Ancient Near East Civilizations

I have skimmed through the forum and the allempires site, but all I found, with regards to older civilizations, is that both Egyptian & Sumerian civilizations are said to be either the oldest.

Nevertheless, the allempires site has not mentioned the south west Arabian civilizations, being one of the ancient human settlements and empires.

What about Uber (The lost city of Aad) and the Nabatiens, the Giants (some refer to them as the nephilim (disambiguation))??

I opening this topic to read your comments on this issue and to elaborate on empires built on legends and hypothesis, yet most of which are vaguely mentioned in old texts, bible and historical books.

I don't want this topic to evade to mythical civilizations such as Atlantis or Mu, rather to emphasize on civilizations based on biblical events.

The nephilim are a mythical race in the Bible, not a civilization.

The Nabateans were a fairly late group. The culture seems to appear about about 400 or 500 BC. 

There were some very ancient urban civilizations in Arabia, but not much is known about them. Remember that Mesopotamia, the Indus civilization, and Minoan Crete were very much lost civilizations - although there were some digs in the mid-1800s, not until the 1920s and 1930s did historians put together sufficiently coherent pictures of these ancient civilizations to establish their existance in the public mind.

Iram/Ubar probably refers to some city, but it's lost, so there isn't much factual anyone can say about it until it's found. It's difficult to discuss such things in an almost total absence of data.

One of the problems here is that when Islam arrived in Arabia, it swept aside the pagan past. In doing so, a good deal of heritage was lost - religion, myth, and historical accounts, in civilizations of antiquity, were highly intertwined (as can be seen with the Bible).