Before The Oil, There Was The Compass Man

Long before Saudi Arabia became synonymous with oil, its greatest resource was something harder to measure: the intimate knowledge of its land. In the sweeping sands of the 1930s, it wasn’t seismic data or imported rigs that first led to black gold—but a Bedouin guide with a near-mythical sense of direction. Khamis Rimthan, a man with no formal education, no maps, and no machines, steered foreign geologists to the very spot where Saudi Arabia’s transformation would begin. His story, long buried beneath tales of American enterprise and Aramco milestones, is finally being told—and it reminds us that every discovery begins with someone who already knows the terrain.

The story of Saudi Arabia’s oil discovery is often told through the lens of foreign expertise and imported technology. Yet at its critical first moment, it was a Saudi guide—Khamis Rimthan,, the so-called “Compass Man”—who made the difference.

And his legacy is finally beginning to be properly recognised. In a recent LinkedIn post, the Senior Director of Archaeology at the Ministry of Culture, Hassa Marwan Alsudairy, celebrated Rimthan’s unmatched ability to read the desert’s subtle signs, leading geologists to the very site that would change the Kingdom’s fate.

It is a reminder that true development does not come from technology alone. It depends on recognising, respecting, and building upon the knowledge embedded in a society’s own land and people—a lesson as relevant today as it was in 1934.

Rimthan’s story unfolded at a time when the rhythms of life in Saudi Arabia stood in stark contrast to the industrial rush elsewhere.

In the early 1930s, parts of the world were already forging ahead. Cities like London and New York were wiring themselves up with electricity, motorcars clogged Parisian streets, and the first talking films were filling cinemas from Berlin to Buenos Aires.

But in Saudi Arabia, the pace was different.
Time still belonged to the land, not to machines. And it was men like Khamis Rimthan—a desert guide who could find his way across hundreds of kilometres of barren sands—who defined what survival meant.

In 1934, Rimthan led two foreign geologists through the Dammam Dome, relying on little more than instinct, the memory of landforms, and the movement of stars. Where others might have seen endless emptiness, he read the ground like a map. Without him, it is unlikely that Saudi Arabia’s first oil discovery would have happened quite so soon.

At the time, daily life in Saudi Arabia was built on working with the land, not bending it to human will. Wells were precious; a good rain season could make or break a community. People measured distances by days on camelback, not kilometres.

In Europe, one could call a distant relative by telephone. In the Saudi desert, news might arrive weeks after the event, carried by word of mouth from trader to traveller, from camp to caravan.

But what the Kingdom lacked in speed, it made up for in resilience. Families and tribes survived not by chasing change, but by trusting the old knowledge: how to find water in a dry wadi, how to predict a sandstorm before it formed, how to travel hundreds of kilometres without a compass.

While factories in Europe churned out goods for an increasingly consumer-driven world, wealth in Saudi Arabia still meant something different: a healthy herd of camels, a safe journey completed, a strong network of tribal alliances. Life was simple on the surface, but it required constant calculation, patience, and deep-rooted skills.

A Bedouin saying from the time captures the mentality:
“The desert is rich—but only for those who know how to ask for its gifts.”

When oil  finally flowed from the ground a few years after Rimthan’s journey, it changed everything. Roads were built, cities rose, and the world’s pace crept into the Kingdom’s daily life.

But it is worth remembering that the first steps into that new future rested not on machines, but on men who could navigate the unmapped—people like Khamis Rimthan, who could survive and thrive in a landscape that offered little forgiveness but enormous rewards for those who listened carefully.

That old world may seem distant now. Yet a certain resilience—a pride in reading the land rather than commanding it—still runs deep beneath the Saudi present.

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