Is there any historical or archaeological evidence that Mecca existed as a city in the early 7th century?

The fair answer is this: we do not possess a neat excavated sign saying "Mecca, 610 CE," but the leap from that to "Mecca did not exist" is much too large. The evidence supports a modest sanctuary-town in the Hijaz, not necessarily the grand commercial metropolis sometimes imagined.

What the argument gets right

The strongest version of the objection says: if Mecca was central to the birth of Islam, we would expect it to appear in contemporary maps, coins, inscriptions, or archaeology. Yet clear non-Muslim references to Mecca from the early 600s are scarce, and excavation in the modern city has not produced a public archaeological layer that can be pointed to as "early seventh-century Mecca." The critic also adds that Mecca sits in a dry valley, so it could not have supported a large city.

That is a serious historical question. Muslims should not answer it by pretending we have evidence we do not have. There is no widely accepted pre-Islamic inscription from 600 CE that plainly names Mecca in the way a modern historian would love to find.

What the Quran itself says

The Quran presents Mecca not as a lush capital, but as a sacred settlement in a barren valley, centered on the Ka'bah and pilgrimage:

Indeed, the first House established for mankind was that at Bakkah - blessed and a guidance for the worlds.

Quran 3:96

Our Lord, I have settled some of my offspring in an uncultivated valley near Your sacred House...

Quran 14:37

And this is a Book which We have sent down, blessed and confirming what was before it, that you may warn the Mother of Towns and those around it.

Quran 6:92

This is not the description of a city sustained by rivers and farms. It is a sanctuary in an "uncultivated valley," with surrounding tribes, pilgrimage, trade, and sacred status. That matches the type of settlement Mecca is claimed to have been: not Rome, Alexandria, or Ctesiphon, but a Hijazi shrine-town.

Silence is not the same as disproof

The absence of Mecca from surviving Byzantine or Persian maps is not surprising. Many Arabian towns, wells, shrines, and tribal centers are invisible in surviving external records. Coins were not minted in every town. Inscriptions are unevenly preserved. And Mecca has been continuously inhabited, rebuilt, expanded, and restricted as a sacred precinct; it is not an abandoned ruin that archaeologists can freely strip layer by layer.

The water objection also needs proportion. Mecca did not need to sustain a huge settled population by agriculture. Zamzam, wells, stored water, seasonal supply, caravans, and tribal management could support a modest permanent community and a larger temporary pilgrimage population. The Quran itself says the valley was agriculturally poor, so dryness is part of the Islamic account, not an embarrassment to it.

There are also early Islamic realities that are hard to explain if Mecca were simply invented later: the Quran's repeated concern with the Sacred Mosque, pilgrimage rites, the Ka'bah, and the Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) conflict with his own people; the early community's remembered migration from Mecca to Madinah; and the rapid, widespread agreement among Muslims across different regions about the sanctuary's location. Fabricating a birthplace, sanctuary, pilgrimage center, and sacred geography within living memory would have met obvious resistance from both followers and opponents.

What this does and does not prove

Plainly: archaeology has not yet given us a complete material picture of Mecca in 610 CE. It also does not prove every detail of later biographical literature. A careful historian may debate the size of Mecca, the scale of Quraysh trade, and how much later memory shaped the telling.

But the objection does not establish that Mecca did not exist, nor that the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), or the early sanctuary are rootless inventions. The best reading of the evidence is more modest and more reasonable: early Islam arose in a real Hijazi sanctuary-town, remembered as Mecca, in a barren valley whose religious importance exceeded its material power.

That is enough to answer the charge. The absence of a perfect archaeological label is not the absence of a historical place.