 It seems like recently, every summer the world comes a fire again. Heat waves in Europe. Nations never accustomed to temperatures hitting the extremes of 40, 45 and even 50 degree centigrade struggling to deal and cope with the impacts of what people are considering global warming. In the Middle East, and mainly the Arabian Peninsula, things really haven't warmed up by that much. It's always been excruciatingly hot during the summer months. But what's really changed is the region's ability to overcome the harsh summer environment. Their condition now is everywhere, and everyone's best friend. From home to car, car to work, and with the occasional church at the mall, every single enclosed space goes much beyond the necessary comforts of cooling, and in some cases, even requiring people to dress warmly mid-summer. But what was life really like for Arabs before modernity and all its consequential lifestyle changes and improvements? How did the Arab ancestors deal with such extreme heat? It's said that necessity is the mother of all invention, and for a people whose means were very little and primitive, invention needed to be at its very best. When observing the towns and villages in the Arabian Peninsula from above, it's clear that the urban fabric was tightly wound. Open spaces were a scarcity. Circulation, be it for any mode of transport, all followed a single premise, minimizing widths without restricting functionality. From that, there was no desire or need to expand any space or road, and this strategy and practice of a compacted city guaranteed the maximization of one critical element necessary for relative comfort. And that's shadow. All ingenious efforts necessitated the creation of as much shade as possible along the various public domains of towns. Direct sun meant a harsher experience, and that was to be avoided at all costs. When shifting down from a town scale to a building, whether public or private, the architectural elements would reveal their secrets. Both walls and ceilings had tremendous depth, at times up to 80 centimeters thick. Although appearing to be strictly of an Adobe construction, the makeup of these elements was far more complex, including straw, stone, and in some seafaring towns, coral, all of which were materials that insulated very efficiently against the heat. Such immense thickness allowed for the welcomed delay of heat transfer from the exterior and into inhabited spaces. By the time the heat would infiltrate the inner walls, dust would have fallen, and its cooler temperatures would prevail. One major element of Arabian Peninsula architecture was the melgoth, a rectilinear tower that operated as a wind scoop, bringing fresh air into each and every building around town. This tower would at times be unidirectional at others, dual, and at most would have four inlets, one from each cardinal direction. In its purest form, the melgoth provided cross-ventilation into the central courtyards of the building. More complex and eloquent systems would see the melgoth combined with smaller pseudo-reservoirs of water, like large earthen pots, located at the bottom of the tower to cool the passing breeze, and even larger, centrally located water reservoir rooms that would greatly amplify the cooling impact on a building. For those who struggle without air conditioning, dealing with escalating heat in small apartments or homes can be a great challenge, but there's a lot to learn and apply from the old Arab ways and specifically how they dealt with airflow and evaporation. The introduction of cross-ventilation through the opening of oppositely located windows can greatly improve the quality of the air, resulting in cooler and healthier habitats. A major enhancement to this method would be to incorporate inexpensive fans at both the air's entry and exit points, one to draw the air from the outside and the other to extract the air from the inside. Partnering the system with the addition of earthen pots, filled with water positioned exactly at the entry point of the airflow, thus allowing the breeze to hit the cool walls of the pots, will significantly reduce the temperature of the air entering the home, hence creating a much more favorable and pleasant internal environment. Please subscribe to our channel, as it would support us greatly in generating more content that documents our Arabian and Muslim heritage, history and culture. Now back to our story. Reducing scale even further and down to the Arabs themselves as a people and what observing their traditional garments, intuitively one would surmise that the hotter the temperature became, the less Arabs would put on in terms of apparel. This is where intuition is wrong. First throughout history in Arabia, the layering of garments and most critically those made of natural materials such as cotton or wool were fundamental in combating heat and the sun. Arabs were known to wear at least four layers of clothing during the height of summer, covering their bodies from wrists to ankle and this included all men, women and children. This method protected their bodies from direct and excessive sun radiation as well as insulated their bodies from excessive dehydration. Today the humming of the air conditioning around us has grown silent. We're so accustomed to its noise that we barely think it an unnatural phenomenon, a pollution on many fronts, visual, biological and environmental. It's a wonderful achievement and technology but it has allowed our innovators and architecture and urban planning to abandon their responsibilities in deciding buildings that respect their context and in the very least from an environmental perspective. Things can't keep following the same laziness. We must reintroduce these inventions to improve efficiency and performance. Our vernacular architecture should embrace technology but not by deserting the wisdoms of the past. We always question why we constantly have to revisit and understand our history and there is no better reason than to remember and reapply the invention of our ancestors when they didn't have the means we have today.