Saba'

Arabia Felix

Drafted from (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (2015)formation

Frankincense and myrrh are the dried resins of trees that grow in a narrow band of country in southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa and almost nowhere else. The ancient Mediterranean burned them in quantity — in temples, at funerals, in medicine, as perfume — and had no way to produce them. That single fact made the southern corner of the Arabian peninsula one of the wealthiest regions of the ancient world, and gave it the name Roman geographers used: Arabia Felix, fortunate Arabia, as against the rocky Arabia to the north and the desert between.

The resin came from Hadramawt and Dhofar. It travelled north by camel caravan up the western edge of the peninsula, through a string of oases and kingdoms, to Gaza and the Mediterranean — a journey of two thousand kilometres taking months, through country where a caravan needs water, fodder, protection and permission at every stage. Whoever controlled a stretch of that road taxed it.

Several kingdoms did. Saba' around Marib, Ma'in to its north, Qataban to the south-east, Hadramawt in the east where the trees actually grew, Awsan on the coast, and later Himyar in the highlands. They fought each other, absorbed each other, and are known to us overwhelmingly through their own inscriptions — tens of thousands of them, cut in stone in a monumental alphabet, recording dedications, building works, campaigns and laws.

Saba' is the largest and best documented of them, and it is the one outsiders had heard of. The Hebrew Bible has a queen of Sheba visiting Solomon; Assyrian royal inscriptions from the eighth century BC record tribute from a king of Saba'; Greek and Roman writers from Theophrastus to Pliny describe the Sabaeans as the richest people on earth, on evidence they had mostly not seen.

When the kingdom began is a genuinely open question. South Arabian epigraphy runs on two rival chronologies, a long and a short, and the earliest Sabaean rulers sit several centuries apart depending on which is used — so the eighth century and the sixth are both defensible answers, and the gap between them is an argument among specialists rather than a hedge.

The name in the Assyrian annals

Drafted from Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume II (1927)expansion

Almost everything known about Saba' was written by Sabaeans, in Sabaic, on stone, about themselves. There are two early exceptions, and they are worth setting out at length because they show what the kingdom looked like from the other end of its road.

Sargon II of Assyria, listing his receipts in the annals of his reign, records tribute from Pir'u king of Egypt, from Samsi queen of Arabia, and from It'amra the Sabean: gold, herbs of the mountain, horses and camels. That is the company Saba' is put in — Egypt and the strongest of the northern Arabian confederacies, named in one breath, as powers that sent things to Assyria rather than as places Assyria had been.

A generation or so later Sennacherib, laying the foundations of a temple for the New Year's festival, describes what he buried in them. Into the footings went silver and gold, carnelian and lapis lazuli, and among it all the treasure that Karibi-ilu king of Saba' had ordered to be brought: stones, precious stones, choice herbs. The gift of a South Arabian king is in the ground under an Assyrian temple.

What the two notices actually prove

Neither is a description of Saba'. Both are inventories, and Assyrian inventories are written to make the Assyrian king look like the centre of the world.

But they establish three things that the inscriptions at Marib cannot establish about themselves. Saba' existed under that name, with a king, by the late eighth century. Its goods reached northern Mesopotamia — not by conquest and not by an embassy travelling once, but as a regular enough matter for a scribe to file it under tribute alongside Egypt's. And what travelled was aromatics and precious stone: the herbs of the mountain are incense, and incense from Arabia is in an Assyrian foundation deposit two thousand kilometres from where the trees grow.

The names help too. It'amra and Karibi-ilu are Assyrian spellings of Yatha'amar and Karib'il, and both are Sabaean royal names of exactly the kind the inscriptions carry. They are the earliest rulers of this kingdom who can be dated by anything outside its own epigraphy, which in a chronology argued over by centuries is not a small thing.

Expansion measured in a road

This is the shape of Sabaean power and it is easy to mistake. The kingdom did not grow the way a land empire grows, by pushing a frontier outward until it meets another one. It grew along a line.

The incense went north from Hadramawt and Dhofar up the western edge of the peninsula, and every stage of that route needed water, fodder, a place to change animals, someone to guarantee the caravan's safety and someone to take a percentage. What Saba' extended was its ability to guarantee and to charge: outposts, allied and subject towns, colonies of Sabaean speakers far up the road in the Hijaz and beyond, and the reputation that made a caravan safe because of whose name it travelled under.

A state of that kind is not well described by area. It is better described by the fact that a king of Assyria could file its produce under tribute, and that another king of Assyria thought a Sabaean gift the right thing to put under a temple.

The dam at Marib

Drafted from (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (2015)peak

Marib sits at the mouth of a wadi where the highlands drop to the desert. Twice a year, when the monsoon rains fall on the mountains, the wadi runs — briefly, violently, and then not at all. The whole of Sabaean civilisation is what was built to catch that water.

The dam was not a reservoir in the modern sense. It was a barrier across the wadi with sluices at either end, designed to divert the flood into two networks of stone-lined canals that spread it over the fields on both banks — perhaps ninety square kilometres of irrigated land in the middle of a desert, feeding a population that had no other way to exist there. Work on it begins in the eighth century BC or earlier and continues for over a millennium; the surviving structures are successive rebuildings, and the inscriptions recording repairs are a large part of what is known about later Sabaean and Himyarite politics, because keeping it working required a state and saying so was worth cutting in stone.

It is the largest hydraulic work of the ancient world outside Rome and China, and it was maintained for something like a thousand years.

The god of Marib was Almaqah, and the early Sabaean rulers are styled mukarrib rather than king. The word's meaning is argued over — federator, unifier, priest-king are all proposed — and the consensus is that it combined political leadership over a confederation of tribes with a role in Almaqah's cult and in the pilgrimage to his temple. Whoever held it ruled partly by holding the god's festival. Later rulers dropped the title and used malik, king, which is either a secularisation or a change in what a confederation had become.

The dam failed for the last time in the sixth century AD, and the Qur'an refers to it: the flood of the dam, sent against a people who had turned away, and gardens that became bitter fruit and tamarisk. By then Saba' had been part of Himyar for three centuries, and the failure was the end of the irrigation rather than of the kingdom.

The Roman expedition

Drafted from (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (2015)contraction

In 26 BC Augustus sent an army to take Arabia Felix. Strabo, who knew the commander personally, is the main source, and his account is the reason we have any of it.

Aelius Gallus, prefect of Egypt, crossed the Red Sea with something over ten thousand men and marched south down the peninsula. The march took six months. The guide, a Nabataean, was later accused of leading them deliberately astray; the army lost men steadily to thirst, disease and the country rather than to fighting, took several towns, reached Marib, besieged it for some days, and turned back. The return march took two months. Strabo says the campaign lost seven men to the enemy and the rest to hunger and sickness, which is a rhetorical figure and is also roughly the shape of what happened.

Rome did not try again by land. What it did instead is the reason the repulse at Marib was not the victory it looks like.

Within a generation of Gallus, Greek and Roman shipping out of Egyptian Red Sea ports was sailing directly to India on the monsoon, in numbers the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes in the middle of the first century AD and Pliny complains about the cost of. Goods that had gone up the caravan road, paying a toll at every kingdom on it, could now go by sea past all of them.

The incense kingdoms did not collapse — the trees still only grew in one place, and the sea route had its own middlemen — but the structural advantage that made Saba' rich was a monopoly on a road, and the road stopped being the only way. The following two centuries are of Sabaean decline relative to the highland power that did not depend on the caravan: Himyar, which had the agriculture and the coast, and which absorbed Saba' in the end.

The highland power

Drafted from (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (2015)end

Himyar appears in the record in the last century BC, in the highlands south-west of Saba', with its capital at Zafar. It had what Saba' did not: terraced agriculture in high country with reliable rainfall, and a position facing the coast and the Red Sea rather than the caravan road.

The two kingdoms fought and made alliances for three centuries, along with Hadramawt and what was left of Qataban, in a period the inscriptions document densely and confusingly. The decisive change is in the titles. Sabaean and Himyarite rulers each at various points styled themselves king of Saba', which was the prestigious claim; by the late third century the ruler at Zafar was styling himself king of Saba' and of dhu-Raydan — Raydan being the citadel at Zafar — and then king of Saba', dhu-Raydan, Hadramawt and Yamanat, and the titulature is the evidence that the unification had happened.

There is no date to put on that, only a decade or so around 275 by which it had plainly happened. It was not a conquest. It was a competition for the same crown that one side stopped losing.

Himyar governed a unified South Arabia for two and a half centuries, kept the Sabaean royal title at the head of its own, and maintained the dam. The inscriptions continue in the same script and the same language for public purposes long after Sabaic had stopped being what most people spoke.

And the name did not go away. Saba' is Sheba, and the queen who visited Solomon in the Book of Kings became, in the Ethiopian national epic, the ancestress of a dynasty that claimed descent from her and Solomon and ruled until 1974 — a claim made in the script this kingdom's alphabet produced, about a queen this kingdom may or may not have had, by an empire on the other side of a sea.

Sixty-five stages

Drafted from Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume III (Books XII-XVII) (1855)aside?What aside means

Pliny wrote down what the incense road cost, item by item, and the list is the best surviving description of how a South Arabian kingdom actually made money.

He begins with the geography and gets it roughly right. No country in the world produces frankincense except Arabia, and not all of Arabia: near the centre of the region are the Atramitae, a community of the Sabaeans, whose capital Sabota stands on a high mountain, and eight stages beyond it is the incense-bearing district, which the Greeks were told means a secret mystery. It looks north-east, it is walled in by rock on every side and shut off from the sea by enormous cliffs, the soil is a milky white inclining to red, and the forests run twenty schoeni long and half that broad. Adjoining it are the Minaeans, through whose country lies the sole transit for the frankincense, along a single narrow road.

That last clause is the whole economy. One commodity, one growing district, one road.

What happens on the road is a sequence of people taking a cut, and Pliny lists them in order. First the priests take a tenth, measured, before any of it may be sold at all; out of that tenth the public expenses are defrayed, because the god generously entertains every stranger who has travelled a certain number of days to get there. Then the incense can only be exported through the country of the Gebbanites, so a tax is paid to their king as well. Then portions go to the priests and to the king's secretaries, and after them to the keepers of the incense, the soldiers guarding it, the gate-keepers and various other employees. Then the road itself: at one place water to be paid for, at another fodder, and lodging at the stations, and taxes and imposts besides.

Thomna, the Gebbanite capital, is 4,436 miles from Gaza — a figure Pliny's translators think must be corrupt — and the journey is divided into sixty-five stages by camel.

The total, Pliny says, is six hundred and eighty-eight denarii per camel before it reaches the Mediterranean at all. And then there are still payments to be made to the farmers of the Roman revenue. Which is why, he concludes, a pound of the best frankincense sells at six denarii, the second quality at five and the third at three.

Two things follow from that accounting and they run in opposite directions.

The first is what the wealth of Arabia Felix actually was. It was not agricultural surplus and it was not manufacture. It was a toll regime: a resin that grew in one inaccessible valley, moving along one road, past a series of authorities each of whom could stop it, and every one of whom charged. The temple at the head of the road is part of the same machine as the gate-keeper at the twentieth stage — the tithe taken by the god pays the state's bills, and the hospitality offered to arriving strangers is what a tax looks like when it is also a pilgrimage.

The second is what happens to such a state when the road stops being the only way. Pliny was writing in the 70s AD, at the moment Greek and Roman shippers were learning to use the monsoon and sail from Egypt to India and back inside a year. A sixty-five stage camel road with sixty-five tolls on it cannot compete with a hull. The kingdoms of the incense road did not fall to anybody. They were bypassed, over about two centuries, by people who had found out how the wind worked.

The alphabet that went to Africa

Drafted from (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (2015)aside?What aside means

South Arabian is written in an alphabet of its own — the musnad, a monumental script of tall geometric letters, cut in stone with a precision that makes the inscriptions legible after two and a half thousand years. It derives, like the Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets, from the same North-West Semitic ancestor, and it went its own way early.

Tens of thousands of these inscriptions survive, and they are effectively the whole of the evidence for this polity. There is no Sabaean history, no chronicle, no literature; there are dedications to Almaqah, records of building and repair, campaign accounts, legal texts and boundary markers, and everything anyone knows about the kingdom is assembled out of those and out of what outsiders wrote.

The script crossed the Red Sea. Ancient South Arabian letterforms are the ancestor of the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, which developed vowel marking that South Arabian did not have and which is used to write Amharic and Tigrinya today.

The Ethiopians did something with it that the Sabaeans never had. South Arabian wrote consonants and left the vowels to the reader, as the Semitic alphabets generally did; Ge'ez developed a system of marking the vowel on the consonant itself, turning each letter into a set of forms. That is a real invention, and it is why Ge'ez is a syllabary made out of an alphabet rather than a version of one. It is used to write Amharic and Tigrinya today.

So the writing survived the language, the language survived the kingdom, and both crossed a sea. Saba' stopped being a polity in about 275. The letterforms its masons were cutting eleven centuries earlier are on shop fronts in Addis Ababa and Asmara, which is a longer working life than anything else this kingdom made — longer than the dam, longer than the caravan road, longer by far than the state.

Where everybody came from

Drafted from trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892)afterlife

The dam at Marib broke for the last time in the sixth century, three hundred years after the kingdom had stopped being one, and the country below it went back to being desert. What happened next is not really an event in the history of Saba'. It is the beginning of a story that the Arabs told about themselves for the next thousand years, and it made the ruined oasis the starting point of almost everybody.

The version the Arabic genealogists worked with runs like this. The people who inhabited the country of Saba' and its capital Marib — the Azd, the most important of them — abandoned it at the rupture of the dyke of 'Arim, all but a small remnant. A portion went to Oman. The main body went down to the Tihama, the hot coastal plain, and settled near a pool called Ghassan between the wadis of Zabid and Rima', where the tribes already in possession eventually quarrelled with them and pushed them out again. From there they scattered.

One section stopped at Najran. Another, led by Haritha son of 'Amr, attacked the Jurhum at Mecca, beat them, and took the sanctuary; they were afterwards called Khuza'a, the separated ones, because they had split from the branch that followed Tha'laba son of 'Amr. Tha'laba's own descendants went north to Yathrib and took it: his two grandsons gave their names to the Aws and the Khazraj. And the group that had camped at the pool went north again, all the way to Syria, where they became the kings of Ghassan and held the desert frontier for Rome until the Muslim armies came.

What the genealogy is doing

Follow that out and see where it lands.

The tribe that held Mecca and its sanctuary before the Quraysh came from Marib. The two tribes of Medina who took Muhammad in when nobody else would, and whom he named the Ansar, the Defenders — they came from Marib. The Christian Arab kingdom that fought Persia's Arabs on Rome's behalf for two centuries came from Marib. So did the Azd of Oman, at the far corner of the peninsula.

None of this is a chronicle. It is a family tree of nations, assembled by scholars centuries later out of tribal tradition and poetry, and it has the problems family trees of nations always have: the dates do not work — the taking of Mecca from the Jurhum is placed by one reckoning in the second century AD, four hundred years before the last breach — and the dispersal is made a single migration when what it describes must have been a slow drift over many lifetimes, if it happened at all.

But that is the wrong thing to ask of it. The genealogies were not written to record a migration. They were written to answer a live political question in the early Islamic centuries: who are the southerners, and by what right do they stand where they stand? And the answer they give is that the south is not the periphery of Arabia. It is the source. The Qahtani tribes descend from a kingdom with cities and a script and a thousand years of inscriptions, and they left it because a great work of engineering failed, and everything they afterwards founded — in the Hijaz, in Syria, in Oman — was founded by people carrying that memory.

The Qur'an gave the story its permanent form: the flood of the dam sent against a people who turned away, gardens turned to bitter fruit and tamarisk. That sealed it. A hydraulic failure at the edge of a desert became a judgement, and the judgement became a pedigree.

The oasis afterwards

Marib itself stopped mattering almost entirely.

It appears in the medieval Yemeni chronicles as a place things occasionally happen near. In 1027 an unknown claimant turned up there, proclaimed himself imam under a title meaning He who brings the people back to the religion of God, made himself master of San'a, and was killed four years later. That is about the scale of it. A man with no name anyone recorded, using a ruined oasis as a place to start from, because it was empty and it was famous.

The name did better than the place. Marib was the city everybody had left, and it went on being that in poetry and in argument long after there was nothing at it worth taking — which is a peculiar kind of survival, and the only one this kingdom got.