Abdulaziz’s 1932 decree named a peninsula-spanning kingdom
Saudi Arabia covers about 2,149,690 square kilometres—Asia’s fifth-largest and the world’s twelfth—occupying most of the Arabian Peninsula. King Abdulaziz unified Hejaz, Najd, and adjoining regions and decreed the kingdom’s Arabic name on 23 September 1932.
People lived on the peninsula as early as 125,000 years ago, and an Acheulean site at An Nasim in Hail may be 350,000 years old. Rock carvings in the northwest, more than 8,000 years old, show probably domesticated dogs and are the oldest known images of dogs anywhere. The Neolithic Al-Magar culture of southwestern Najd was among the first to domesticate animals widely, notably the horse.
Midian, centred on Tabuk with its fortified capital Qurayyah, housed up to 12,000 people in the late Bronze Age, and the Lihyanites later grew rich on the caravan road, lending their name to the Gulf of Aqaba. The Nabataeans took Hegra around 65 BCE, and Rome later absorbed their lands as Arabia Petraea. Muhammad, born in Mecca around 570, united the peninsula’s tribes, and after 632 his followers carried Islam from Iberia to Central Asia.
Abdulaziz began his campaigns in 1902, and the kingdom counts itself the third Saudi state after those of 1727 to 1818 and 1824 to 1891. The word Saudi comes from the dynasty’s name, Al Saud, taken from Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, father of the eighteenth-century founder. Petroleum found in 1938 made the state the world’s second-largest oil producer and a major non-NATO U. S. ally.
Red Sea and Persian Gulf coasts bracket desert interiors bordering Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Yemen. Riyadh is the capital, and Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, lie in the west. It is the only Arab member of the G20.
Source: Saudi Arabia
