Inscriptions from Jabal Ikmah, in Saudi Arabia, c.644 BCE to 600 CE: these ancient inscriptions and petroglyphs were carved over the course of nearly 1,000 years
Inscriptions and drawings cover many of the rock formations at Jabal Ikmah, which is a mountain located in the al-Ula Valley of Saudi Arabia. These carvings record the everyday activities, transactions, religious practices, names, and political relationships of the ancient Lihyanites (and subsequent cultures) over the course of many centuries.
Several different languages can be identified at this site, including Aramaic, Dadanitic, Safaitic, Thamudic, Miaic, Nabataean, and Arabic; the inscriptions even demonstrate the evolution from Dadanitic to Arabic script.
The writings are often accompanied by petroglyphs depicting people, animals, and objects.
As this article explains:
In and around the al-Ula Valley loom vertical sandstone cliffs. Many of them now display depictions of human figures or animals known as petroglyphs, a term derived from the Greek words petra, meaning “rock”, and glypho, meaning “to carve”. Ancient artists would use stones or tools to scrape images onto the surface of cliffs and freestanding rocks—or, in some instances, they would carve figures or lines of text in relief, standing proud of the rock surface.
The al-Ula region is home to thousands of these petroglyphs, taking different forms and spanning centuries of time. Ibexes, camels, horses, ostriches, and many other species cavort across the rock faces, some pursued by stylized human hunters holding spears and other weapons. Other images depict large urns and include complex decorative patterns.
Jabal Ikmah is often described as an "open-air library:"
In the north of the al-Ula Valley rises the mountain known in Arabic as Jabal Ikmah. This is a particularly rich repository of images and texts that have managed to weather centuries of sun, wind, and rain with remarkably little deterioration—so rich that Ikmah has become known as an open-air library, even though its origin appears to have been as a place of worship rather than study. Some of its hundreds of inscriptions may be as much as 2,500 years old. Most offer tantalizing insights into life and culture during the period when the Lihyanite kingdom flourished in this region of northwest Arabia, roughly from the fifth to the first centuries B.C.E.
National Geographic: Messages on the Mountains
Telegraph: Jabal Ikmah: Home to the "Open-Air Library"
Atlas Obscura: Jabal Ikmah
Al-Ula Patterns Library: Jabal Ikmah
UNESCO: Documentary Heritage in Al-Ula
