This is the first in a series of articles that will take a long, hard, look at the ancient evidence for the existence of Mecca. If you rely on the classic Islamic sources, even asking questions about this might be seen as nonsensical, because they take for granted that Mecca was the most important city in the Arabian Peninsula. However, this picture is, to put it mildly, not supported by on-the-ground evidence. It must, furthermore, be remembered that the Islamic sources were committed to paper generations after the time when Muhammad was supposed to have lived. So, asking these questions is right and proper. In this first article we will look at evidence, or lack of it, from the writings of neighboring entities.
It must be stated from the outset that the title of this article is something of a misnomer because if its contents were limited to actual pre-Islamic historical evidence for the ancient existence of Mecca, there would be nothing here. To put it as bluntly as possible: There is not a single shred of uncontested primary source evidence confirming the existence of an ancient city at the spot where the modern city of Mecca is located.
This may seem, at first glance, like a very bold and startling claim, and one that is likely to be profoundly disruptive to the faith of devout Muslims. The facts, however, speak for themselves. Mecca is not mentioned in any correspondence, travel description or gazetteer (geographical dictionary) or any other type of historical source before the 8th century. In fact, the first references to Mecca all occur more than a century after the date commonly given for the death of Muhammad, with the oldest mention of the city dating from 741 CE (i.e., 109 years after Muhammad’s death) where it is referred to in a document known as the ‘Continuatio Byzantia Arabica’.
A common response to the easily verifiable fact of Mecca’s absence from the pre-Islamic historical record is to claim that this period of the history of Arabia is so shrouded in mystery that the problem of the absence of sources is a general one, rather than being limited to Mecca. In other words, Mecca is absent because the entire history of the period and area is simply a blank page.
This is simply not the case. We can point to detailed historical records for many other towns and cities dotted up and down the Arabian Peninsula. These include Yathrib (later Medina, ‘second city’ of Islam), Sana’a, Najran, and Petra. We can even, perhaps most interestingly for our purposes, point to detailed sources confirming the pre-Islamic existence of the city of Ta’if. At 70 miles from Islam’s holy city, Ta’if is practically on modern Mecca’s doorstep. It is presented in the Islamic record as very much in the shadow of its much more illustrious neighbor. We would be justified in thinking, considering this, that there would be plenty of sources from which to reconstruct the pre-Islamic history of Mecca with scanty evidence for Ta’if. Instead, we have much to draw upon for Ta’if and precisely nothing for Mecca.
The gaping hole in the historical record where references to Mecca should be (if the traditional Islamic account is to be believed) is nothing short of astounding. This is the city at the heart of Islam, the supposed mother of all cities. A city that was a major trading hub and religious center. Yet, as Patricia Crone points out in her seminal work ‘Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam’: “Greek trading documents refer to the towns of Ta’if (Southeast of Mecca), Yathrib (later Medina), Kaybar, but never Mecca!” We must wait, as mentioned above, for a full 109 years after the traditional death date of Muhammad for the first mention of Mecca to appear (in a document dating from 741 CE) and more than another century (i.e., around 900 CE) after that for the city to be shown on a map.
Mecca’s complete absence from the pre-Islamic historical record is not the only question that could be asked about the place of this supposedly ancient site within Islamic history. There are also significant doubts about whether descriptions of the holy city of Islam in the Qur’an and Hadiths correlate with the physical features of the city of Mecca.
The silence of the ancient sources about Mecca is certainly deeply embarrassing to those Muslim scholars who are aware of this issue and many of them have tried very hard to prove we can indeed find Mecca in ancient documents if we just look hard enough. Over the course of this article series, this claim will be tested by turning to historical sources dealing with ancient Arabia in an attempt to unearth even a single pre-Islamic reference to the city of Mecca. We will begin by turning to the records of nations who lived in the areas bordering the location of the modern location of Mecca to see if any of them ever mentioned the great city that supposedly existed right on their doorsteps.