Introduction

     Before addressing the topic, let’s briefly discuss the history of Mecca from the Islamic tradition’s point of view. Surprisingly, there is only one reference to Mecca in the Qur'an (48:24). Another passage mentions a place called “bakka” (3:96), which Muslim exegeses generally identify with Mecca, but this hypothesis is not credible² . To give a point of comparison, the New Testament, which is roughly similar in length to the Qur'an, mentions Jerusalem 139 times! Thus, Mecca occupies a very marginal place in the Qur'anic text. This is all the more striking given that Islamic sources describe the city as a great Arab metropolis whose origins date back to Adam and Eve. Islamic tradition indeed recounts that Adam, after being expelled from paradise, would have lived in Mecca and built the Ka’ba to dwell there. The “house” was destroyed during the flood, and Allah ordered Abraham and Ishmael to rebuild it as a sanctuary. Ishmael would then have founded a lineage from which Muhammad would descend.

     Around the beginning of the 5th century, a certain Qusayy ibn Kilab, himself an ancestor of the Prophet, supposedly succeeded in unifying the Quraish tribe and establishing himself as governor of the city. He is attributed a mainly religious role: for example, he would have revived the Meccan pilgrimage – meanwhile, the city had become almost entirely polytheistic. It is said that pagans came from all over the Arabian Peninsula to perform the pilgrimage around the Ka’ba. Furthermore, Mecca had become, according to the “official” account, one of the main commercial crossroads of Arabia, which would have contributed to the city’s wealth. But we will now see that this version no longer holds up in light of recent historical discoveries…

The Embarrassing Silence of the Sources

     The first point to highlight is that to date, there are no references to Mecca in pre-Islamic sources. Epigraphic excavations in the Arabian Peninsula have uncovered several tens of thousands of inscriptions from the pre-Islamic period. Not a single one mentions Mecca. This seems all the more surprising for a city supposedly important, as “so many insignificant villages in Yemen provide texts by the dozens,” notes Christian Robin ³

Historians have analyzed thousands of documents from the period (chronicles, travel accounts, religious texts…) of Byzantine, Persian, or Syriac origin. Not a single one mentions Mecca. Among the dozens of contemporary testimonies of the Arab conquests, none mention Mecca, from which many of the conquerors are supposed to have come⁴ . Furthermore, it is known that on the eve of Islam, Arabia was under Ethiopian control, which intervened militarily to defend the Yemen Christians persecuted by a newly converted king to Judaism. One of the generals of the Ethiopian army, a certain Abraha, seized power around 535 and reigned over the South Arabian kingdom. From 548 onward, he launched an offensive into the desert Arabia and led campaigns against several cities. These expeditions are well documented through inscriptions (CIH 541 and RY 506), as well as a chronicle by the historian Procopius of Caesarea⁵. It is probable that if Mecca had the importance attributed to it by Islamic sources, it would have been among Abraha's targets. Yet, the city is not mentioned in the inscriptions he left behind, nor in the chronicles of the time⁶ .

Les preuves archéologiques confirment que La Mecque était à peine un village insignifiant, attesté par une inscription sabéenne datant du 3^e siècle, découverte dans la région de Jabal Riyam au Yemen. L’inscription, découverte en 2006, est exceptionnelle car elle offre une cartographie des principales tribus et de leurs territoires dans la péninsule arabe⁷ . One of the authors of the inscription thanks the deity of his tribe for bringing him back safely from a long journey during which he traversed about ten territories. Among them, he mentions notably the land of the Lihyan, near Mecca, the land of the Asd (al-Azd) in the south of the peninsula, the land of the Nizar, located halfway between Mecca and Medina, or the land of the Tanukh, on the eastern coast. Conversely, neither the Quraysh tribe nor Mecca are mentioned, which undermines the claim that the city has an ancient origin.

South Arabian epigraphic sources also mention several pilgrimage sites in Arabia. One of them even references a pilgrimage located in a city called the “holy city.” But the place-name designates Ma’rib, the capital of the Sabaean kingdom⁸ . To date, there are no sources before Islam that designate Mecca as a pilgrimage center, making this claim quite doubtful. Epigraphic and archaeological excavations also show that pre-Islamic Arabia was largely monotheistic⁹ . In many regions of the peninsula, references in inscriptions to pagan deities disappear from the 5th century onward, replaced by references to the one God¹⁰ . It is hard to imagine how polytheists from all over Arabia could have flocked to Mecca if polytheism had almost disappeared. The pilgrimage to Mecca probably did not exist there before Islam and appears to have been instituted only around the 8th century¹¹ . The Ka’ba was still, in pre-Islamic times, a small local sanctuary, whose walls were said not to exceed the height of a man¹²

The Bible also remains silent regarding Mecca. Some Muslim apologists still attempt to prove otherwise by arguing that certain biblical passages do indeed refer to the Islamic holy city. One cites Psalm 84:7, which mentions “the valley of Baka,” identified with the mysterious toponym “Bakka” mentioned in the Qur'an. The two words probably refer to the same place, but it is not Mecca that is meant, but a site in Palestine along a route used by pilgrims heading to Jerusalem¹³ . Some also argue that the “desert of Paran” mentioned in the Book of Genesis (21:21) extends into the Hejaz and thus refers to Mecca (although the city itself is not directly mentioned). This hypothesis collapses when considering archaeological and epigraphic data. Archaeologist Uzi Avner showed that Paran is actually located in a mountainous region south of Sinai (Palestine). This region is irrigated by the Wadi Feiran oasis, from which it probably derives its name (Feiran > Paran). There, 43 Nabataean inscriptions bearing the name Paran have been recorded. This name, in its variant Pharan, corresponds to a village mentioned by several ancient geographers such as Ptolemy (~ 168 AD)¹⁴ .

Furthermore, many Greek and Roman authors were interested in Arabia during Antiquity and documented in detail the main settlement sites. For example, Strabo (circa 23 AD) and Eratosthenes (died 194), both authors of a map of the peninsula. Others like Pliny the Elder (died 79), Ammianus Marcellinus (circa 395), or Philostorgius (died 433) also dedicated several pages in their writings to the geographical and political situation of Arabia. None of them refer to Mecca.

Some say that the city is mentioned by the Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy, who we already mentioned, but this claim does not withstand critical analysis. In his Geography Manual, written in the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy provides a map of Arabia in which the name Macoraba (Μακοράβα) appears near Hejaz¹⁵ . Some historians have inferred that Macoraba must refer to Mecca, but this “is not credible,” states expert on pre-Islamic Arabia Ilkka Lindstedt ¹⁶ . The question was recently extensively addressed by Ian Morris in a very well-documented study¹⁷ . He also concludes that the identification of Macoraba with Mecca is “arbitrary and fragile”¹⁸ .

At the risk of stating the obvious, Makkah (ﻣﻜﺔ) and Macoraba (ﻣﺎﻛﻮراﺑﺎ) are two different names, and to date, there is no convincing explanation regarding the etymology of Macoraba. The name is not mentioned anywhere outside the Manual, and how the transition from Makkah to Macoraba (or vice versa) occurred remains a mystery. French orientalist Samuel Bochart was the first to identify Macoraba with Mecca. Due to a confusion with Hebrew, he thought the name came from Makkah rabbah, meaning “Great Mecca”¹⁹ . The obvious problem is that in Arabic, it should be written al-rabbah. Another popular hypothesis among 20th-century historians suggests Macoraba derives from the Ethiopian mikrab, “the temple”²⁰ . But Patricia Crone has shown that this hypothesis is etymologically unsound²¹ . Recently, Mikhail Bukharin proposed another interpretation that derives the Greek name from the Arabic maghrib, meaning “west” or “occident”²² . He suggests that the Greeks and Romans referred to the region around Mecca by this name. In this case, Macoraba would be the generic name for the western part of Arabia, not the city of Mecca, which is perhaps the most convincing explanation to date.

Moreover, Ian Morris has shown that the identification of Macoraba with Mecca was never considered by medieval Muslim scholars. They were well aware of Ptolemy’s work, which had been translated into Arabic as early as the 9th century²³ . The Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Rumi (d. 1229) cites the Greek scholar, but the coordinates he assigns to the location of Mecca are very different from those of Macoraba²⁴ . In fact, this name does not appear anywhere in Arab-Muslim texts, probably because scholars of the time did not understand its meaning and simply ignored it²⁵ . It is noteworthy that following Ptolemy, no scholar (Arab, Greek, Syriac, Latin…) has revived the idea that Macoraba referred to Mecca²⁶ . This identification is based on no tangible proof, and various attempts to explain the origin of Macoraba have all failed. Currently, it is still unknown what the Greek geographer was referring to. The name could designate the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula, as already suggested. It is also possible that the toponym referred to a city that has since disappeared, or whose name changed along the way. In any case, analysis of the various elements clearly shows that “the name Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca”²⁷ .

In principle, if the city had been a major commercial hub, one would expect it to be mentioned by its trading partners. As Patricia Crone points out,

the Greek and Latin writers, after all, wrote extensively about the Arabs of the south who supplied them with aromatic products in the past. They provide information about their cities, tribes, and political organization [...]. The political and religious importance of Arabia in the sixth century was such that considerable attention was also paid to Arab affairs; but the Quraysh and their commercial center are absolutely never mentioned, whether in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, or any other literature produced outside Arabia before the conquests ²⁸-->.

To summarize, among the tens of thousands of documents from all origins dating from the pre-Islamic period, not a single one mentions Mecca. As Francis Peters writes, “there is no non-Arabic text that can reasonably confirm anything about Mecca – including its very existence” ²⁹ . The first non-Islamic reference to Mecca appears in the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle written in 741³⁰ . The chronicle reports the conquest of Mecca by Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, and specifies that the city “is located between Ur, in Chaldea, and the city of Harran in the desert”³¹ . But this location strangely corresponds to Mesopotamia, not Arabia. It is probably just an error by the chronicle’s author, but this mistake reveals that around the mid-8th century, when Islam dominates a large part of the Near East, we are still unable to accurately place Mecca on a map.

The Meccan Trade: Myth or Reality?

     As we have seen, Islamic sources claim that Mecca built its fortune on caravan trade, supplying goods to Byzantium and Mesopotamia. Gradually, the Meccans would have become indispensable in this large-scale trade, and their city would have eventually established itself as one of the major trading hubs in Arabia. For a long time, historians lacked perspective on the sources and took the traditional narrative at face value, which presented Mecca as a key place in the peninsula’s commerce. But in 1987, the publication of Patricia Crone’s book titled Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam sparked a revolutionary shift on the topic.

               Mecca and the trade routes

     It is undeniable that Arabs played an intermediary role in trade between the East and the Byzantine world. The rise of commerce in Arabia began about 3,000 years ago thanks to the economic growth of regions around the Mediterranean³² . This growth in turn increased demand for products (incense, spices, leather, luxury goods, etc.) from India or Yemen. Arabia then became a transit land for these goods, which were transported towards their destination markets along trade routes. In this context, did Mecca really play an important role, as claimed by Islamic sources? Archaeological excavations, combined with analysis of contemporary documents, provide a clearer picture, and the answer is clearly no. Honestly, it’s hard to see how a city completely unknown in ancient sources could have occupied an unmissable position in international exchanges. But beyond the silence of the sources, many elements contradict this hypothesis.

Firstly, it is now established that Mecca was far from major trade routes. Patricia Crone showed that crossing the Arabian Peninsula from south to north via Mecca made no sense and was an unnecessary detour³³ . In a recent work, Jacqueline Chabbi, who had long accepted the traditional Muslim narrative, admits that it is no longer historically valid. She writes:

I have finally come to realize that this was false. In reality, many popular works uncritically reproduce the Muslim tradition that Mecca was an important city, a stopping point for great caravans that shone throughout Arabia. But Mecca is located east, in volcanic reliefs that are difficult to access, toward the Red Sea coast. It is not at all situated on the major caravan route, and the ancient frankincense route passes three nights away, to the east. Caravanners had no reason to deviate from the direct route to stop in a small, peripheral city, lacking any local resources³⁴--.

Furthermore, with improved navigation techniques, it became possible to transport goods from India by ship instead of following trade routes through Arabia, greatly reducing travel time! ³⁵ . Stephen Shoemaker also emphasizes that “since the Greco-Roman period, trade in this region was mainly by sea via the Red Sea, circumventing Mecca, which is about 70 kilometers from the nearest port of Jeddah”³⁶ . The decline of caravan traffic in Arabia is also confirmed by the oldest sources. Archaeographically, Christian Robin notes that “it is a total or nearly total silence” with< i> only one inscription mentioning caravan trade from the 1st century³⁷ .

These analyses are definitively confirmed by indisputable material evidence. Archaeological excavations in the Negev region, south of Palestine, show that, on the eve of Islam, there was simply no large-scale trade between Arabia and the Mediterranean basin³⁸ .

This near disappearance of caravan trade fits into a context of profound economic crisis that had struck Arabia and much of the Near East at the end of Antiquity, resulting in depopulation of the region³⁹.

To complicate matters further, Islamic sources, written centuries after the events, are contradicted by contemporary documentation. Muslim tradition states that Meccans sold precious metals (like gold or silver), perfumes, and leather to the Mediterranean world. However, Patricia Crone reviewed the Greco-Roman archives of the time: none of them mentions the importation of precious metals⁴⁰ . Regarding perfumes, it is known that Arab production mostly took place in Aden, in southern Yemen. But no source confirms the presence of Quraysh traders in that city⁴¹ . Moreover, it is unlikely that the Meccans transported perfumes from southern Arabia to the Byzantine Empire, as the latter had its own perfume industry and there is no indication that it imported such products. On the contrary, its production was so abundant that it was sold to Arabs themselves⁴² . In 2007, Patricia Crone hypothesized that the Meccans might have supplied Roman soldiers fighting Persians with leather products for their military equipment. But she emphasizes that this hypothesis is “impossible to prove with current knowledge”⁴³ . In any case, the hypothesis of Mecca as the key trade crossroads of pre-Islamic Arabia should now be dismissed as part of the grand myths of history. As Francis Peters notes, “the pre-Islamic commercial prosperity of Mecca is, at best, an illusion or, at worst, a considerable exaggeration” ⁴⁴ .

The Population of Mecca

A final point to clarify is the size of Mecca during the Prophet’s time. How many inhabitants did the city have? To our knowledge, Islamic sources do not specify an exact figure, but it can be roughly estimated using certain indicators. According to Arab-Muslim authors, the Prophet could mobilize thousands of Meccan fighters for his military expeditions. During the Battle of Uhud, al-Tabari states that “the Quraysh prepared to fight with three thousand men and two hundred horses”⁴⁵ . Assuming that half of the city’s men participated in the fighting, it can be inferred that its population was around 20,000 inhabitants⁴⁶ , a considerable figure for the time and region. To compare, Jerusalem had about 15,000 inhabitants at the same time⁴⁷ . In other words, the two cities supposedly had a comparable population size. The difference is that Jerusalem is attested by hundreds of sources, whereas Mecca has none…

In fact, the indications that pre-Islamic Mecca was an important city demographically are to be rejected, just like the rest. The most thorough study on Mecca’s population was conducted by Majied Robinson, who concludes that the city, including women, children, and slaves, had about 500 inhabitants, of which around a hundred were adult men. In reality, it was not even a city properly speaking, but rather a small village or insignificant hamlet. The geographical and climatic conditions of the place made a large population impossible (at least at the time). During his trip to Mecca in the early 19th century, Domingo Badia (alias Ali Bey) wrote that:

The aridity of the land is such that there are virtually no plants near the city or on the surrounding mountains. [...] Do not expect to find in Mecca something resembling a prairie, much less a garden. Cereal cultivation is not done there, because the soil, too ungrateful, produces no plants for the farmer⁴⁸--.

This is well known: Mecca is located in a region unfavorable for agriculture⁴⁹ . As Chabbi reminds us, “there is no food resource locally. It can therefore only support a tribe of limited importance”⁵⁰ . The issue is even more delicate regarding water supply. Sure, the Meccans could rely on the Zamzam well, but it is impossible that it alone sufficed to meet the needs of 20,000 people, not to mention thousands of animals. Evidence of this is that, towards the end of the 8th century, Queen Zubayda, wife of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, built aqueducts and reservoirs to prevent pilgrims from dying of thirst⁵¹ . But this only partially solved the problem, and despite numerous renovations and extensions, water supply remains a persistent problem even today. In June 2024, the intense heat, which is not unusual in the region, caused the death of more than a thousand pilgrims, most of whom died of thirst. This is despite all the modern infrastructure and rescue means available to the wealthy Saudi state. One can only imagine what life was like in tribal society in the 7th century! Thus, the idea that Pre-Islamic Mecca could nourish and hydrate tens of thousands of people (both humans and animals combined) belongs to the realm of myths of history. Living conditions made large human presence impossible, and today the city is very lightly populated only thanks to large-scale works initiated by the Ottomans and continued by the Saudis afterward.

Conclusion

In this article, we confronted the traditional Muslim narrative about Mecca with historical data. At the end of this examination, it becomes clear that this narrative has little to do with historical reality. Each point made by Islamic tradition is contradicted by our documentation. On one hand, Mecca is completely unknown in historical sources before Islam – including, and this is perhaps the most damaging element – in Arabic sources themselves, notably epigraphic inscriptions. So how can we accept the Islamic account claiming that Mecca’s origins trace back to Adam and Abraham? The city’s importance in trade is also contradicted by contemporary sources and archaeological data, which show that large-scale trade between Arabia and the Mediterranean world did not exist. This does not necessarily mean that the Meccans never participated in trade, in one way or another. In fact, they were even forced to do so to procure goods they did not produce. Shoemaker specifies that “it was a trade where the Meccans exchanged goods from their peasant economy, the only form of economy their environment could support, for goods produced in sedentary agricultural economies, especially foodstuffs” ⁵² . Finally, we have seen that Mecca during the Prophet’s time was at best an insignificant and isolated hamlet, consisting of a few hundred inhabitants. The Islamic narratives describing Mecca as a thriving metropolis capable of rallying thousands of men during the Prophet’s battles are completely fanciful in this regard.

This does not necessarily mean that the city did not exist at the time of the Prophet, or that it is a later creation by the caliphs⁵³ . As of our current knowledge, it remains impossible to reach a definitive conclusion. At best, one can suppose it was a small, isolated village with a “recent foundation,” says Robin⁵⁴ . In any case, the gap between the classic Muslim depiction of pre-Islamic Mecca and what appears to be the actual historical reality is overwhelming. It is also clear that if Muslim sources are this mistaken about Mecca, it is simply impossible to credit them without a critical examination in the future.