Once a vital green oasis on the caravan route from UAE to Oman, Al Ain, which means The Spring, is the emirate’s lush heritage garden city, one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited settlements, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Classified by UNESCO under cultural sites, the Al Ain world-heritage locations include the six Al Ain Oasis and the archaeological sites of Bida bint Saud, Jebel Hafit, and Hili. These incredible, ancient sites echo the stories of prehistoric culture an
...Various locations, Al Ain
To the north of Al Ain, several ancient stone-constructed tombs were discovered and excavated on top of the hard-to-miss Gharn bint Saud, a large stratified rock that rises from the desert and surrounding farms. The largest of these tombs is rectangular, eight metres long and six metres wide. Although some of the tombs may date as far back as 5,000 years ago, many of the tombs were re-used throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.
The Hili Archaeological Site not only provides the earliest known evidence of an agricultural village in the United Arab Emirates but also contains other Bronze Age (3200BCE to 1300BCE) and Iron Age (1300BCE to 300BCE) villages, burial grounds and agricultural infrastructure. The early agricultural village is located at Hili Site 8 and dates to 3000BCE. In the period between 2500BCE and 2000BCE, the settlement at Hili expanded.
The 5,000-year-old Jebel Hafit tombs mark the start of the Bronze Age in the UAE. Excavations by Danish archaeologists in 1959 found evidence of ceramic vessels and copper artefacts in these tombs. These indicate the importance of maritime trade across the Arabian Gulf. The tombs are single-chamber tombs and are made of local, unworked or roughly cut stones. These differ from later Umm an-Nar tombs, mentioned above, which were made from finely worked blocks and contained the remains of hundreds of people.
