An earthquake in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula leaves up to 20,000 dead.

Two major earthquakes occurred in the Near East on 18 March and 29 May, AD 1068. The two earthquakes are often amalgamated by contemporary sources. The first earthquake had its epicentre somewhere in the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula around Tabuk, while the second was most damaging in the city of Ramla in Palestine, some 500 km to the northwest.

The Levant is a subregion of West Asia that borders the Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west and forms the core of the Middle East. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in Western Asia that is, the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Syria, as well as Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and the southern part of Cilicia. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Egypt and Cyrenaica in Northern Africa.

The Arabian Peninsula, or Arabia, is a peninsula in West Asia, situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. At 3,237,500 km² (1.25 million sq mi), comparable in size to India, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world.