This is Angela Odell and you are listening to real cool history for kids.

A podcast show featuring history told from a distinctly biblical world view perspective.

Welcome to an adventure.

Welcome to episode 42 of real cool history for kids.

This episode is for Maley Haggard, who recently became a big sister again.

Congratulations, Maley, and here is your special episode about ancient abandoned places.

You are all probably familiar with the biblical story of Abraham, who was promised by God

that he would be the father of a great nation through a son that God would give him and his wife Sarah.

Abraham, who was an old man, married to an old woman, waited for years for this promise to be

fulfilled. He eventually got impatient, waiting on God's timing and decided to take things into

his own hands. He decided to take Sarah's servant woman as his second wife, which was against

God's instructions. And they had a son named Ishmael. Although Abraham loved Ishmael,

he was not the son of promise. In fact, Ishmael caused a lot of trouble between Abraham and Sarah.

After Isaac, the promised son was born, Ishmael and his mother, who was of Egyptian descent,

were sent away from the family. Ishmael and his mother returned to her people.

And when he grew up, he married a woman from his mother's extended family and became the

father of 12 sons. Ishmael's descendants became the people of the Middle East and Northern Africa.

It's important to know all of this because the abandoned ancient places that I'm going to tell

you about in this episode were built and ruled by the tribes that came from these original

Middle Easterners. 600 years before Christ, the original city of Al-Yula was built to be an

oasis in the desert, what is now Saudi Arabia. If you can, please pause me just for a moment and

ask someone to click on the links that I have included in the information section of this episode.

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