Earth’s largest peninsula is roughly India’s size
The Arabian Peninsula spans about 3.24 million square kilometres on the Arabian Plate—world’s largest peninsula, comparable to India—with nine countries sharing its deserts and coasts. Red Sea rifting between 56 and 23 million years ago peeled it from Africa, and early modern humans soon arrived.
Seas ring it: Persian Gulf and Hormuz to the east, Arabian Sea southeast, Gulf of Aden and Mandeb south, with Mesopotamia and the Levant to the north. Modern humans entered early after leaving Africa. Greco-Roman writers split Petraea, Deserta, and Felix; medieval Muslim geographers preferred Najd, South Arabia, and related quarters. Antiquity’s “Arabia” was wider than today’s peninsula outline, including Syrian desert stretches.
Plate tectonics, pilgrimage, and oil later remade the same outline into a geopolitical noun.
Stone tools and animal fossils at Ti's al Ghadah hint that early hominins crossed a once-green Arabia, and Acheulean tools from Sadaqah point to occupation around 188,000 years ago. The peninsula may have sheltered a Basal Eurasian population that split off soon after the exit from Africa and stayed isolated until it began mixing with other Middle Eastern groups about 25,000 years ago. Most scholars regard it as the original homeland of the Semitic languages, and South Arabia supported kingdoms such as Saba, Ma'in and Himyar.
Muhammad, born in Mecca around 570, began preaching there in 610 and moved to Medina in 622, from where the tribes were united into the first Islamic state. Under the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphs, Arab rule spread from the northwest Indian subcontinent to the Pyrenees, yet Arabia itself soon turned politically peripheral as power moved to Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. Mecca and Medina stayed spiritually central, drawing pilgrims for the Hajj, and the Hashemite Sharifs held the Hejaz from the tenth century to the twentieth. The Ottomans never controlled the Najd.
Source: Arabian Peninsula
