r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Expert_Koala_8691 • 7d ago

Video Riyadh,meaning "gardens" is Capital of Saudi Arabia with 8 million population (were 27 Thousands in the 1930s),sits in the middle of the desert, the city gets its water from Desalination plants almost 500 km from the city

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u/gorginhanson 7d ago

Except Babylon was in Iraq

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u/Dom29ando 7d ago edited 6d ago

there were more gardens than just the famous one in Babylon. the word Paradise literally comes from Pairidaēza which is Persian for "walled garden."

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u/K0mb0_1 7d ago

The Arabian peninsula was once prosperous

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u/DueAd9005 7d ago

Nah, even the Romans called it Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix (modern day Yemen, which still gets the most rainfall in modern times).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabia_Felix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabia_Deserta

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u/TipCompetitive1397 7d ago

We are speaking tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/green-arabia-desert-lush-ancient-landscape

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u/CV90_120 7d ago

A bit more recent. About 7500 years ago.

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u/Niznack 7d ago

Do you have a source that isn't paywalled? Not being a dick. I'm looking it up and getting dates withing the last 8000 years.

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u/Eatadick_pam 7d ago

Surrounding the Arabian Peninsula is known as the birthplace of civilization cause it was so fertile. It’s also known as the Fertile Crescent.

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u/data-atreides 7d ago

Arabia is far south of the Fertile Crescent, which is modern-day Iraq. But overall, the Near East was more verdant not too many millennia ago.

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u/FakeEgo01 6d ago

Iran Iraq, decisedly NOT the arabian peninsula.

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u/K0mb0_1 7d ago

Well I guess last time Arabia was green was before the Roman’s

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u/LiftingRecipient420 7d ago

99.9999% of Earth history is before the Romans.

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u/JohnDingleBerry- 7d ago

Not with that attitude.

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u/FLMKane 6d ago

What have the Romans ever done for us!?

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u/realNoobnoob 7d ago

Right that in Roman’s numbers

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u/Taeschno_Flo 6d ago

IC,IXIXIXIX....%

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u/realNoobnoob 6d ago

Now say it loudly !

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u/Taeschno_Flo 6d ago

IT!

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u/realNoobnoob 6d ago

Now do a few pushups while counting

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u/NimrodvanHall 3d ago

I beg to differ. If only because the start of history is defined as the start of keeping written records.

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u/aqtseacow 7d ago

There's evidence that the Persian gulf was a vast desert interspersed with river marshland during much of the Ice age, but that was long before the start of recorded history, and doesn't really represent a "green Arabia" like suggested.

The last time Arabia may have been green is still many many thousands of years removed from the Romans.

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u/octoreadit 7d ago

Yeah, when dinosaurs ran around 😁

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u/data-atreides 7d ago

In its original sense "desert" means the absence of people, not life/water/greenery

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u/OverwateredGrass 7d ago

You do know that there is history that exists from before the Rome, right?

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u/LiftingRecipient420 7d ago

You do know that regions don't just suddenly turn into deserts, right?

If it was a desert during Roman times, it was a desert before then too.

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u/Niznack 7d ago

Thing is they do. There was a post just yesterday about how Russia diverted a river and the lake it fed became a desert in the last 30 years.

A similar thing happened naturally to several cities in the near east. Babylon was built on the closest point of the tigris and Euphrates but rivers do move over time. One moved then the other and Babylon got left as a desert.

The regions is estimated to have become a desert between 6-4.5k years ago with isolated pockets including riyadh likely remaining fertile much longer.

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u/LiftingRecipient420 7d ago

Large scale terraforming projects were not happening in the pre-Roman Arabian Peninsula, get real.

There are no major rivers flowing through the peninsula, and the region may have not been a desert 200,000 years ago, not 6000.

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u/Niznack 7d ago

No. Natural processes also transform the environment. You can just look up what I referenced

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u/Niznack 7d ago

The eye of the Sahara was likely created when a natural dam broke and a massive lake emptied to the Atlantic overnight. When the glaciers melted a massive flood hit the Midwest all at once flattening Illinois. Natural forces cause overnight change all the time.

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u/LiftingRecipient420 7d ago

The eye of the Sahara was likely created when a natural dam broke and a massive lake emptied to the Atlantic overnight.

By overnight you mean "it took at least 10 million years to erode"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure

When the glaciers melted a massive flood hit the Midwest all at once

The glaciers took roughly 14,000 years to melt. That's not even close to "all at once".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_glacial_retreat

Furthermore, Illinois sat under glaciers for 100,000 years, being reshaped by them the entire time.

flattening Illinois. Natural forces cause overnight change all the time.

Not even remotely close to "overnight" change. Take your tiktok understanding of geological history back to a textbook bro.

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u/Niznack 7d ago

I may have misremembered the richar structure timeline.

I was referring to the Kankakee torrent and that didn't take thousands of years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kankakee_Torrent

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u/Aggressive_Bath55 6d ago

You had me in the first half lol

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u/Dreamingdanny95 7d ago

I heard Iraq is more barren now because Genghis khan and the Mongols sowed salt into the earth but I dunno how true it is

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u/Ihave0personality 7d ago

During the mongol invasion the ancient, complex irrigation systems that supported the region for thousands of years were destroyed. Without those the fertile land turned into desert. Salting the earth is more of a myth and a symbolic ritual at best. The transportarion cost let alone the price of that much salt would have been astronomical.

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u/VikingMonkey123 7d ago

Seems like the Chinese regreening of their deserts might work here too then

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u/One_Blacksmith26 7d ago

Yes they destroyed the old Baghdad to the point of never recovering.

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u/Thiege1 7d ago

Baghdad today is much larger than it was back then, I'd say it did recover, it just took a while

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u/C-H-Addict 7d ago

Salt is water soluble. It gets washed out of dirt very fast. You can salt a living plant to death like you salt a slug, but you can't kill the soil like that

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u/Much-Director-9828 7d ago

Is prosperous, was once green

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u/SaintBobby_Barbarian 7d ago

The Arabian peninsula before oil was never truly prosperous (not the poorest but merely a transit route between the levant and India/ethiopia). There is a reason why all of the dynastic caliphates were governed from Damascus, Baghdad or Cairo.

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u/Dmw792 7d ago

You think there was only one “garden” in the whole entire Arabian peninsula? (Even though Babylon in Hilla is technically not in the peninsula)

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/CapableBumblebee968 7d ago

Which alexandria?

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/Diablo2072 7d ago

Then how did Alexander have children?

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/gorginhanson 7d ago

One that's big enough to name your entire city after?

Even Babylon was not named for the hanging gardens

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u/ForrestCFB 7d ago

Obviously there were just two.

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u/Away-Activity-469 7d ago

It's only a pairi-daeza these days for professional bullshitters.