Unearthing Qurayyah I. Report on the 2015-2019 Excavation Seasons
Qurayyah, a 750 acres desert site, is one of most vast walled oases of the Arabian Peninsula: after Tayma, the one with the longest continuous encircling wall. It is located at 28° 47’ 00” N and 36° 00’ 27” E in the province of Tabuk (KSA). It is here that the well-known ‘Midianite Pottery’ (now ‘Qurayyah Painted Ware’) was produced, found most famously in the final Late Bronze Age Egyptian shrine in Timna, Israel and in sites in the Southern Levant up to Gezer and Amman in the north and to Tayma and Al-‘Ula, Saudi-Arabia in the south.
Qurayyah developed into a permanent settlement in the early 3rd mill. BCE thanks to a sophisticated surface water harvesting system. Already at this stage, the attested contacts suggest it was part of the ‘Greater Levant’. With Unearthing Qurayyah I, we aim at a timely publication of the results of the Qurayyah Joint Archaeological Project of the Heritage Commission (Ministry of Culture, KSA) and the University of Vienna. We will provide the first encompassing study of this severely understudied, still largely unknown region and highlight the multiple and diachronic connections with the material culture of the Southern Levant, from the Early Bronze Age I to the Iron Age, which suggest that we must understand NW Arabia as part of a redefined and better understood Levant as a whole.
The publication project is directed by Dr. Marta Luciani.
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