Qaryat al-Faw

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A traveler coming up out of the south, with the incense lashed to the camels and the great gravel sea of the Rub’ al-Khali at his back, came at last to a gap where the long limestone wall of the Tuwaiq escarpment breaks open and lets the road through. The gap is a faw — a pass. On the floor of it, where the wadi of the Dawasir runs down toward the sands, the caravans found a town: a square ringed with shops, houses of three and four stories with painted walls, deep wells, a palace, and on the desert’s edge the temples and the tombs of its kings. The Arabs of the place called it the village of the pass. In their own monumental script its name was Qaryatum dhāt Kāhilim — the town of the god Kahl.

The town at the pass

Qaryat al-Faw lies in the Wadi al-Dawasir region of what is now south-central Saudi Arabia, roughly 700 kilometers southwest of Riyadh and about 100 kilometers south of the modern town of Wadi al-Dawasir, on the northwestern rim of the Empty Quarter. The setting is the whole explanation of the town. Here the Tuwaiq escarpment, the long cliff-line that curves across the heart of Arabia, is cut by a pass; and through that pass ran one of the arteries of the ancient world — the road that carried frankincense and myrrh north and east from the kingdoms of the south. A town planted in the faw sat astride the traffic the way a tollgate sits astride a river. It watered the camels at its wells, sold them grain from its market, and taxed, sheltered, and fed the men who drove them.

The people who made it the capital were the kingdom of Kindah — Kinda — a confederation of Arabian tribes who rose to power in the central peninsula in the last centuries before the common era. They are a half-lit people. Later Arab memory kept the name of Kindah as a great house of the deep past — a kindred that would rise again centuries afterward in a second, better-remembered kingship in central Arabia, the line of the poet-king Imruʾ al-Qays, long after this town was gone. But the firsthand record of the early Kindah whose seat stood here is thin, and Qaryat al-Faw is the nearest thing to a body for that name: the capital, in its time, of the first kingdom of Kindah. The town flourished from about the fourth or third century BCE until roughly the third or fourth century CE, when the Kindah moved south toward the Hadramawt and the place was left to the sand. For most of that span Qaryat al-Faw was the seat of their kings, a wealthy entrepôt where the merchant peoples of Arabia met.

The South Arabian kingdoms to the south — the Sabaeans of Saba, the merchant Minaeans of the incense road — left their script and their gods here; the Himyarites, who would inherit the south, held suzerainty over the region in its later centuries. The town belonged to no single kingdom’s hinterland so much as to the road itself. Its position is the kind that geography hands out only rarely. The incense of southern Arabia — the frankincense of the Dhofar coast, the myrrh of the Hadramawt — moved north in the holds of camel caravans toward the markets of the Fertile Crescent, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf, and the long haul up the spine of the peninsula had to find its way through or around the Tuwaiq wall. At the faw, the road found a door, and a town grew in the doorway. The wadi of the Dawasir gave it water; the pass gave it traffic; the desert at its back gave it the one thing a caravan city most needs, which is to be unavoidable.

What makes Qaryat al-Faw extraordinary is that it was recovered whole, or nearly so — not a temple or a tomb in isolation but a working Arabian town, its market and houses and sanctuaries together. A team from King Saud University in Riyadh, led by the archaeologist Abdulrahman al-Ansary, excavated the site across more than three decades, from about 1970 to 2003, and what they uncovered fell into two great quarters. The first was the living town: a residential and commercial district with streets, squares, a market, houses, and the deep wells — more than seventeen of them — that made life possible at the edge of the sands. The second was the town of the dead and the gods: a field of tombs and a cluster of temples set apart from the houses. The market was a planned souq of shops; among the standing remains are grain stores and the ovens where bread was baked. Water reached the town through canals and cisterns that the diggers found laid out to a plan. The houses rose in stories — the wall paintings themselves show a tower-house several floors high, peopled with its inhabitants — and the palace held columned halls with stone pillars and benches along the walls for those who gathered there.

The painted halls and the god of the place

The sand had preserved what almost never survives from pre-Islamic Arabia: paint. The walls of Qaryat al-Faw’s grander rooms were frescoed, and the fragments recovered range from quick, schematic designs to elaborate figural compositions in a manner that recalls the wall painting of the Roman and Hellenistic Mediterranean. This is itself a rarity worth dwelling on. From most of pre-Islamic inner Arabia what survives is stone and bone — a worn wall, a cut tomb, a line of script. At Qaryat al-Faw the diggers recovered color, and with it the surfaces and small things of an ordinary wealthy life: glass perfume bottles, painted pottery, the ovens of the bakers, the benches where the men of the palace sat. The town does not have to be reconstructed from a king-list. It can almost be walked. One celebrated panel, now in the National Museum in Riyadh, shows a man with a thin mustache and wide eyes, a wreath upon his head and a vine heavy with grapes arching above him, attendants at his sides — a scene of crowning, with the vine and the grape given the central weight. The town’s wealth, won from the trade, bought it the visual language of the wider world the trade had touched.

That language was at its most legible in the sanctuaries. The town’s gods kept their own quarter, a sacred zone of temples and altars set apart from the houses, where the living came to feast with the powers and the dead were laid down under their protection. Several temples have been distinguished, raised across the centuries and given to different gods. One belonged to the sun goddess Shams, and within it the excavators found a mrzḥ — a marzeah, a ritual banqueting hall of a kind known across the Semitic world, a fellowship that met to feast in the presence of the god. Its frescoes are openly Hellenized: reclining banqueters, scrolling vines, winged erotes, amphorae, chariots, figures in Roman dress. The feast in the god’s house was an old Semitic institution; at Qaryat al-Faw it was kept in a room dressed in the imagery of the Mediterranean, the local rite and the imported decor laid one over the other like two coats of the same wall. The bronze and stone statuary tells the same story of a caravan city at the crossing of the routes. From the houses and temples came a bronze head of a woman, the so-called Lady of the Faw, of the first century BCE; a bronze statuette of Herakles in the Greek manner; and a pair of bronze ornaments shaped as lions’ faces gripping a ring, of the third century BCE — objects that arrived, or were made in imitation of objects that arrived, along the same road as the incense.

Above this cosmopolitan town stood its own lord. The South Arabian name of the place, Qaryatum dhāt Kāhilim, declares it: the town of, or possessed by, the god Kahl — the tutelary deity whose name carries the Semitic root khl, “strong” or “mighty,” and to whom the town belonged as a god belongs to his haram. A recent study reads Kahl as a smiting god, a warrior figure who may have been imagined wielding a club, his iconography on the local coinage standing in the lineage of the Near Eastern storm and warrior gods. He did not stand alone. The inscriptions of Qaryat al-Faw name a pantheon that draws the whole peninsula together: the sun goddess Shams; Wadd, the chief god of the Minaeans, whose emblem joined the crescent and the star; the great morning-and-evening star ʿAthtar in his eastern aspect, ʿAthtar al-Shariq; Sayin of the Hadramawt; the pan-Arabian goddess al-Lāt; and others. The town sat where the gods of the south, like Almaqah’s kin, met the gods of the north — much as the moon was worshiped at Harran as Sin and the star-goddess as Ishtar in the Mesopotamian lands the road also reached.

The dead of Qaryat al-Faw were buried beyond the houses in a field of tombs. The kings lay apart, to the northwest, in a built monument — stone burial chambers carried up into a mausoleum, with a tower set above; the nobles and the warriors had their graves along the town’s eastern edge. To raise a tower over a grave was to make the dead visible on the plain, a marker on the road as much as a resting place, and to entrust them to the gods was to make the tomb inviolable by something stronger than a wall.

The clearest voice from the place is a single such tomb. Cut in the script the town shared with the Sabaean south — the musnad, the monumental South Arabian alphabet — but in the Arabic tongue, it is among the earliest substantial Arabic inscriptions known, dated to about the first century BCE and now in the National Museum in Riyadh. A man named ʿIgl son of Hafʿam built the grave for his brother Rabībil. The text, as published by the epigrapher A. F. L. Beeston, records that ʿIgl made the tomb “for his brother Rabībil son of Hafʿam … both for him and for his child and his wife, and his children and their children’s children,” and that he placed it “under the protection of (the gods) Kahl and Lah and ʿAthtar al-Shariq from anyone strong or weak,” against any who would sell or pledge it, “for all time without any derogation, so long as the sky produces rain or the earth herbage.” The dead were given over to the three gods, and the curse of the gods was the lock on the door. Here the language that would one day be the Qur’an’s appears already on the wall of a tomb, in a southern script, under the protection of a god named Kahl.

A town recovered from the sand

For most of recorded history Qaryat al-Faw was a name without a place — known, if at all, from the deep genealogies and the poetry that remembered the kingdom of Kindah, but lost on the ground. Its recovery is a twentieth-century work. The site has a particular weight for the history of the Arabic language. The grave inscription of ʿIgl is a sentence of Arabic some six or seven centuries older than the Qur’an, written before the Arabic script itself existed, borrowing the letters of the south to set down the speech of the center; it shows the tongue already settled and literate at the desert’s edge in the last century before the common era. The town is thus a hinge: a place where the language that would carry a later revelation can be read on a wall while the gods it names are still Kahl and ʿAthtar and Shams. The long campaign of King Saud University under al-Ansary, running through the last third of the century, made it one of the fullest pictures yet won of a pre-Islamic Arabian town: not a king-list or a temple wall but the texture of a living place, its market and ovens and wells, its painted rooms and its gods, its kings’ tombs and the curse-bound graves of its people. The finds went largely to the National Museum in Riyadh and the museum of King Saud University, and they became a centerpiece of how the kingdom narrates its own deep antiquity — Qaryat al-Faw set beside the carved necropolis of Hegra and the great oasis of Tayma among the foremost pre-Islamic sites of Arabia, and beside the Nabataean cities to the north like Petra on the same long web of caravan roads.

The reading of the place is still in motion. Scholars weigh the exact natures of its gods — whether Kahl is best understood as the smiting warrior the latest work proposes, his image on the local coinage read against the storm and warrior gods of the Levant, and how the southern deities of his pantheon relate to their counterparts farther south. These are open questions of identification, not of existence: that the town was given to Kahl, that the tomb was sealed by his name, is plainly written; what Kahl looked like in the minds that wrote it is the harder thing to recover. A new wave of survey and mapping, mounted by the Saudi Heritage Commission in the present century, has begun to chart the wider landscape of the faw — the field systems, the water works, the inscriptions in the surrounding rock — beyond the town the first excavators uncovered. In July 2024 the broader site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as “The Cultural Landscape of Al-Faw Archaeological Area,” the eighth such inscription for Saudi Arabia, recognized under criteria (ii) and (v) for the interchange of human values it embodied across the millennium from the mid-first millennium BCE to the fifth century CE and as an outstanding example of human settlement at the desert’s edge.

A fragment of painted plaster from Qaryat al-Faw bearing a zodiacal motif, evidence of the town’s tradition of figural wall painting. Nesnad, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The remains of Qaryat al-Faw at the pass through the Tuwaiq escarpment. Saudi Heritage Commission, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

What was buried at the pass was not a shrine but a city — the place where the trade, the gods, and the first writing of the Arabic tongue were all at home together, under the protection of Kahl, until the road shifted and the kings went south and the sand came in over the painted walls. The desert kept it, and the diggers gave it back: a whole Arabian town, with its market still smelling faintly of bread and its tombs still calling down the curse of three gods upon any hand that would disturb them.

→ Related: The Sabaeans · The Minaeans · Tayma · Hegra · Marib · Kingdom Of Saba · Nabataean Kingdom · Himyar · Kaaba · Petra · Allat · Al Uzza · Manat · Almaqah · Hubal · Divination · Idolatry · Revelation · Sin Moon God · Ishtar