The Southern Levant and Northern Arabia in the Iron Age

Abstract

The chapter provides an overview of the societies that inhabited the arid regions of the southern Levant and northern Arabia during the first half of the first millennium BC. This period was a turning point in the history of the local populations, since they organized themselves for the first time into independent polities of differing levels of social complexity. Commonly studied through the written records of the contemporary Near Eastern empires, the chapter focuses on the local epigraphic and archaeological evidence of the emergence and collapse of these polities, including the tribes and tribal confederacies of the Syro-Arabian desert and the Negev, the oasis towns in the northern Hejaz (Tayma, Dedan), and a chiefdom in the southern Transjordanian plateau (Edom). It also addresses the environmental factors that impacted the local societies—most importantly aridity—and the evidence for economic exploitation of the environment, which was mostly based on nomadic semi-pastoralism and limited agriculture. The first millennium BC also witnessed the incorporation of the southern Levant and northern Arabia into the Near Eastern economic system, particularly through the extension of the commercial networks to obtain mineral resources (copper from Wadi Arabah) and precious aromatics (incense from South Arabia). The chapter highlights how the neighboring Near Eastern states, and particularly the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, strove to dominate the regional trade routes and to co-opt the tribal groups that controlled them, not always successfully.