In the 8th and 7th centuries BC, the Arabs fought frequent wars with the Assyrians, who deported many of them to Palestine. In contrast, they were often allied with the BABYLONIANS. Ancient Arab tribes included the Adbell, Badana, Marsimani, KINDAH and Thamud.

Although they were not initially a great trading nation themselves, the Arabs’ nomadic skills and desert knowledge were employed by more settled peoples to trade across Arabia and into Mesopotamia, Africa and the Levant. Command of the great caravan routes brought considerable wealth to the Arab tribes and led to the rise of great trading cities such as Mecca and Medina, as well as to the development of significant social and cultural divisions between settled and nomadic Arabs, differences which led to some degree of tension.

Prior to the 7th century AD the Arabs were rarely a unified people, although occasional tribal confederations arose and harassed their neighbours. The most aggressive of these confederations was the Qedar. It was the rise of Islam during the 620s and 630s, however, that acted as the great unifying factor in Arab history, and the Bedouin tribes were at the forefront of the subsequent Islamic conquests. Prior to this, Arab religion had been polytheistic (initially animistic), although Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity had made considerable inroads.

Warfare had always played a large part in Arab life: raiding rival tribes was an important way for warriors to win status and wealth. After unifying and converting the Arabs to Islam, Muhammad (c. 570–632) managed to suppress inter-tribal warfare (though the tradition soon re-asserted itself among the Bedouin). The caliphs (‘successors’) who followed Muhammad as religious and political leaders of the Arabs found an outlet for their martial tradition by attacking the neighbouring BYZANTINE and PERSIAN empires, which had only recently ended a mutually destructive war. By the death of the second caliph, Uthman, in 656, the Arabs had conquered the Persian empire and driven the Byzantines out of Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

“The Arabs keep … pledges more religiously than almost any other people”

Herodotus, 5th century BC

By the early 8th century the Arab caliphate stretched from the Pyrenees to the Indus. Arab unity, however, was already strained. A disputed succession to the caliphate in 661 led Islam to split into its two main branches, the majority Sunnites and the minority Shi'ites. Political unity lasted until 750; when the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs, an Umayyad prince fled to Spain and set up an independent emirate. After this the political fragmentation of the Arab-Islamic world proceeded steadily and irreversibly Nonetheless, the Abbasid caliphate (750–1256) was the period of the Arabs’ greatest cultural achievements. Not least of these was the preservation of much of the philosophy and scientific knowledge of the Classical world at a time when it had been all but forgotten in Christian Europe.

The conquests enabled a great expansion of the Arab identity. Through conquest, large numbers of Arabs settled in Mesopotamia, Syria, the Levant, Egypt and northern Sudan, North Africa, Spain, Persia and northern India. With the sole exception of Spain, all of these areas became permanently Islamized. As translation of the Koran is forbidden, Islam became a powerful agent for spreading the Arabic language, and through it, Arab culture and identity. Most of the conquered peoples eventually became Arabized, the most notable exceptions being the Persians, MOORS and KURDS. Even in Spain, however, an Arab influence remains in evidence in language, architecture and cuisine.