How come pretty much every empire that conquered the middle east took only the edges of saudi arabia and ignored the...

Siberia had a decent amount of resources in expensive furs, various mineral deposits and timber. Siberia isn't Antarctica mate

but if they conquered the middle they could of made the biggest sandcastle in the world

>using dry sand for sandcastles

probably wasn't worth it, the challenge of creating and maintaining sufficient supply lines to allow for conquests that far into the desert was enough for the romans to forget about going that far as i recall

Arabia Felix and the Nabataeans were thought to be extremely wealthy. The Romans sent an expedition which eventually failed.

>the most irrelevant and hellish part of the world now controls the world thanks to oil
The loser now will be later to win.

Russia CLAIMED Siberia.
No one conquered it, because there were like seventy Yupiks living there, and those fuckers don't care who calls themselves their lord as he's not going to fucking show up anyway.

Besides that one city in the middle and Yemen in the far south it looks like OP's map covered every settlement worth placing on a map.

Those are just trade routes. Pic related is Ptolemy's map from AD 150.

The people replying that it was written off as "just desert" are ignoring the fact that the richest part was the southern coast (Yemen), and that people at the time would have considered it more of a mysterious land than a barren one, which even today persist with the legend of the Lost City of Ubar, the "Atlantis of the Sands", and the satellite archaeology searching for lost trade routes.

...

It's just empty desert with some camel herders. It's really difficult to conquer and harder to occupy.

The best any empire could do would send emissaries to make alliances with certain Arab tribes.

It's not even worth sending out a tax collector

The romans did invade the aegean sea, though.

The population outside the red part was trivial and is still trivial today.

Until oil was discovered, there was literally nothing in that part of Saudi Arabia.

The Rub' al Khali was so inhospitable that for the entirety of recorded history not even Arab camel-riders could travel through without dying.

Man there's probably some real neat shit in that sand.

Probably

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_of_the_Sands

Also the whole desert was supposedly a dense jungle long time ago. Imagine all the shit hidden there

It's a shitty desert full of Bedouins.

There's nothing in there even worth trying to conquer

>no strategic or economic value
>full of angry, tribal Bedouins who will stop at nothing but to kill you and cannibalize your corpse because you accidentally disrespected random pagan idol #16271
Gee, I wonder

>The Rub' al Khali was so inhospitable that for the entirety of recorded history not even Arab camel-riders could travel through without dying.

Only after desertification circa 300 AD. It was passable and used by frankincense and incense trades routes.

"Ubar?" being the citadel complex found with satellite archaeologists in the 90's that some think is Ubar, but much of it has collapsed into the sink hole.

cause nothing was there and no even cared about it

You could just bring a waterbucket...

conquer WHAT? There's nothing there.

I'll waste valuable resources and send my soldiers into the desert just to say it's mine!
Or you know, you could use them to guard valuable areas. Anyone can say they own a desert, who is going to prove you wrong? it's just sand. I own Antarctica.

>Only after desertification circa 300 AD
I have to find some good older guesstimation maps in the style of satellite maps.
Too hard to remember the changing terrain.

>Arabs can retract to the desert and attack every position near the border of it
>you can't even localize them since they operate faster in the desert than your army ever could
>they are constantly one the move
Nothing but sand is a meme but you need to do a cost-use-bill and see that attacking those fucks in the desert simply wasn't worth it. Roman rule of supporting one of the chieftains was good enough.

>Nothing but sand is a meme

No it's not. Look at southern Saudi Arabia on Google Earth. It is literally nothing but sand. Arabs aren't retreating there because they can't live on sand either.

>100 Desert goatfuckers fucking goats in the middle of nowhere
>Worth losing thousands of men over

It's literally called "the empty quarter" in Arabic. There's nothing fucking there

>no strategic or economic value
The frankincense trade was highly lucrative and so valuable to Kingdoms of Southern Arabia, so much so that Alexander and the Romans did infact try to take it over, but...

>full of angry, tribal Bedouins who will stop at nothing but to kill you and cannibalize your corpse because you accidentally disrespected random pagan idol #16271
Which isn't far off the mark lol

Rub' al Khali means "The Empty Part", which tells you everything you need to know about it.

Unless you're talking about rocks or about the limited amount of oasis, it's not a meme at all.

Arabia being only sand IS a meme, but that part of it is the one that caused the meme to exist.

>The frankincense trade was highly lucrative and so valuable to Kingdoms of Southern Arabia, so much so that Alexander and the Romans did infact try to take it over

Romans changed the incense route into a sea one the second they discovered how to reach the place by sea. There's no point on conquering the desert.

How do you conquer a wasteland. Do you just need to touch the center with an army to conquer it or something? You need to develop an area to truly rule it, and shit land ft. oil isn't worth the time.

...

That would make a great D&D module!

>I-it's nothing b-but sand!
>No o-one can l-live there a-anyway...

Nice excuses, Persians, Macedonians, Romans and Turks

>Persians, Macedonians, Romans and Turks had modern communications

>posted from my private jet paid for by countless barrels of oil

Actually. Ottomans conquered central arabia and massacred some wahhabis in there.

t. Alexander