Who lived here before we came?

Archaeologist working on sites in the UAE believes Fujairah was an important part of Middle Eastern civilisations


At first glance it appears to be a sea of rocks with a coppery tint and dusting of fine sand that looks like snow from a distance. Hundreds of Zizyphus trees rise like sentinels in deep concentration with their arms reaching out to the sky. Fujairah's charcoal-brown Al Hajjar Mountains keep watch around this tableau of nature.

Any second, you expect Fred Flintstone in his leopard-skin tunic to come dashing around the corner, telling you to stop snooping around. But, nothing of the sort transpires. Instead, we travel through centuries to the Islamic era and times beyond that, as far back as the Iron Age – 1300 BC to 300 BC.

Archaeologist Dr Michelle Ziolkowski has surveyed and recorded 126 ancient tombs in Fujairah's Wadi Saqamqam, located seven kilometres north of the city.

The graves are of varying shapes, including oval, circular and two or three joined together, in a line or a figure-of-eight. All of them are from a time prior to the arrival of Islam in this land, with some possibly dating to the Iron Age and others to the Wadi Suq period – 2000 to 1300 BC. There is also the presence of Late Islamic period ceramics and settlement features, perhaps 300 or 400 years ago.

The incredible thing about the archaeological site is all these various characters are all present in a rather small area of land, a cauldron of antiquity that gives a remarkable glimpse of the people who came before us - travellers, nomads and settlers.

The discovery…

The Wadi Saqamqam site was located in the path of the Qidfa to Al Ain water pipeline project by the Union Water and Electricity Company (UWEC).

"It was identified during an environmental survey of the route for the water pipeline carried out in December 2001 for UWEC, by Simon Aspinall and Peter Hellyer of the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey (ADIAS)," explained Dr Ziolkowski.