40 Fun Facts About Arabian Desert

Saudi Arabia, mostly Arabian Desert, is the largest country in the world without a single permanent what?

No permanent river flows anywhere in Saudi Arabia, so the country leans on groundwater and desalinated seawater. Its valleys are wadis, which run only after rare rain.

What does the single hump of the Arabian camel, or dromedary, actually store to carry it through lean weeks?

Fat, up to 36 kg of it, fills the hump, and the camel burns it for energy when food runs short. A shrunken hump is a sign of a starving animal.

Which mythical beast may have begun with sightings of the oryx, a white antelope of the Arabian Desert?

Unicorn legends may have begun with oryxes that had lost one of their long, straight horns. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder both listed the oryx among one-horned animals.

In camel racing across the Gulf states, what has replaced the child jockeys who once rode the racing camels?

Robots with remote-controlled whips now sit on the camels' backs. Qatar banned child jockeys in 2005 and ordered every race to be run with the machines by 2007.

Rub' al Khali, the Arabic name of the world's largest continuous sand desert, translates into English as what?

Empty Quarter is the literal meaning, and the desert earns it: 650,000 square kilometres of dunes up to 250 metres high, filling the southern third of the peninsula.

Which 1962 epic film shows its heroes crossing the Nafud desert by camel, a crossing the real raiders never made?

Lawrence of Arabia sends its hero across the Nafud to take Aqaba, but in 1917 the tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi refused the detour as unnecessary and the raiders never entered the sands.

The dunes of the Rub' al Khali near Liwa in Abu Dhabi played the desert planet Jakku in which Star Wars film?

The Force Awakens opens on Jakku, where a Resistance pilot is handed a map to Luke Skywalker, and its sand scenes were shot in the dunes east of Liwa.

Which country, far from Arabia, is home to the world's largest population of feral dromedary camels?

Australia brought in thousands of dromedaries as outback pack animals from the 19th century, and their wild descendants are now sometimes exported live to Saudi Arabia.

Fossils found among the dunes of the Rub' al Khali show which large African animal once lived there?

Hippopotamus bones lie in dried lake beds among the dunes, beside those of water buffalo and long-horned cattle, proof that heavy rains once filled the basins.

Which capital city in the centre of the Arabian Desert has a name meaning gardens, after its old palm orchards?

Riyadh grew from a walled town ringed by orchards on the bank of Wadi Hanifa into a city of about seven million people in the middle of the desert.

Which nomadic herders of the Arabian Desert take their name from an Arabic word meaning desert dweller?

Bedouin comes from the Arabic badawi, a word traditionally set against hadir, the term for settled people. A family unit is still counted as a bayt, or tent.

Ghawar, buried beneath the eastern Arabian Desert, is the world's largest conventional field of what?

Oil was struck at Ghawar in 1948 and began to flow in 1951, and the field's southern end runs under the northern sands of the Rub' al Khali.

Which city carved into rose-red cliffs in Jordan's desert stayed unknown to the West until 1812?

Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, Arab traders who grew rich on the desert caravan trade and survived there by collecting every drop of rainwater.

Which drink, poured from a long-spouted pot called a dallah, is at the heart of desert hospitality in Arabia?

Coffee is roasted, pounded and boiled in front of the guest, then served in a small handleless cup called a finjan.

The Arabian Desert shares its hot, dry climate with which larger desert, of which it is considered an extension?

Sahara conditions carry on east of the Red Sea across the peninsula, and even as an offshoot the Arabian Desert ranks as the largest desert in Asia.

Which off-road race, first run across Africa and later South America, moved to Saudi Arabia's deserts in 2020?

Dakar Rally organisers left Africa after security threats in Mauritania cancelled the 2008 race, spent a decade in South America, then chose the Saudi dunes.

Al-Ahsa in eastern Saudi Arabia, a World Heritage Site since 2018, is the world's largest example of what?

Oasis is the word for it: a huge underground aquifer waters more than 2.5 million palm trees at Al-Ahsa, allowing farming all year in what is otherwise sand desert.

Which sweet fruit of the palm tree has been cultivated in eastern Arabia for more than seven thousand years?

Dates were being grown in eastern Arabia by about 5300 BC. The Romans later planted the same palm in their gardens, though it would not fruit in Italy's cooler climate.

Which part of its face can the Arabian camel close at will, a trick that also helps it save water?

Nostrils that close at will cut the moisture lost with each breath, while a double row of eyelashes and bushy eyebrows keeps wind-blown sand out of the camel's eyes.

Wilfred Thesiger's 1940s crossings of the Rub' al Khali began as a hunt for the breeding grounds of which insect?

Locusts were the excuse: an anti-locust unit paid Thesiger to look for the swarms' breeding grounds, and the journeys became his 1959 classic Arabian Sands.

Until about AD 300, caravans crossed what is now the Rub' al Khali carrying which fragrant resin prized by Rome?

Frankincense, tapped from Boswellia trees, went north by camel until the desert grew too harsh. The old caravan tracks, invisible on the ground, still show up in satellite images.

Which big cat, whose Asiatic subspecies now survives only in Iran, once ranged across the Arabian Desert?

Cheetah territory once ran from Arabia all the way to India, but the Asiatic form was wiped out everywhere except Iran during the 20th century.

What coats the sand grains of the Rub' al Khali, turning its great dunes orange, purple and red?

Iron oxide, the compound in rust, coats the feldspar grains that make up a tenth or more of the sand, so the dunes glow in warm colours.

Which Jordanian desert valley, nicknamed the Valley of the Moon, stood in for Mars in the film The Martian?

Wadi Rum has played the red planet in several films, and its sandstone scenery in a 1962 desert epic is credited with kick-starting tourism in Jordan.

The nomadic herders of the Arabian Desert traditionally wove their black tents from the hair of which animal?

Goat hair made the black tent called a bayt al-shar, which cloth curtains divided into carpeted areas for the men, the family and the cooking.

Which slender sighthound, also called the gazelle hound, did the nomads of Arabia use to run down desert game?

Saluki hounds hunt by sight rather than scent. To give one a flying start at a hare, a hunter might ride close on a camel and throw the dog towards its prey.

Ubar, the lost city sought beneath the dunes of southern Arabia, is called which legendary place 'of the Sands'?

Atlantis of the Sands is the lost city's popular name. In the 1990s searchers armed with satellite photographs claimed a ruined fort at Shisr in Oman as the site.

The houbara bustard, a shy bird of Arabia's deserts, is the traditional quarry of which hunting art?

Falconry with saker and peregrine falcons came close to wiping out the houbara in the Middle East. A chased bustard spirals up into the air to dodge the strike.

The Rub' al Khali spreads across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and which fourth country?

Yemen holds a strip along the southern edge of the sands, but by far the largest share of the desert lies in southeastern Saudi Arabia.

Umm al Samim, the 'Mother of Poisons' on the Rub' al Khali's eastern edge, is a treacherous expanse of what?

Quicksand hides there under a crust that looks solid: water draining off Oman's mountains collects in the closed basin and never reaches the sea.

Which US city's zoo began the captive herd in 1962 that saved the Arabian oryx from dying out altogether?

Phoenix Zoo started with nine animals and has had more than 240 births. Hunters finished off the last wild oryx by 1972, and zoo-bred herds went back to the desert from 1980.

Searching the Rub' al Khali for the lost city of Ubar in 1932, explorer St John Philby instead found what?

Meteorite craters ringed with black glass lay where legend put the city. Philby took the site for a volcano until the British Museum identified the iron he carried home.

Men from the desert villages of Liwa traditionally spent summers on the Gulf coast working in which trade?

Pearl diving gave the Bani Yas of Liwa a second income beside their palm gardens, and the same villages produced the ruling families of both Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

The National Museum of Qatar in Doha is built in the shape of which crystal formation found in the region?

Desert rose crystals form as petals of gypsum that trap sand as they grow. Architect Jean Nouvel copied them in 539 interlocking discs that shade visitors from the heat.

Jebel Fihrayn, a cliff dropping 300 metres to an ancient seabed in central Saudi Arabia, is nicknamed what?

Edge of the World is a lookout on the Tuwaiq escarpment, an 800-kilometre arc of limestone cliffs thrown up by movements of the Arabian plate.

Which 85,000-year-old human fossil, found in the Nafud desert in 2016, showed how early our species reached Arabia?

A finger bone was all it took: at about 85,000 years old, it ranks among the oldest traces of our species found beyond Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

Which northwesterly wind, named from the Arabic for north, whips up sandstorms over Iraq and the Gulf states?

Shamal winds can blow for days on end, lifting a wall of dust several thousand feet deep that grounds flights and buries roads under sand.

Which official of the Sultan of Muscat became the first documented Westerner to cross the Rub' al Khali?

Bertram Thomas made the crossing in 1930 and 1931 with guides of the Rashid tribe, then told the story in his book Arabia Felix.

Which Saudi desert site, with over 110 rock-cut Nabataean tombs, became the kingdom's first World Heritage Site?

Hegra, also called Mada'in Salih, marked the southern reach of the Nabataean kingdom, and the dry air kept its carved tomb fronts crisp for some two thousand years.

Sabkha, an Arabic word used by geologists worldwide, names which kind of terrain common around the Rub' al Khali?

Salt flat is the plain meaning: groundwater seeps up to the surface and evaporates, leaving a crust of minerals between the dunes.