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Riyadh: Saudi motorsports star Falah Al-Jarba said Saudi Arabia is holding events for motorsports on a scale that has never been seen before. Al-Jarba, the latest guest on the “Mayman Show,” said: “We’re now working on a big motor festival. You’ve seen the changes in Saudi, and now Saudi is having more than one international motorsports [event] in the same season, which didn’t happen anywhere else.”
The professional racer explained that changes to the Kingdom’s motorsports scene were years in the making, before 2018, when Formula E was held in Diriyah.
“People think that 2018 was the first change where we got Formula. But you know that this had to be cooked for two years, three years, minimum to have it.”
It all started with the Formula E event, he explained. Then came the Dakar Rally, which is the longest international rally — famous for also being the most difficult — and has now exclusively been held in Saudi Arabia for 10 years.
Al-Jarba and his team have worked on various aspects in motorsports, from racing to influencing the sport at the grassroots level. He began as a racer, expanding to team owner and further broadening his experience as a championship organizer.
Addressing the difficulties in securing sponsors, he talked about the public misconception that sponsors line up to knock at racers’ doors if they win a race.
“Corporates would never go just for the winner if you couldn’t fulfill their [key performance indicators] at the end…It always comes back to numbers,” he said.
Regarding the Kingdom’s strides in the field, Al-Jarba said that Saudi Arabia was now in a “golden age” for motorsports.
“The first electric rally…started in early NEOM. This is the first rally to be ever held in the world that started from Saudi,” he said.
JEDDAH: All Saudi visa holders are now permitted to perform Umrah in the wake of a decision by the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah.
The move aims to ease bureaucracy and open the pilgrimage to more visitors — a target of Vision 2030.
It comes in conjunction with the start of this year’s Umrah season and as part of efforts to facilitate rituals, provide high-quality services and enrich the religious experiences of pilgrims.
The Maqam platform connects pilgrims with authorized tourism companies and agencies. Users from outside the Kingdom can also apply for an Umrah visa, as well as choose service bundles. The platform is available at maqam.gds.haj.gov.sa.
The Visit Saudi platform provides e-services, including the issuance of electronic visas and purchasing of Umrah bundles. The service is available at visitsaudi.com/ar.
Holders of on-arrival visas, among countries eligible for electronic visas, as well as US, UK and Schengen visa holders, can carry out Umrah rituals with ease, provided that the visas are used for one time only and carry the issuing country’s seal.
Family visit and personal visit visa holders can also perform the pilgrimage by booking an appointment through the Eatmarna application during their visits to relatives and friends in the Kingdom, and by applying to the Unified National Visa Platform.
To carry out Umrah rituals, visitors must have comprehensive medical insurance that covers — among other things — the treatment costs of COVID-19, personal incidents resulting in death and disability, and flight delays or cancellations.
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan met with his Maltese counterpart Ian Borg during his visit to Malta. The two ministers held a session of talks, during which they reviewed aspects of relations between the Kingdom and Malta and ways to strengthen and develop them in various fields, in addition to discussing the most prominent issues of common interest. The meeting and the talks were attended by the Deputy to Italy, Faisal bin Hanif Al-Qahtani, and the director-general of the Office of the foreign minister’s Abdul Rahman Al-Daoud.
LONDON: To the bedouin, the mysterious structures of uncertain age and unknown origin scattered across the harsh and dramatic landscapes of northwestern Saudi Arabia have always been simply the works of “the old men.”
To the archaeologists who have just completed a four-year project to catalogue all the visible archaeology of AlUla County and the nearby Harrat Khaybar volcanic field, the tens of thousands of structures they have found, most between 4,000 and 7,000 years old, are the key to a radical rethinking of the prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula.
“A lot of the archaeological focus in the region in the past has been on the Fertile Crescent, running through Jordan, Israel and up into Syria and beyond, and little archaeological attention has been paid to this early material of Saudi Arabia,” said archaeologist Dr. Hugh Thomas, a senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia.
“But as we do more and more research, we’re realizing that there was so much more here than small, independent, communities living on nothing much and not doing much in an arid area.
“The reality in that in the Neolithic period these areas were significantly greener, and there would have been really sizeable populations of people and herds of animals moving across these landscapes.”
In the near future, he believes, “I think we are going to make massive discoveries that are going to change how we view the Middle East completely.”
Dr. Thomas is co-director of the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia project, set up in 2018 by the Royal Commission for AlUla, as part of the Identification and Documentation of the Immovable Heritage Assets of AlUla program. The following year the project was expanded to include the neighboring, heritage-rich region of Khaybar.
A “core” area of AlUla of 3,300 sq. m was surveyed separately by UK-based Oxford Archaeology. Working with staff and students of King Saud University in Riyadh, they identified more than 16,000 archaeological sites.
Setting out initially to survey the AlUla hinterland, an area of more than 22,500 square kilometers, Dr. Thomas and his colleagues faced a daunting task, which they broke down into three stages.
A remote preliminary survey of the entire area, using satellite imagery, was followed by aerial photography of selected sites and, finally, excavation of a small number of the most promising structures.
The first stage lasted more than a year, with team members poring painstakingly over Google Earth and other satellite imagery and pinning every structure they spotted.
For the University of Western Australia team back in Perth, it meant “hour after hour of patiently scrolling through,” Dr. Thomas said.
“Sometimes it was in areas where there was absolutely nothing, just endless kilometers of remote desert. But then at other times you’d find structures all over the place, and you would get through only a few kilometers in a session, because you were constantly finding and pinning new archaeological sites.”
The hard work paid off handsomely.
By the end, they had identified 13,000 sites in AlUla and an extraordinary 130,000 in Khaybar county, dating from the Stone Age to the 20th century. They logged everything they saw, including some of the remains of the Hejaz railway, built by the Ottomans before World War I, but the vast majority of the sites dated from prehistory.
Each site consisted of anything from one structure to clusters of 30 or more, and they have now catalogued more than 150,000 individual structures of archaeological interest, especially in the Khaybar region, where there is “a really dense, significant concentration of archaeological remains.”
After the remote sensing came the really fun part — flying low over the spectacular landscapes of AlUla and Khaybar in helicopters, using open-door photography to record sites previously identified by the satellite survey as being of particular interest.
The pilots, from the Saudi-based The Helicopter Company, flew from site to site along flight paths created by the archaeologists.
“They were commercial pilots who at first had no idea about the archaeology,” Dr. Thomas said. “But they were very keen, and also pretty good at interpreting and spotting things.
“They ended up having a really great understanding, and that was so beneficial to the project. I could say, ‘I’m after three funerary pendants up on an outcrop’, and the pilot would say, ‘Oh, I can see them, in front of us,’ and they’d steer the helicopter round to give you the best photographic angle.”
By the end, he said, “some of the pilots would have seen more archaeology up close than the majority of archaeologists.”
The last aerial photography was carried out in March this year and, by then, the team had captured more than a quarter of a million images across AlUla and Khaybar.
Among the structures they photographed were more than 350 examples of one of the most extraordinary types of large-scale structures scattered across Saudi Arabia’s prehistoric landscape — the mysterious mustatil.
Mustatil is the Arabic word for rectangle, and these often huge, rectangular structures, built by an unknown people more than 8,000 years ago, may be unique to the Arabian peninsula.
More than 1,600 are now known to exist across 300,000 sq. km of northwestern Saudi Arabia, concentrated mainly in the vicinity of AlUla and Khaybar.
Mustatils vary in type — some are more complex than others — but usually they consist of two parallel walls, or occasionally more, joined at either end by shorter walls to create a rectangle. They range in length from 20 to 620 meters and often they are clustered together, in groups numbering anything from two to 19.
In some places, mustatils have been “overbuilt” by subsequent generations who have constructed circular ringed tombs, or so-called pendant tombs, on or very near them.
Building some of the mustatils would have been a big commitment for a considerable number of people. The largest structure ground-surveyed by the AAKSA team, situated on the Harrat Khaybar lava field 50 km south of Khaybar town, was built from basalt boulders and measures 525m in length.
It is estimated that the structure weighs about 12,000 tons, with individual stones weighing between 6 and 500 kg.
Extrapolating from experimental studies carried out on Mayan structures in Guatemala, the archaeologists have estimated that it would have taken a group of 10 people two or three weeks to build a mustatil more than 150m long. Larger structures, up to 500m, could have been constructed by a group of 50 people in about two months.
As Dr. Thomas and his colleagues wrote in a paper published recently in the journal “Antiquity,” not only are mustatils “an important component of the ancient Arabian cultural landscape,” they are also among the earliest stone monuments in Arabia, and “globally one of the oldest monumental building traditions yet identified.”
Of the 1,600 mustatils identified via satellite imagery and the 350 photographed from the air, 39 were selected for ground survey by Thomas’ team. Of these, just a handful were excavated, and these have revealed a wealth of previously unknown information.
In late 2018 and 2019, for example, archaeologists from both the UWA and Oxford teams began excavating undisturbed mustatils east of AlUla valley, and discovered evidence that the structures had served a ritual purpose. Collections of horns and other cranial bone fragments, from animals including cattle, goat and gazelle, were found in chambers in the structures, which could suggest offerings had been made to some long-forgotten deity.
“These are ritual structures, I’d bet my house on it,” Dr. Thomas said.
“We have now excavated five of them, the Oxford Archaeology team has excavated three, and other teams are excavating others too. With the artefacts that are inside, and also the construction techniques that are involved in creating them, there is no practical function for these structures, other than ritual, that would make any sense.”
There is no roofing, the walls are too low for them to have been used for keeping animals in them, and some of them are built on the slopes of mountains that are incredibly steep and difficult to walk up.
Organic remains can be carbon-dated, and the animal bones revealed that the site was late Neolithic – about 7,000 years old. In the past season, however, in a collaboration with the archaeology department at Durham University in the UK, the team has been employing another sophisticated dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence.
This, Dr. Thomas said, “basically allows you to date the last time that sand had light fall directly upon it, which is a really useful technique for dating structures that don’t have any kind of organic deposits within them.”
So far, nothing has been unearthed to suggest why the mustatils were built where they were.
“In some of the locations where we find them we just can’t understand why they were built there,” Dr. Thomas said.
“They might be in a random valley with seemingly not much happening around them. It suggests that people are coming to that spot, creating them, then moving on and probably coming back periodically.”
That, of course, poses the question: what was so special about these sites to these people?
Another, possibly connected, mystery is that the mustatils and even the later Bronze Age burial structures in the region were clearly built to be appreciated not from ground level, but from up above, in the sky.
“What’s fascinating is when you see them from the ground, they’re not that spectacular, just a series of walls,” Dr. Thomas said.
“But as soon as you get in a helicopter, or you look at it on satellite imagery, these things just come to life.”
One theory is that the structures might have been built to be viewed from above by the dead. Another possibility is that they were ritual structures constructed for the benefit of some deity in the sky.
But, as the structures were built long before human beings developed writing, the truth is likely to remain a mystery.
Equally mysterious is where the people came from who built the mustatils — and where they ended up. As yet, no Neolithic burial sites from the same period have been found.
“The hope is that, in the future, we might identify some Neolithic burials,” Dr. Thomas said. “But the reality now is that we’re not sure where the people of the Neolithic are.”
They could have been buried in unmarked graves at random sites, which would make it very hard to find any of them.
“Alternatively, there may be other things that they did to their bodies, which means that we will never find them.”
However, a series of finds in some mustatils has hinted at a perhaps macabre practice in about the mid-fifth millennium BC. Some human remains have been found — but only fragments.
“In one, we found part of a foot and five vertebrae and a couple of long bones. We can tell that while there was still soft tissue attached and holding the bones together, fragments of that body were taken and placed within this mustatil, or next to it.”
There are, however, multiple burial sites in the region — and sometimes close to mustatils — from the Bronze Age, dating from about 2,500 years later.
“There are thousands upon thousands of tombs, pendant burials and larger monumental tombs in the region, indicating that there were large, thriving populations here,” Dr. Thomas said.
The most dramatic examples are located in Khaybar county, to the southeast of AlUla.
“Projecting out of Bronze Age oases are these long pathways, funerary avenues, flanked by thousands of tombs, creating a really significant funerary landscape.”
The next objective for the team is “to focus on this shifting idea of monumentality. In the Neolithic period, for whatever reason, something occurred that meant that people started creating these absolutely massive ritual structures, over a 300 to 500-year period.
“Then it stopped. Archaeologically, from about 4,800 down to about 2600 BC, we find very little — some domestic structures, but not many graves.
“Then suddenly these monumental burials start appearing across the landscape. Why this shift from the mustatil, monumental ritual structures, to the focus 2,000 years later on the individual, or family groups, that were being buried in these structures?
“What happened in those few thousand years?”
Whatever the answer, the vast number of mustatils identified — about 1,600 in an area roughly the size of Poland — not only puts Saudi Arabia’s ancient past in a Neolithic class of its own, but has global repercussions.
“When we look at Neolithic landscapes across the world, often you’re only finding a handful of structures, less than a dozen,” Dr. Thomas said.
“So to have something like the mustatil, where you’ve got well over 1,000, covering such a significant area, really changes how we have to view the Neolithic.
“It indicates that the Neolithic is much more complex than we originally thought.
“And, as more research comes out about the mustatil, I think that will completely revolutionize how we view Neolithic societies, not just in Arabia but across the rest of the world.”
There will be 12 archaeological teams at work in the field this autumn, exploring the past cultures of AlUla and Khaybar from prehistory to the early 20th century. Stone structures of the late prehistoric period will remain a key focus.
On the occasion of International Youth Day, the Diriyah Gate Development Authority has affirmed its commitment to this year’s theme of intergenerational solidarity, highlighting its achievements in bringing people of all ages together as the city moves into the future.
International Youth Day, designated by the UN, aims to draw attention to contemporary issues affecting today’s youth.
The goal of this year’s International Youth Day is to amplify the message that all generations need to take action to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Solidarity across generations is key for sustainable development, and Saudi Arabia’s major development projects address age-related barriers in order to “build back better” in a way that leverages the strengths, knowledge and experience of all age groups.
Ahlam Al-Thunayan, community engagement director at DGDA, said: “What we want to create within Diriyah is an environment where everyone can succeed, no matter their background or age. Diriyah was once a bastion of knowledge, understanding and cultural and commercial exchange. By capitalizing on the skills across generations here at DGDA and building a knowledge exchange program, we can empower the young people in our community and see this become a reality once again.
“Our youth have so much to give to our community, and we have so much to give them. Young people contribute an enormous amount to our project, and we want to see them thrive, whether that be through the provision of multiple career development opportunities or youth-focused community engagement initiatives. They are our nation’s pride, and we see them as the architects of the Kingdom’s future,” she added.
One of the ways DGDA is achieving this is through the implementation of its Community Engagement Strategy and Human Capital Development Strategy, which aim to discover, develop, transform and energize future leaders through the mentorship of the vast talent within the organization and broader community.
The strategy has paved the way for bright young people from the local community to join the authority through the graduate training program, engage in global events like Formula E, become cultural ambassadors at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale or take Diriyah’s message to an international audience as tour guides at Saudi Arabia’s Expo 2020 Pavilion in Dubai.
The authority has also overseen the implementation of empowerment programs for Diriyah’s young residents, including Program Your Passion, to teach game development and animation to middle and high school students.
Sixty-seven percent of Saudi Arabia’s population is under 35, according to a 2020 study released by the General Authority for Statistics, with almost half of the Kingdom’s workforce (47 percent) falling into this young demographic.
The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 strategy aims to unleash this young potential through new initiatives, investments and opportunities.
JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US, Princess Reema bint Bandar Al-Saud, said she was honored to have met the governor of Utah during a recent visit to the western state.
The envoy met Governor Spencer Cox and his wife Abby Palmer during a trip designed to bolster ties between the two sides.
“Honored to have met with Governor Spencer J. Cox of Utah to further the deep friendship between the state of Utah and Saudi Arabia,” she said in an Instagram post.
She also likened the people of Utah to those of Saudi Arabia, saying they were both religious, made their homes in the desert, and had the same values and dreams.
• The princess likened the people of Utah to those of Saudi Arabia, saying they were both religious, made their homes in the desert, and had the same values and dreams.
• The princess and an embassy delegation also met representatives of Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based not- for-profit network of hospitals
During her trip, the princess accompanied Palmer on a visit to The Neighborhood House, a facility that provides affordable care and support services to children and adults needing supervision, Harper’s Bazaar reported.
“Delighted to have the opportunity to join @AbbyPalmerCox to visit the @nhutah to tour the facility, meet the children, and listen to their dreams and wonders!” the envoy said on Instagram.
“Thank you to the First Lady of Utah for organizing this unforgettable fun day @showuputah.”
According to @Showuputah — the official Instagram page of Utah’s first lady — the princess also said: “We both believe in faith, family and a future shaped by creativity and innovation … together, we have ensured peace and prosperity, created global stability, and promoted progress and understanding.”
She added: “What a great opportunity this was to spread more awareness for service and ask questions about being good citizens!”
The princess and an embassy delegation also met representatives of Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based not-for-profit network of hospitals.
The two sides discussed how they might work together in the context of the development of healthcare services in the Kingdom under the umbrella of Saudi Vision 2030.
Princess Reema is the first Saudi woman to serve as an ambassador. She last visited Utah in March 2020.