old Town and Hegra Archaeological Site, a red sandstone rock displays the oldest dated Islamic Arabic inscription.
The Inscription of Zuhair (Naqsh Zuhair) was added to the Memory of the World (MoW) Register in 2003 for its world significance, and dates back to 644 CE / 24 Hegrah.
Etched in Kufic Arabic—an early and crude form of Arabic without diacritical marks—the inscription reads: “In the name of God, I Zuhair wrote the date of death of Omar the year four and twenty.”
The Inscription of Zuhair marks the date of death of Omar bin al-Khattab, the second Caliph of Islam, and its preservation provides valuable clues for researchers studying the form of Arabic used in the early periods of Islam.
It remains well-preserved, but UNESCO’s MoW Programme has identified potential ecological, environmental and climatic factors that may cause deterioration to the inscription in the long-term, illustrating the importance of identifying, preserving, and protecting our documentary heritage.
Al Aqra'a Mountain
Kufic Arabic inscriptions declaring the beliefs of AlUla’s inhabitants, merchants and pilgrims who passed through are also visible across the rocks of Al Aqra’a. The mountain, located along a historic pilgrimage route north of AlUla Valley, also contains documentary heritage in the form of rock art inscriptions depicting ancient equestrian traditions. Their fine preservation enables researchers to chronicle our history, and their universal value is evident in the ways in which the rock art attests to the common heritage built, shared, and practiced by different cultures of the region, historically and still today.
Petroglyphs depict the biodiversity that roamed AlUla
Abu Ud
With rock carvings dating back to the 1st millennium BCE, Abu Ud's petroglyphs depict human figures coexisting alongside ostriches, dogs, aurochs and the Arabian leopard.
The latter, which was abundant in number for thousands of years, had been declining to the point of critical endangerment before preservation efforts were made to stymie the trend. The Arabian leopard serves as an important component of AlUla’s natural environment, but it also embodies a fabled status in the cultural heritage shaping the region’s imagination, demonstrated by its various depictions in ancient, well-preserved wall art.
Abu Ud’s documentary heritage is also a corpus of the Lihyanite era’s Dadanitic language and script, a language still being examined and unearthed today. Inscriptions chronicle the stories of tribes and civilizations, their names, declarations of faith and religious vows, their memories engraved into stone.
