The story here is measured in millennia, not decades. Gold was first mined in Arabia around the thirtieth century BC, and Mahd adh-Dhahab is among the oldest of those workings. A great surge of activity came under the Abbasid Caliphate, between 750 and 1258, when the medieval Islamic world had both the wealth and the metallurgy to exploit the deposit at scale. Then the mine fell quiet for centuries. Modern operations began in 1939, opening both open-pit and underground workings. A fresh wave of exploration followed in the 1970s, spurred by a sharp rise in the price of gold after the United States ended the dollar's fixed link to the metal. Despite reports a few years ago that the deposit was nearly exhausted, the mine remains in production today under the Saudi state mining company, Maaden, still pulling gold from rock that has given it up for fifty centuries.

Wherever gold and antiquity meet, legends gather, and Mahd adh-Dhahab has attracted one of the most famous. The site has long been identified by some with "King Solomon's Mines," the fabled source of the biblical king's vast wealth. It is a legend, not a proven fact, and it should be held as one. But the sheer scale of the ancient diggings gave the story enough plausibility to keep it alive. One geologist who studied the old workings, Robert W. Luce, put it carefully: the investigations, he said, confirmed that the old mine could have been as rich as the biblical accounts described. Could have been. The romance of the claim has always run ahead of the evidence, which is part of what makes it irresistible.

There is an even older legend attached to this corner of Arabia. The Book of Genesis describes a river called the Pishon flowing out of the Garden of Eden through a land rich in gold. Archaeologists Juris Zarins and Farouk El-Baz proposed that the Pishon could be a now-vanished riverbed that once flowed northeast from near Mahd adh-Dhahab around 3000 BC, in a wetter age when water still ran across what is now bone-dry desert. It is a speculative idea, a way of reading scripture onto a satellite image of an ancient watercourse, and it carries no certainty. But it places this gold-bearing ground inside one of humanity's oldest stories, where the first descriptions of paradise lingered on the gleam of Arabian gold.