SPECIAL THE ARABIAN PENINSULA'S RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
A view of the temple of Qasr al-Bint, in Petra, dated to the first century BC to the first century AD. The deity worshipped here is thought to have been Dushara or Al-Uzza.
© Daniel Case / Wikimedia Commons
A stele of a goddess, known as the ‘Goddess of Hayyan’, from the Temple of the Winged Lions in Petra, dated to the first to second century AD. The precise identity of the goddess is unknown.
The Arabian Peninsula is an enormously large land mass. Despite its vastness, Arabia was not cut off from the wider world. Trade routes crisscrossed between Arabia's most important settlements and beyond, bringing new goods and ideas into the region.
Who was an Arab?
Arabia on the eve of Islam was a multiethnic and multilingual place. Many inhabitants of the Peninsula spoke Arabic, but there were also speakers of South Arabian languages, Aramaic, Greek, and Ethiopic (to name only those which we have tangible evidence of).
The definition, and extent, of Arab identity before Islam remains somewhat unclear. However, we can say, based on the surviving evidence, that it was not common in pre-Islamic times to self-identify as Arab; instead, tribal andguage. The Roman Emperor Philip the Arab (died AD 249) appears to have received the byname ‘Arab’ because he hailed from the Roman province of Arabia, not because he would have spoken Arabic as his first language.
