Qaryat al-Faw
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Qaryat al-Faw lies about 700 km southwest of Riyadh on the northwestern edge of the Empty Quarter, at a key point on the trade route linking the south of the Arabian Peninsula with its northeast. With more than seventeen wells, it became the capital of the Kingdom of Kinda and flourished from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE.
The town was laid out in quarters, and excavators have found a palace, temples, houses, a market and cemeteries. Frescoes in the temple of the sun god Shams, showing banquets among other scenes, closely follow Roman wall painting, especially the workshops of Egypt. The Namara inscription records that Imru al-Qays led an expedition to Najran, reached Qaryat al-Faw and drove out the ruling Madh'hij tribe. The town was later abruptly abandoned.
Saudi Aramco employees mentioned the site in the 1940s, and in 1952 three of them visited and wrote about it. From the 1970s King Saud University excavated a residential and market sector and a sacred sector of temples and tombs. Nearly 12,000 archaeological remains from prehistoric to late pre-Islamic times have been recorded, and the site was inscribed on 27 July 2024.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).