PREISLAMIC NEAR EAST: AN OVERVIEW
BACKGROUND OF THE ARABIAN PENINSULA
The Arabian peninsula is a large land bridge suspended between Africa and Asia. It is among the largest peninsulas on earth, and is surrounded by water on three sides. To the north lies Syria; to the west it forms a coast to the Red Sea.
To the east is the Persian Gulf, and to the south is the Arabian Sea, which is also part of the Indian Ocean.About three-quarters of the Arabian peninsula is covered by deserts. Geographers think that the region had changed from savannah, or grasslands to desert by about 8,000 B.C.E., along with the neighbouring Sahara Desert in North Africa.
Artifacts from hunter-gatherer groups and early settled cultures have been found at many sites. Traces of the earliest towns, cities and civilizations in the Fertile Crescent along the Mediterranean Sea have also been found.
The Arabian peninsula was mostly barren and inhospitable terrain, with fertile regions nearly all around the periphery. Along the mountainous Arabian Sea coast to the south, rain-fed and irrigated highland areas support a rich agriculture.
These mountains continue up to the Red Sea coast, but they do not receive the monsoon rains, and are mostly arid.
The narrow isthmus of Suez, near the Sinai peninsula, joins the Arabian peninsula to Africa. Today, the Suez Canal cuts through that connection, allowing ships to pass from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
The peninsula is connected to Asia from the Mediterranean coast along the Tigris-Euphrates River system to the head of the Persian Gulf. Arabia is part of a region geographers now call Southwest Asia. One can see the Arabian peninsula at the centre of the eastern hemisphere's continents and waterways.
It forms a land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and a crossroads between Africa, Asia and Europe. The Arabian peninsula is at the centre of a huge region of desert stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, called the Great Arid Zone.
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