The remains of the town, dubbed al-Natah, were long concealed by the walled oasis of Khaybar, a green and fertile speck surrounded by desert in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula. Then an ancient 14.5 kilometre-long wall was discovered at the site, according to research led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charloux published earlier this year.

The large town, which was home to up to 500 residents, was built around 2,400 BC during the early Bronze Age, the researchers said. It was abandoned around a thousand years later. “No one knows why,” Charloux said. When al-Natah was built, cities were flourishing in the Levant region along the Mediterranean Sea from present-day Syria to Jordan.

Black volcanic rocks called basalt concealed the walls of al-Natah so well that it “protected the site from illegal excavations”, Charloux said. But observing the site from above revealed potential paths and the foundations of houses, suggesting where the archaeologists needed to dig. They discovered foundations “strong enough to easily support at least one- or two-storey” homes, Charloux said, emphasising that there was much more work to be done to understand the site.

Al-Natah was still small compared to cities in Mesopotamia or Egypt during the period. But in these vast expanses of desert, it appears there was “another path towards urbanisation” than such city-states, one “more modest, much slower, and quite specific to the northwest of Arabia”, Charloux said.