A recent study indicates that urban development in this region advanced at a slower pace than in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant during the same period, though it was not entirely absent.

The earliest Arabs, Semitic peoples related to the Akkadians of Mesopotamia, the Canaanites and Hebrews of the Levant, and the Abyssinians of the Horn of Africa, settled in the Arabian Peninsula ...

Urbanization has been difficult to study in northern Arabia due to a lack of well-preserved archaeological sites compared to better-understood areas such as the Levant and Mesopotamia. However ...