Did the Persians and Romans care about this? Did they just see it as useless sand? They certainly should have cared about it.
Nobody cared, no oil back then..
... Persians have a history of annexing the Oman area.
They didn't really care. Persia took control of the southeastern coastline (Oman/Yemen/etc) for sailing purposes but not much came out of it. The northernmost tribes would sometimes be employed by either side as mercenaries.
They were both in deep enough shit without the sudden unification and rise of muslims anyway. Economically and militarily depleted and with tons of internal conflict, especially in Persia.
Fun fact: Sassanid lands were steadily converting to nestorian christianity. Zoroastrianism was a thing of the urban upper class. If the islamc conquests never happened, modern Iran might've ended up christian, not zoroastrian.
It is useless sand.
>>1397316
Muslims didn't convert Iran for another 200 years though. Something else happened to stop the Christian conversion
>>1397296
Romans had a province Arabia Petraea which included Sinai , Jordan and northwestern parts of modern Saudi Arabia. Roman Emperor Phillip the Arab was from this province, hence the nickname. Although he was most likely Syrian, not an actual Arab.
Also if i'm not mistaken Trajan reached the Persian gulf in modern Kuwait in one campaign against Sassanids and included it in his province Mesopotamia.
There were few major cities back then in the Arab peninsula and almost all were located on its boundaries, which was enough for both Romans and Sassanids to control them. Also this>>1397327
No one's going to take suicidal campaigns in endless, lifeless desert.
>>1397296
They cared enough to annex or vassalize almost all the important parts. If you mean the central desert no, nobody cared, and nobody would care today if it wasn't because the savages who inhabit that area also control the holy sites of islam and a lot of oil deposits. Thanks, brits.
>>1397296
Both the Romans and Persians had a history of recruiting Arab tribes to police their borders. As has been said elsewhere the Persians conquered southern Arabia. Arabia was much more integrated into the ancient world than one would expect.
In God's Path is a really good book on this, as is In The Shadow Of The Sword.
>>1397331
No point in converting to an abrahamic religion when the other offers the same and also social privilege of adopting the ruling religion. It made more sense for those who had complaints against zoroastrianism to just adopt islam.
It's not true by the way that zoroastrianism as a thing of the urban upper class. Nestorianism was growing a lot but in specific areas (most importantly Mesopotamia) and specific social strate (most importantly merchants and artisans, who were in the lowest caste in zoroastrianism). You still had an important christian presence in Irak before Timur almost extinguished the Assyrians. And the historical importance of nestorianism in the silk road is well known.
>>1397296
It's nothing but sand. Persia did take over the eastern tip of the Arabian peninsula but that's about it and it was never a overly significant portion of the empire. Rome might've had some interest in taking a part of Yemen for example to trade better with India but that would be rather unneeded considering Egypt laid just on the other side of the Red Sea and wasn't a barren wasteland.
>>1397344
Iirc Augustus wanted to conquer Arabia Felix at some point.
There's a book on this called Rome and the Arabs Before the Rise of Islam by Greg Fisher if you're interested, OP.
From what I remember (I read it years ago mind you) Arabia was important to both as an ideal client state to be able to really dig at their enemy, but neither could muster the resources to annex it (especially without pulling in their opposite power to try and stop them). The Arabs tended to take advantage of the rivalry whenever they could.
>>1397370
The same Augustus that told his successors to not expand the empire?
