Rock Art in the Hail Region
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Some carvings show hunting dogs joined to people by lines from neck to waist, possibly the oldest leash depictions known, dated to at least the 7th millennium BC.
- A 2017 study counted 6,618 animal figures on 1,405 panels at Jubbah and Shuwaymis, including 156 dogs at Shuwaymis and 193 at Jubbah.
- Lady Anne Blunt, granddaughter of Lord Byron, and her husband Wilfrid reached Jubbah in January 1879, among the first Westerners to see its rock art.
- Some of the camels pecked into the rock are life-size and date from the Thamudic period, roughly 3,000 years ago.
- The rock art at Jabal al-Manjor alone has been recorded as 190 panels grouped in twelve clusters.
- The Shuwaymis component sits on the border between the provinces of Ha'il and Medina, on boulders typically five to ten metres across.
Why it is worth it
On sandstone outcrops at the edge of the Nafud desert, thousands of figures pecked into the rock record some ten thousand years of life in northern Arabia: people with raised arms, ibex, cattle, horses and camels, palm trees and the outlines of human feet. Seen together, they tell a story of a landscape that was once green and slowly turned to desert, and of the people who adjusted to that change.
The site, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015, has two parts. Jabal Umm Sinman rises above the oasis town of Jubbah, about 90 km northwest of the city of Ha'il, inside the Nafud sand sea. The hill reaches 1,264 metres above sea level, around 450 metres above the surrounding plain, and once looked out over a freshwater lake that stretched up to 20 km in length and about 5 km in width. As the climate dried, the lake disappeared roughly three thousand years ago. The second part lies at Shuwaymis, about 250 km southwest of Ha'il, where the hills of Jabal al-Manjor and Raat carry further panels. Together the protected area covers a little over 2,000 hectares.
The oldest layers of images belong to hunters of the early Neolithic, when ibex were a favourite subject. Later come domesticated cattle, then horses and camels as herding and long-distance travel changed life in the desert. Many panels carry lines of Thamudic writing, an early North Arabian script, and later Arabic inscriptions, so that pictures and words from very different centuries share the same rock faces. The clarity of the figures in the low desert light makes the cliffs read like an open archive of prehistory.
Ha'il itself is the capital of the province of the same name in north-central Saudi Arabia, set between the Aja and Salma ranges of the Shammar mountains. The city grew rich as a stop on the camel caravan route of the Hajj pilgrimage.
Getting there
The nearest city is Ha'il; Jubbah lies about 90 km northwest of it by road across the Nafud, and Shuwaymis about 250 km to the southwest. The nearest airport is Ha'il International Airport (HAS), about 100 km from the site in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Rock Art in the Ha'il Region is the fourth site in Saudi Arabia to be inscribed on the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. The rock art consists of two sites with petroglyphs and inscriptions situated in the desert of the Ha'il Region:
Jabel Umm mountain at the city of Jubbah 90 km northwest of Ha'il within the Nafud desert. Jabal Al-Manjor and jabal Raat at Al-Shuwaymis 250 km southwest of Ha'il on the border between the provinces of Ha’il and Medina.Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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