Arabian Peninsula
or Arabia
Peninsular region, southwest Asia.
With its offshore islands, it covers about 1 million sq mi
(2.6 million sq km). Constituent countries are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,
United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and, the largest, Saudi Arabia. It is generally
arid and is covered almost entirely by the Arabian Desert. The modern economy
is dominated by the production of petroleum and natural gas. The world's
largest proven reserves of those minerals are in the Arabian Peninsula. Its political
consolidation was begun by the Prophet Muhammad, and it was the centre of the
orthodox caliphate until 661, when that office passed to the Umayyad dynasty in
Damascus. After 1517 much of the region was dominated by the Ottoman Empire,
though the peninsula's people, who had remained largely tribal and nomadic,
revolted repeatedly until the World War I (1914–18), when the Ottoman Empire
dissolved. Thereafter, individual nation-states followed their own histories,
though many maintained close ties with European powers such as the United
Kingdom.
. At least one-third of the desert is covered by sand,
including the Rubʿ al-Khali, considered to have one of the
most inhospitable climates on Earth. There are no perennial bodies of
water, though the Tigris-Euphrates river system lies to the northeast and the
Wadi Ḥajr is located to
the south, in Yemen. Humans have inhabited the area since Pleistocene times.
Source: Britannica encyclopedia
