Who were the Arabs?
They began as tribes of the desert — and gave the world a language of heaven, a religion followed by nearly two billion people, and the libraries that carried science through the Middle Ages. The Arabs are at once a people, a language, and a civilization; their story runs from the incense caravans of pre-Islamic Arabia to the skyscrapers of the Gulf.
Last updated: October 2026
Mecca ★ Medina Damascus Baghdad Cairo Córdoba Heartland and golden-age cities — stylized map 1st millennium BCE Caravan kingdoms 622 The Hijra 711 Tariq crosses to Iberia 1258 Baghdad sacked 1916 Sykes-Picot Origins · golden age · today Centuries of rule: how long each power lasted Abbasid caliphate 508 years Ottoman rule (Arab lands) 400 years Umayyad caliphate 89 years Rashidun caliphate 29 years Five centuries of Abbasids; four of Ottomans Origins Before Islam, Arabia was a world of tribes and caravans. By the 1st millennium BCE, its caravan kingdoms were already rich: the kingdom of Saba, the Sheba of legend, was trading frankincense and myrrh by the 8th century BCE. In the north, the Nabataeans carved Petra from rose-red rock and taxed the spice roads. Mecca, a harsh desert town, prospered on the caravan trade and the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine that already drew pilgrims long before Muhammad.
The Arabs take their name from Arabia, the great peninsula between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In the ancient world, Arab peoples lived as farmers in the watered valleys of the south, as traders in the oasis towns of the north, and as nomadic herders across the deserts of the interior, moving with camels, sheep, and goats between wells and pastures. They were never one kingdom or one tribe, but a mosaic of tribes and towns bound by a common language, Arabic, and by a shared sense of descent and honour.
Arabic belongs to the Semitic family of languages, which also includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and the ancient languages of Mesopotamia. In the centuries before Islam, Arabic was a language of poetry, prized across the peninsula for its odes, its genealogies, and its boasting contests at fairs. The most famous pre-Islamic poems, the Muallaqat, the hanging odes, were said to have been suspended in honour at the Kaaba in Mecca, and they remain monuments of Arabic literature today.
The Arabs of the pre-Islamic age were far from isolated. In the north, the Nabataeans, an Arab people, carved the city of Petra from the rose-red rock of the Jordanian mountains and grew rich taxing the spice roads that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean. Further north still, the city of Palmyra, a desert oasis, grew rich on the same trade and briefly, under Queen Zenobia in the third century CE, challenged Rome itself for control of the east. In the south, the kingdoms of Saba, whose queen is remembered in legend as the Queen of Sheba, Ma'in, and Himyar built dams, terraces, and temples in what is now Yemen.
In the desert's margins, two Arab client kingdoms served the great empires: the Ghassanids guarded the Byzantine frontier, and the Lakhmids the Persian one, and their courts became centres of Arabic poetry. Mecca, a harsh desert town with little water and no agriculture, prospered on two assets: the caravan trade, and the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine that already drew pilgrims from across Arabia long before the rise of Islam. It was in this world of trade, poetry, and pilgrimage that the prophet Muhammad was born, around 570 CE.
In the seventh century CE, the Arab peoples were transformed by a new faith. Muhammad, born in Mecca, preached a message of one God, and after his death in 632, his successors, the caliphs, carried Islam out of Arabia with astonishing speed. Within a century, Arab armies and administrators ruled from Spain in the west to the borders of India and Central Asia in the east. With Islam travelled Arabic: the language of the Quran became the language of administration, law, science, and poetry across a vast empire, and peoples from Morocco to Mesopotamia adopted it, often while keeping their older identities alongside their new one.
The caliphates that followed, the Umayyads of Damascus and then the Abbasids of Baghdad, presided over a golden age of scholarship. In Baghdad's House of Wisdom and in the libraries of Cordoba and Cairo, scholars working in Arabic preserved the learning of Greece, Persia, and India, and extended it: in algebra, named after the Arabic al-jabr, in astronomy, in medicine, and in optics. The Arab contribution to this age was not only conquest but transmission: the knowledge carried in Arabic texts would later flow into medieval Europe and help to shape the Renaissance.
Today the word Arab describes peoples who share the Arabic language and a broad cultural heritage, not a single ethnicity, religion, or appearance. The Arab League, founded in Cairo in 1945, counts twenty-two member states, stretching from Mauritania and Morocco in the west to Oman and Iraq in the east, and Arabic is spoken, in its many dialects, by several hundred million people. Arab societies include Muslims of many traditions, Christians with churches older than most of Europe's, Jews whose communities in the Arab world stretch back more than two thousand years, and many others.
Arab identity has always been layered. A person can be Arab and Amazigh, Arab and Kurdish, Arab and Nubian, Arab and French-speaking, all at once, and diaspora communities from Paris to São Paulo to Detroit carry Arab culture far beyond the Arab world. What endures across that diversity is the language, with its poetry and its calligraphy; the hospitality and the poetry contests of the desert camp, carried into modern novels, songs, and films; and a history that runs from Petra and Palmyra to the present, longer and more varied than any single story can hold.
- League of Arab States, on its member states and founding.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on the Arabs, Arabia, and Arabic language.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Nabataean Petra and the art of the Arab world.
- Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History, Basic Books.
- UNESCO, on the heritage of Petra, Palmyra, and the old city of Sanaa.