Who ruled Riyadh?

Riyadh lies in the Najd, the high, dry plateau at the centre of the Arabian Peninsula, where the seasonal watercourse of Wadi Hanifa and its tributaries feed groundwater to a string of date-palm oases. Its name means "the gardens", a reminder that it began as a cluster of walled farming settlements in the desert. For most of its history it was a small regional town; it became the capital of the House of Saud in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century oil revenue turned it into one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in the Middle East.

In late antiquity the oasis town on this site was called Hajr, and Arabic tradition says it was founded by the Banu Hanifa tribe. After the rise of Islam it was the main town of the province of al-Yamama, governed for the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, but in the late ninth century the local Ukhaidhirid rulers moved their seat to nearby al-Kharj, and Hajr declined. The traveller Ibn Battuta still described it in the fourteenth century as a town of streams and trees inhabited by the Banu Hanifa. Over the following centuries it broke up into separate settlements, and the name Riyadh appears in local chronicles from about 1590.

In the eighteenth century a local strongman, Dahham ibn Dawwas, took power and enclosed the scattered oasis villages within a single wall. Meanwhile, in the town of Diriyah a few kilometres up the wadi, the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab made a pact with the ruler Muhammad bin Saud in 1744, founding the alliance between religious reform and Saudi political power. Dahham was the Saudis' most stubborn opponent, holding out for nearly three decades until he fled and Riyadh submitted in the early 1770s. It then became part of the First Saudi State, ruled from Diriyah.

In 1818 an army sent by Muhammad Ali of Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman Empire destroyed Diriyah and ended the first state. When Turki ibn Abdullah revived Saudi rule a few years later, he chose Riyadh as his capital in the mid-1820s, and it remained the seat of the Second Saudi State. Feuds within the family allowed the rival Al Rashid dynasty of Ha'il to take over Najd, and in 1891 the Saudi family went into exile in Kuwait. In January 1902 the young Abdulaziz ibn Saud and a few dozen followers retook Riyadh in a surprise raid on the Masmak fortress. From this base he conquered the rest of central Arabia, the eastern coast and, by 1926, the Hejaz, and in September 1932 he proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with Riyadh as its capital.

In the 1930s Riyadh was still a walled town of mud-brick houses and palm groves, while foreign embassies and much of the government were based in Jeddah. Oil revenue after the Second World War changed everything. The walls were pulled down around 1950, a railway reached the city from the Gulf coast in 1951, and ministries moved from Jeddah during the 1950s. Planned grids of streets spread across the plateau, and in the 1980s the foreign embassies also moved to a new diplomatic quarter. The population grew from about 150,000 in the 1960s to more than seven million today, millions of them foreign workers. Riyadh now holds the national government, the head offices of most major companies and large state-led building projects, including a metro system opened in 2024, and it is due to host the World Expo in 2030.