Two sites in the desert
The listing has two parts. Jabal Umm Sinman at Jubbah lies about 90 km north-west of the city of Hail. Jabal al-Manjor and Raat at Shuwaymis lie about 250 km south of it.
A freshwater lake once lay at the foot of the Umm Sinman hills, watering people and animals in the southern Great Nafud desert. It has since disappeared. At Shuwaymis the carvings line a wadi that once ran with water and is now covered by sand.
What the carvings show
Human and animal figures were hammered into the rock with simple stone tools, using a range of techniques. The imagery at Shuwaymis covers some 10,000 years of history.
UNESCO sees in them a record of how people responded to a changing climate, as the region dried out from the mid-Holocene onwards, and the trace of a society that has since vanished. The sites were inscribed in 2015.