Sumerians pictured a Gulf trading hub called Dilmun as a paradise garden
Long before Islam, Bahrain sat at the heart of Dilmun, a Bronze Age trading power whose sweet groundwater and safe anchorages drew goods from as far as the Indus Valley. Mesopotamian poets turned it into a land of the living where the flood hero was granted eternal life, and some link the tale to Eden.
Pre-Islamic Arabia covers everything on the peninsula and in the southern Levant before Islam began spreading in 610 CE. The peninsula spans about 2.5 million square kilometres and 7,000 kilometres of coast. Ancient writers did not use Arabia to mean just that landmass: Herodotus, in the 5th century BC, stretched it to eastern Egypt, Sinai and the Negev, while Pliny the Elder treated the Syrian desert as the Arabia of the nomads. Some Islamic tradition labels the whole era the Jahiliyyah, an age of ignorance, but historians have not taken up that framing.
People arrived in waves shaped by rainfall. The earliest settlements found date to roughly 240,000 to 190,000 years ago, the oldest human fossils are over 80,000 years old, and the first migrants probably came from Africa to the eastern coast. By about 6,000 years ago the economy had shifted to nomadic herding, though whether that came with Levantine migrants or grew through trade is still argued over.
Dilmun, whose capital lay in Bahrain, appears in writing from the 3rd millennium BCE and controlled Persian Gulf trade routes at its height; its importance faded after 1800. Letters from around 1370 BCE show a Dilmun official writing to a friend in Babylon, hinting at administrative ties. In the 13th century BCE the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I styled himself king of Dilmun and Meluhha, and later Dilmun paid tribute to keep its independence before passing to the Persians. An old theory that the Phoenicians came from Dilmun has been dropped.
The first millennium BCE brought written history and southern kingdoms such as Sheba and Ma'in, while the Nabataean realm in the north was absorbed by Rome in 106. Alexander the Great sent three scouting missions and was eyeing an invasion when he died. Religion was plural: polytheism rooted in old Semitic belief dominated for centuries, but Christianity, Judaism and monotheism spread from the fourth century, helped by missionaries from Byzantium and Aksum and by the conversion of Himyar's elite. Muhammad founded the first Islamic state at Medina in 622.
Source: Pre-Islamic Arabia
