لعب سعودي
Eliane Lebouf
Saudi Arabia,[e] officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA),[f] is a country in West Asia and the Middle East. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about 2150000 km2 (830000 sq mi), making it the fifth-largest country in Asia and the largest in the Middle East. It is bordered by the Red Sea to the west; Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; the Persian Gulf, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the east; Oman to the southeast; and Yemen to the south. Bahrain is an island country off its east coast. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northwest separates Saudi Arabia from Egypt and Israel. Saudi Arabia is the only country with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and most of its terrain consists of arid desert, lowland, steppe, and mountains. The capital and largest city is Riyadh; the kingdom also hosts Islam's two holiest cities of Mecca and Medina.
The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of mainly four distinct historical regions: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and South Arabia ('Asir).[22] The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by King Abdulaziz (known as Ibn Saud in the West). He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia has since been an absolute monarchy, where political decisions are made on the basis of consultation among the King, the Council of Ministers, and the country's traditional elites that oversee a highly authoritarian regime.[23][24][25] The ultraconservative Wahhabi religious movement within Sunni Islam was described as a "predominant feature of Saudi culture" until the 2000s.[24][26] In 2016, the Saudi Arabian government curtailed the influence of the Wahhabi religious establishment and restricted the activities of the morality police and launched various Westernization policies such as the economic programme of Saudi Vision 2030.[27][28][29] In its Basic Law, Saudi Arabia defines itself as a sovereign Arab Islamic state with Islam as its official religion and Arabic as its official language.Petroleum was discovered in 1938 and followed up by several other finds in the Eastern Province.[30][31] Saudi Arabia has since become the world's third-largest oil producer and largest oil exporter, controlling the world's second-largest oil reserves and the sixth-largest gas reserves.[32] The kingdom is categorized as a World Bank high-income economy and is the only Arab country to be part of the G20 major economies.[33][34] The Saudi government has attracted criticism for various policies such as its intervention in the Yemeni Civil War, alleged sponsorship of terrorism as well as for its use of executions.[35][36]
Saudi Arabia is considered both a regional and middle power.[37][38] The Saudi economy is the largest in the Middle East; the world's nineteenth-largest economy by nominal GDP and the seventeenth largest by PPP. As a country with a very high Human Development Index,[39] it offers a tuition-free university education, no personal income tax,[40] and a free universal health care system. With its dependency on foreign labour, Saudi Arabia is home to the world's third-largest immigrant population. It also has one of the world's youngest populations, with approximately 50% of its population of 32.2 million[41] being under 25 years old.[42] In addition to being a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Saudi Arabia is an active and founding member of the United Nations, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League, Arab Air Carriers' Organization and OPEC. Saudi Arabia is a dialogue partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Following the amalgamation of the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, the new state was named al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya as-Suʿūdiyya (a transliteration of المملكة العربية السعودية in Arabic) by royal decree on 23 September 1932 by its founder, Abdulaziz bin Saud. Although this is normally translated as "the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" in English,[43] it literally means "the Saudi Arab Kingdom",[44] or "the Arab Saudi Kingdom".[45]
The word "Saudi" is derived from the element as-Suʿūdīyya in the Arabic name of the country, which is a type of adjective known as a nisba, formed from the dynastic name of the Saudi royal family, the Al Saud (Arabic: آل سعود). Its inclusion expresses the view that the country is the personal possession of the royal family.[46][47] Al Saud is an Arabic name formed by adding the word Al, meaning "family of" or "House of",[48] to the personal name of an ancestor. In the case of Al Saud, this is Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, the father of the dynasty's 18th-century founder, Muhammad bin Saud.[49]
There is evidence that human habitation in the Arabian Peninsula dates back to about 125000 years ago.[50] A 2011 study found that the first modern humans to spread east across Asia left Africa about 75000 years ago across the Bab-el-Mandeb connecting the Horn of Africa and Arabia.[51] The Arabian Peninsula is regarded as central to the understanding of evolution and dispersals of Man. Arabia underwent an extreme environmental fluctuation in the Quaternary that led to profound evolutionary and demographic changes. Arabia has a rich Lower Paleolithic record, and the quantity of Oldowan-like sites in the region indicate a significant role that Arabia had played in the early hominin colonization of Eurasia.[52]
In the Neolithic period, prominent cultures such as Al-Magar, whose centre lay in modern-day southwestern Najd, flourished. Al-Magar could be considered a "Neolithic Revolution" in human knowledge and handicraft skills.[53] The culture is characterized as being one of the world's first to involve the widespread domestication of animals, particularly the horse, during the Neolithic period.[54][55] Al-Magar statues were made from local stone, and it seems that the statues were fixed in a central building that might have had a significant role in the social and religious life of the inhabitants.[56]
In November 2017, hunting scenes showing images of most likely domesticated dogs (resembling the Canaan Dog) and wearing leashes were discovered in Shuwaymis, a hilly region of northwestern Saudi Arabia. These rock engravings date back more than 8000 years, making them the earliest depictions of dogs in the world.[57]
At the end of the 4th millennium BC, Arabia entered the Bronze Age; metals were widely used, and the period was characterized by its 2 m high burials which were simultaneously followed by the existence of numerous temples that included many free-standing sculptures originally painted with red colours.[58]
In May 2021, archaeologists announced that a 350000-year-old Acheulean site named An Nasim in the Hail region could be the oldest human habitation site in northern Saudi Arabia. 354 artefacts, including hand axes and stone tools, provided information about tool-making traditions of the earliest living man inhabited south-west Asia. Paleolithic artefacts are similar to material remains uncovered at the Acheulean sites in the Nefud Desert.[59][60][61][62]
The earliest sedentary culture in Saudi Arabia dates back to the Ubaid period at Dosariyah. Climatic change and the onset of aridity may have brought about the end of this phase of settlement, as little archaeological evidence exists from the succeeding millennium.[64] The settlement of the region picks up again in the period of Dilmun in the early 3rd millennium. Known records from Uruk refer to a place called Dilmun, associated on several occasions with copper, and in later periods it was a source of imported woods in southern Mesopotamia. Scholars have suggested that Dilmun originally designated the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, notably linked with the major Dilmunite settlements of Umm an-Nussi and Umm ar-Ramadh in the interior and Tarout on the coast. It is likely that Tarout Island was the main port and the capital of Dilmun.[63] Mesopotamian inscribed clay tablets suggest that, in the early period of Dilmun, a form of hierarchical organized political structure existed. In 1966, an earthwork in Tarout exposed an ancient burial field that yielded a large statue dating to the Dilmunite period (mid 3rd millennium BC). The statue was locally made under the strong Mesopotamian influence on the artistic principle of Dilmun.[63]
By 2200 BC, the centre of Dilmun shifted for unknown reasons from Tarout and the Saudi Arabian mainland to the island of Bahrain, and a highly developed settlement emerged there, where a laborious temple complex and thousands of burial mounds dating to this period were discovered.[63]
By the late Bronze Age, a historically recorded people and land (Midian and the Midianites) in the north-western portion of Saudi Arabia are well-documented in the Bible. Centred in Tabouk, it stretched from Wadi Arabah in the north to the area of al-Wejh in the south.[65] The capital of Midian was Qurayyah,[66] it consists of a large, fortified citadel encompassing 35 hectares and below it lies a walled settlement of 15 hectares. The city hosted as many as 12,000 inhabitants.[67] The Bible recounts Israel's two wars with Midian, somewhere in the early 11th century BC. Politically, the Midianites were described as having a decentralized structure headed by five kings (Evi, Rekem, Tsur, Hur, and Reba); the names appears to be toponyms of important Midianite settlements.[68] It is common to view that Midian designated a confederation of tribes, the sedentary element settled in the Hijaz while its nomadic affiliates pastured and sometimes pillaged as far away as Palestine.[69] The nomadic Midianites were one of the earliest exploiters of the domestication of camels that enabled them to navigate through the harsh terrains of the region.[69]
At the end of the 7th century BC, an emerging kingdom appeared in north-western Arabia. It started as a sheikdom of Dedan, which developed into the kingdom of Lihyan.[71][72] During this period, Dedan transformed into a kingdom that encompassed a much wider domain.[71] In the early 3rd century BC, with bustling economic activity between the south and north, Lihyan acquired large influence suitable to its strategic position on the caravan road.[73] The Lihyanites ruled over a large domain from Yathrib in the south and parts of the Levant in the north.[74] In antiquity, Gulf of Aqaba used to be called Gulf of Lihyan, a testimony to the extensive influence that Lihyan acquired.[75]
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