The history of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia covers most of the Arabian Peninsula, a land of deserts, oases and two long coasts on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In antiquity it was crossed by the caravan routes of the incense trade and settled by Arab kingdoms in its oases. In the seventh century Mecca and Medina became the birthplace of Islam, and they have drawn pilgrims ever since, even while political power moved to Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul. The modern kingdom grew from an eighteenth-century alliance between the Al Saud family of Najd and the reforming preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and was united by Abdulaziz ibn Saud in 1932. Oil, discovered in 1938, made it one of the world's richest states and a central player in the politics of the Middle East and the global economy.

Arabia was not always desert. During wetter phases of the Pleistocene, lakes and grasslands covered much of the interior, and stone hand axes at sites such as An Nasim in the Hail region are around 350,000 years old. A finger bone from Al Wusta shows that modern humans had reached the peninsula by about 85,000 years ago, part of the early spread of our species out of Africa. In the Neolithic, herders of cattle, sheep and goats built thousands of large rectangular stone enclosures called mustatils, probably used for ritual, around 7,000 years ago. As the climate dried after about 4000 BCE, life concentrated in oases and on the coasts, while the east coast around Tarut Island was linked to the Dilmun trading culture of Bahrain.

From the late second millennium BCE, the domestication of the camel opened routes across the desert that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The oasis towns of the Hejaz and north grew rich on this trade. At Tayma, the last king of Babylonia, Nabonidus, lived for about ten years in the sixth century BCE. The kingdom of Lihyan, centred at Dedan near al-Ula, left monumental tombs and inscriptions, and the Nabataeans, whose capital was Petra in what is now Jordan, carved the great rock tombs of Hegra, now known as Mada'in Salih. When the Roman Empire annexed the Nabataean kingdom in 106 CE, the north-western Hejaz briefly became Roman. In central Arabia, the kingdom of Kinda ruled a confederation of tribes from Qaryat al-Faw in the fifth century CE.

Most Arabs worshipped many gods, such as al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat, and the Kaaba at Mecca was a sanctuary of tribal cults and a place of pilgrimage. Judaism was well established in oases like Yathrib, Khaybar and Tayma, and Christianity in Najran in the south-west. The Himyarite Kingdom of Yemen, whose ruler adopted Judaism, massacred the Christians of Najran around 523, provoking an invasion by the Christian Kingdom of Aksum. On the northern edges, Arab client kingdoms served the Byzantine and Sasanian empires.

Muhammad was born in Mecca, a trading town ruled by the Quraysh tribe, around 570. From about 610 he preached a strict monotheism that his followers called Islam. Facing persecution, he and his community migrated in 622 to Yathrib, which became Medina, the city of the Prophet. After years of war with the Meccans, he took Mecca in 630 and cleansed the Kaaba of idols, and by his death in 632 most of the peninsula's tribes had accepted his authority.

His successors of the Rashidun Caliphate crushed tribal revolts in the Ridda wars and then launched conquests that defeated the Byzantines and overthrew the Sasanian Empire within two decades. The centre of power soon left Arabia: the fourth caliph, Ali, moved to Iraq, and the Umayyad Caliphate ruled from Damascus from 661. Mecca and Medina remained the spiritual heart of the Muslim world, because every Muslim who is able must make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once.

The Hejaz became a province of the great caliphates. During a civil war, Umayyad troops besieged Mecca in 683 and again in 692, when the rebel caliph Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr was killed. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Zubaydah, wife of Harun al-Rashid, funded wells and cisterns along the pilgrim road from Iraq, still known as the Darb Zubaydah. In 930 the Qarmatians, a radical Ismaili movement based in eastern Arabia, sacked Mecca and carried off the Black Stone for more than twenty years.

From the tenth century, the Sharifs of Mecca, descendants of the Prophet, ruled the Holy Cities as local princes under the overlordship of whoever controlled Egypt or Iraq, including the Fatimid Caliphate, the Ayyubids and the Mamluk Sultanate. Travellers such as Ibn Battuta, who made the Hajj in 1326, described their courts. The vast interior, especially Najd, remained a world of tribes, oasis towns and small emirates with little outside control.

After Selim I conquered Mamluk Egypt in 1517, the Sharif of Mecca submitted to the Ottoman Empire, whose sultans took the title of protector of the Holy Cities and sent rich subsidies with the annual pilgrim caravans. The Ottomans also held al-Hasa on the Gulf coast for long periods and the highlands of Asir, but their authority in the interior was nominal.

In 1744 Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of the small oasis town of Diriyah near Riyadh, allied with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a scholar who preached a return to strict monotheism and condemned the veneration of saints and tombs as idolatry. The alliance, in which the Al Saud held political power and the family of the preacher, the Al al-Shaykh, religious authority, became the foundation of the Saudi state. Its forces conquered most of Najd, raided Karbala in Iraq in 1802, and took Medina in 1804 and Mecca in 1806, ending Ottoman control of the pilgrimage.

The Ottoman sultan ordered his governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, to restore his authority. Egyptian armies retook the Hejaz from 1811, and in 1818 Ibrahim Pasha captured and razed Diriyah, sending the Saudi ruler Abdullah ibn Saud to be executed in Istanbul. The family returned in 1824 and founded a second state with its capital at Riyadh, but it was weakened by family feuds and finally defeated in 1891 by the rival Al Rashid dynasty of Hail, who drove the Saudi family into exile in Kuwait.

In January 1902 the young Abdulaziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud, recaptured Riyadh with a small band of followers. Over the next two decades he rebuilt his family's power, helped by the Ikhwan, militant Bedouin settled in farming communities and bound by Wahhabi teaching. He took al-Hasa from the Ottomans in 1913, signed a treaty with the British Empire in 1915, and stayed out of the Arab Revolt that Sharif Hussein of Mecca launched against the Ottomans in 1916 during World War I. In 1921 he conquered Hail and the Rashidi lands.

When Britain stopped backing Hussein, who had proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz and then caliph, Ikhwan forces invaded the Hejaz in 1924, massacring civilians at Taif, and took Mecca, Medina and finally Jeddah by the end of 1925. Abdulaziz became King of the Hejaz in 1926, and Britain recognised his independence in the Treaty of Jeddah in 1927. When the Ikhwan, wanting to carry holy war into British-protected Iraq, Kuwait and Transjordan, turned against him, he crushed them at the Battle of Sabilla in 1929. On 23 September 1932 his realms were united as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A short war with Yemen in 1934 ended with the Treaty of Taif, which fixed much of the southern border.

The new kingdom was poor, dependent on pilgrim revenues, until an American company, Standard Oil of California, won a concession in 1933. In March 1938 the Dammam No. 7 well struck oil in commercial quantities, and the operating company later became Aramco. Production expanded rapidly after World War II. In February 1945 Abdulaziz met Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy, beginning the long partnership in which Saudi oil and American security were closely linked.

Abdulaziz died in 1953, and his sons have ruled since. King Saud's extravagant spending and poor administration brought debts and a power struggle with his half-brother Faisal, who replaced him in 1964. Faisal modernised the government, expanded education, including schools for girls, and abolished slavery in 1962 as prime minister. He confronted Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in a proxy war in Yemen in the 1960s and championed Islamic solidarity as a counterweight to Arab socialism during the Cold War. In the October War of 1973 against Israel, Saudi Arabia led the Arab oil embargo against the United States and other supporters of Israel, and the quadrupling of oil prices transformed the kingdom's wealth and influence. Faisal was assassinated by a nephew in 1975.

Under King Khalid and then King Fahd from 1982, oil money paid for highways, cities, universities and a generous welfare state, staffed by millions of foreign workers, and the state gained full ownership of Aramco by 1980. The year 1979 brought two shocks: the Islamic revolution in Iran, which challenged Saudi religious leadership, and the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Juhayman al-Otaybi and several hundred armed militants who denounced the monarchy, ended after two weeks of fighting. The government responded by giving the religious establishment greater control over social life and funding the spread of its interpretation of Islam abroad, as well as the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, King Fahd invited a US-led coalition of hundreds of thousands of troops into the kingdom, which became the base for the Gulf War of 1991. The presence of American forces enraged Islamist critics, among them the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers of the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 were Saudi citizens, which strained relations with Washington, and al-Qaeda waged a campaign of bombings inside the kingdom from 2003. King Abdullah, regent from 1995 and king from 2005 to 2015, pursued cautious economic reforms, brought Saudi Arabia into the World Trade Organization and allowed women to vote in municipal elections, while sending troops to help suppress protests in Bahrain during the Arab uprisings of 2011.

King Salman came to the throne in January 2015 and quickly elevated his son Mohammed bin Salman, who became crown prince in 2017 and prime minister in 2022. In March 2015 Saudi Arabia led a military coalition into the civil war in Yemen against the Houthi movement, a war whose air strikes and blockade contributed to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, while Houthi missiles and drones struck Saudi cities and oil installations. Riyadh broke relations with Iran in 2016, led the blockade of Qatar from 2017 to 2021, and in 2019 attacks on the Abqaiq oil facilities, which Saudi Arabia and Western governments blamed on Iran, briefly halved its oil output.

The Vision 2030 programme, launched in 2016, aims to diversify the economy away from oil through tourism, entertainment, sport, mining and giant projects such as the planned city of Neom. Cinemas reopened, the powers of the religious police were curtailed, and women gained the right to drive in 2018 and to work and travel more freely, though activists who had campaigned for these rights were imprisoned. In November 2017 hundreds of princes and businessmen were detained in a Riyadh hotel in what the government called an anti-corruption drive. The killing of the exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 caused international outrage, and human rights organisations continue to criticise the kingdom's use of the death penalty and its repression of dissent.

In March 2023 Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed in a China-brokered deal to restore diplomatic relations. Talks on normalising relations with Israel, under discussion before the war in Gaza began in October 2023, were frozen, with the crown prince insisting that any agreement must include a path to a Palestinian state. The kingdom hosted mediation over the war in Ukraine in 2025, signed a strategic economic partnership with the United States during a visit by President Donald Trump in May 2025, and entered a mutual defence pact with Pakistan in September 2025. In December 2024 it was confirmed as host of the 2034 FIFA World Cup. When the United States attacked Iran in February 2026, Saudi Arabia officially denied reports that the crown prince had privately urged Washington to strike.