For a long time the deep past of Khaybar was mostly a blank. Then, in 2024, archaeologists announced something remarkable: a fortified Bronze Age town, named al-Natah, that had lain hidden in the oasis for millennia. Built around 2400 BCE and inhabited until roughly 1300 BCE, it spread across some two and a half hectares, home to perhaps five hundred people living in stone houses of one or two stories along narrow lanes. A wall nearly fifteen kilometers long once encircled the wider oasis, guarding its fields and wells against raiders from the desert. The find reframed the whole region's history, evidence of a slow, homegrown path to urban life in Arabia at a time when scholars had assumed the area held only nomads. The town's tombs gave up axes, daggers, and agate, the belongings of a settled, organized society far older than anyone had expected.

By the time written history reaches Khaybar, the oasis was famous for one thing above all: dates. Its groves were prolific, and the fruit was carried south to be sold in the markets of Medina. The people who pioneered this cultivation, working the rich soil watered by the harrah's hidden springs, included Jewish tribes whose presence here stretched back beyond reliable record; when their settlement in northern Arabia began, no one knows. In 567 CE a Christian Arab king of the Ghassanids, al-Harith ibn Jabalah, swept through and drove out the oasis's Jewish inhabitants, though he is said to have freed his captives on his way back to the Levant. Through invasion and upheaval, the palms endured, and so did the patient work of turning a volcanic oasis into a garden.

Khaybar's best-known chapter arrived in 628 CE, when the early Muslim community under Muhammad besieged and took the oasis in the Battle of Khaybar. The settlement's defenses, scattered fortresses separated by distance and poorly coordinated with one another, could not hold, and after weeks of fighting the inhabitants surrendered. By the accounts that survive, between sixteen and eighteen Muslims and ninety-three of Khaybar's defenders died. The Jewish farmers were permitted to stay on and tend their orchards in exchange for half their harvest, and for years the oasis carried on much as it had. Then, around 642, the caliph Umar ordered them expelled. From that scattering, tradition holds, the Jews of Khaybar dispersed across the Islamic world as artisans and merchants, and they appear in documents for centuries afterward, a community remembered long after it had left.

Khaybar's memory traveled farther than its people. In the twelfth century, the Navarrese traveler Benjamin of Tudela journeyed through Arabia and described Khaybar and neighboring Tayma as Jewish habitations, recording a community still present in his day. Centuries later and hundreds of miles away, families in the southern Hebron hills would claim descent from the Jews of Khaybar, and folklore in the region tied local ruins to an old Jewish king. Today the oasis is quieter, its ancient fortresses weathered, its lava fields drawing geologists and travelers to one of the most otherworldly terrains in Arabia. But the new excavations at al-Natah have given Khaybar a fresh kind of fame, recasting this date-palm haven amid the black rock as one of the keys to understanding how civilization first took root in the peninsula.