The Kingdom of Saba

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In the highland basin of Marib, on the desert edge of what is now Yemen, two great stone wing-walls still stand where for more than a thousand years a wall of earth and masonry held back the seasonal floods of the Wadi Dhana. The wall is gone; the sluices that fed the water out across the fields remain. Around this single piece of hydraulic engineering a kingdom grew — Saba, the Sheba of the Hebrew Bible and the Quran — that controlled the harvest of the incense trees, governed a confederation of South Arabian tribes from a federal sanctuary, and sent its caravans the length of the peninsula to the markets of the Mediterranean. Its kings called themselves not first “king” but mukarrib, “federator,” and the god they served at Marib was Almaqah, to whom the whole apparatus of dam, field, temple, and pilgrimage was owed.

The federator-kings and the unification of the south

Saba emerges into the documentary record at the start of the first millennium BCE, with the bulk of its political and religious history falling between roughly the eighth century BCE and the late third century CE, when it was finally absorbed by the rising power of Himyar. The precise beginning is contested: a “long chronology” pushes the earliest Sabaean material back toward the early first millennium or beyond, a “short chronology” keeps it nearer the eighth century, and the question turns on the dating of the oldest monumental inscriptions in the Ancient South Arabian script. What is not contested is the form of the early state. Its rulers bore the title mukarrib — derived from a Sabaic root and best rendered “federator” or “unifier” — a style understood as more weighty than the plain mlk, “king,” and as marking the one who held primacy over a group of tribes bound together by covenant. The mukarrib presided over the cult and the confederation at once; the title carried the sense of a priest-ruler who federated the south under the patronage of its god. Sometime in the fourth century BCE the title was set aside and the Sabaean rulers styled themselves simply malik, king of Saba.

The decisive figure of the federating age is Karib’il Watar, son of Dhamar’ali, who reigned in the late seventh century BCE. His deeds are recorded in two long inscriptions, RES 3945 and RES 3946, set up at the temple of Almaqah at Sirwah — one of the two urban centers of the early kingdom, the other being Marib itself. The texts narrate eight campaigns by which Karib’il Watar broke the rival South Arabian polities and brought the region under Sabaean hegemony for the first time: he subdued Awsan to the south, took Nashshan and other towns of the inland wadis, and extended Sabaean reach northward toward Najran, southwestward to the Gulf of Aden, and east to the foothills of the Hadramawt plateau. The campaigns are framed throughout as warfare conducted for Almaqah and for Saba — conquest as an offering to the god and an enlargement of his domain. The federating kingship and the cult of Almaqah are, in these foundational texts, a single institution.

The dam and the engine of wealth

The wealth that sustained this kingship came out of the ground at Marib, where the seasonal torrents of the Wadi Dhana, draining the western highlands, could be captured and spread across the floor of the basin. The great dam at Marib — properly a system of earthen barrage, spillways, and dressed-stone sluice structures channeling water to the fields on either bank — was first raised around the eighth century BCE and repeatedly enlarged. At its height the works watered an oasis on the order of a hundred square kilometers, some twenty-five thousand acres, on the rim of the southern Arabian desert: an artificial garden whose grain, dates, and fodder fed the population of the capital and underwrote the caravans. The dam was less a monument than a permanent obligation. It demanded constant maintenance, organized labor, and the silt to be cleared from its channels; the inscriptions that record its repairs are also records of the political order that could command such work.

That dependence was also the kingdom’s vulnerability. South Arabian sources report a major breach around 145 BCE, during the wars between Saba and the emergent power centered on Raydan, the dynasty that would become Himyar. Repairs followed, and the dam endured for centuries more, but in late antiquity the breaches recurred and the effort to mend them grew harder to sustain. The last great restoration is fixed by inscription: the long Sabaic text known as CIH 541, dated to 548 CE, records the rebuilding of the dam under the Christian ruler Abraha and lists the provisioning of the work in enormous quantities of grain, dates, livestock, and wine. It is the final ancient notice of the standing dam. Within a generation the works failed for good, the irrigation system collapsed, and the oasis was progressively abandoned. The memory of that collapse passed into scripture: the thirty-fourth sura of the Quran, Surat Saba’, takes the people of Saba as a parable, recalling the two gardens to right and left and the Sayl al-‘Arim, the Flood of the Dam, sent upon a people who turned away. The historical breaches and the Quranic flood are not the same kind of statement, and the documentary record offers more than one dam-failure to which the migrations of the South Arabian population have been attached — but the silting of Marib and the dispersal of its people are real, and they end the long age of the federated south.

The incense road

Marib’s gardens fed the kingdom; the incense trade made it rich and made it known. Along a narrow band of arid coast and highland to the south and east grew the two resin-bearing trees of the ancient luxury market — Boswellia sacra, whose tapped bark weeps the pale tears of frankincense, and Commiphora, source of the darker myrrh. The harvest of incense was concentrated in Dhofar and the Hadramawt, and from the start of the first millennium BCE the South Arabian kingdoms — Saba together with Qataban, Hadramawt, and Ma’in — controlled both the trees and their export. The resin moved overland by camel caravan: gathered toward Shabwa, the Hadrami capital, then northwest through Timna of Qataban and on to Marib, then up to the oasis of Najran and into the long string of watering stations along the highlands of the Hejaz, terminating at the Mediterranean ports — Gaza above all — and at the desert emporium of Petra, where the Nabataean kingdom grew wealthy on the northern leg of the same road. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, set down the route in detail in his Natural History: a journey of some sixty-odd stages, taxed and tolled at each, with stiff penalties for any caravan that tried to leave the prescribed path.

The trade tied Saba into a world far larger than the peninsula. Frankincense and myrrh were burned by the ton in the temples of Egypt, the cities of the Levant, and later across the Roman empire, whose appetite for southern resin Pliny famously deplored as a drain of imperial silver into Arabia. Sabaean and South Arabian traders reached the Persian Gulf entrepots and, by sea, the coasts of the Red Sea and East Africa; the same maritime world would later carry the kings of Aksum across the strait to intervene in Yemen. The kingdom that the outside world called “Sheba” was, to its trading partners, the gatekeeper of the most coveted commodities of antiquity — the realm from which, in the biblical account, a queen came bearing spices, gold, and precious stones.

Almaqah and the cult at Awwam

At the center of Sabaean religion stood Almaqah — also written Ilmuqah — the national god of Saba, lord of the federation and patron of the king. His federal sanctuary was the temple of Awwam, the great oval precinct southeast of Marib that later Arabic tradition would call Mahram Bilqis, “the Sanctuary of Bilqis,” after the queen of legend. It is the largest known temple of pre-Islamic South Arabia: an immense oval enclosure wall with a pillared hall, an associated cemetery, and a cult active from early in the first millennium BCE to the end of the fourth century CE. The site has yielded close to a thousand Sabaic inscriptions — among the densest single concentrations of pre-Islamic Arabian text anywhere — excavated by the American Foundation for the Study of Man in 1951–52 and again from 1997, and these dedications are the principal window onto how the god was served. Pilgrimage to Awwam in the month of dhu-Abhi was a binding obligation across the kingdom, so central that the cult of other South Arabian deities is found directing its own pilgrims onward to the sanctuary of Almaqah. The architecture of the cult is one of procession, dedication, oath, and the setting up of bronze and stone offerings before the god; its operative detail belongs to the priests who kept it.

What kind of god Almaqah was remains an open question of South Arabian scholarship. The older view, established in the early decades of the field, classed him as a moon-god — the masculine lunar deity standing at the head of the astral schema, matched against a feminine sun. From the 1970s a revisionist line of argument, associated with Jacqueline Pirenne, Jacques Ryckmans, A. F. L. Beeston, and Giovanni Garbini, pressed in the opposite direction: Almaqah’s emblems — the bull, the cluster of lightning, the vine, and the lion’s skin — carry solar and vegetative, even Dionysiac, associations that fit a sun-god or a god of irrigating storm better than a moon. The debate has not closed. It bears directly on the broader reconstruction of the South Arabian pantheon, because the place of the moon in that pantheon depends on which national gods are read as lunar.

The astral schema and the sibling kingdoms

Above the national patrons stood a triad of astral powers shared across South Arabia, and its gender pattern is the inverse of the Mediterranean one. The morning and evening star was Athtar, a masculine deity — the South Arabian cognate of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, but transposed into the male, presiding over the planet Venus and, in his aspect as Sharikan, “the Eastern One,” invoked as a god of thunderstorm and rain who waters the fields the dam could not reach. Below Athtar came the moon-god under his various national names, and the sun, Shams, who was feminine — the national deity of Himyar and a presence in subsidiary roles at Saba. That masculine moon and feminine sun reverse the Greco-Roman arrangement and answer instead to the grammatical genders of Arabic, where the moon, qamar, is masculine and the sun, shams, feminine. The neat formula of an “astral triad” of moon-father, sun-mother, and Venus-child, popular in older handbooks, is now treated with caution and in part discarded; what the inscriptions securely attest is a shared cast of celestial deities differently ranked from kingdom to kingdom, not a single rigid family.

The “kingdoms” beside Saba were its rivals and its partners on the incense road, each with its own capital, patron, and inflection of the common system. Ma’in, the realm of the Minaeans, served Wadd, “Love,” a securely lunar god whose amuletic name-formula travels with the crescent and the Venus-disk. Qataban, with its capital at Timna, honored ‘Amm, “paternal uncle,” as its patron. Hadramawt, reaching from its capital at Shabwa to the frankincense groves of Dhofar, served Sayin, whose emblem of the eagle has been read by some as solar rather than lunar — the same moon-or-sun question that hangs over Almaqah. Latest of all came Himyar, which broke away from Qataban around the close of the first century BCE, built its power from the highland capital of Zafar, and by the late third century CE had swallowed Saba itself, its kings thereafter styling themselves rulers of Saba and Dhu-Raydan. It was the Himyarite kings who, from the late fourth century CE, abandoned the old polytheism for a single god named Rahmanan, “the Merciful” — a Jewish-inflected monotheism among the ruling house — and whose religious convulsions, the persecution of the Christians of Najran and the Aksumite Christian invasion that answered it, carried South Arabia into the world of late-antique Christianity and toward the eve of Islam. The transition is studied through the same astronomy and astral lore that ran through the older cult; the science of reading the heavens that fed South Arabian religion belongs to the wider history of astrology across the Near East, from Mesopotamia to the Arabian south.

Scholarship and the inscriptions

Saba is one of the most richly documented civilizations of pre-Islamic Arabia, and almost everything secure about it rests on its inscriptions rather than on later report. The foundational corpus is the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars quarta, the South Arabian volumes published by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris from the 1880s, which gathered the Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic texts into a single edited series; the early dam inscriptions were brought to scholarly attention by the Austrian explorer Eduard Glaser, whose Zwei Inschriften über den Dammbruch von Mârib (Berlin, 1897) first published the Sabaic records of the dam’s breaches. The Marib Dam stele CIH 541, Abraha’s repair inscription of 548 CE, remains the central document for the dam’s last age. The conquests of Karib’il Watar are preserved in the long Sirwah inscriptions RES 3945 and RES 3946, and the cult of Almaqah in the great body of dedications from Awwam. The standard modern synthesis of the whole pre-Islamic Arabian world is Robert Hoyland’s Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (Routledge, 2001); the work of Christian Julien Robin has reconstructed the late-antique Himyarite phase from the inscriptions. The incense economy that made the kingdom is set out, with its full caravan itinerary, in Pliny’s Natural History, Book 12. A general historical overview keyed to the inscriptional evidence is maintained in the World History Encyclopedia entry on the Kingdom of Saba.

The Queen of Sheba

Outside the inscriptions, Saba lived longest as the kingdom of a queen. The Hebrew Bible tells, in the first book of Kings and again in Chronicles, of the queen of Sheba who came to Solomon in Jerusalem to test him with hard questions and brought camels bearing spices, gold, and precious stones — the very freight of the incense road, set in the mouth of a sovereign of the resin lands. The Quran retells the encounter in its twenty-seventh sura: Solomon, master of the winds and of the speech of birds, learns of the queen and her sun-worshipping people from a hoopoe, summons her, and brings her to recognition of the one God across a floor of glass she mistakes for water; later Islamic tradition gives her the name Bilqis. In Ethiopia she becomes Makeda, and the fourteenth-century Ge’ez national epic, the Kebra Nagast, makes her the mother — by Solomon — of Menelik, who carries the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum and founds the Solomonic line of Ethiopian kings; that lineage and that claim remain living elements of Ethiopian Orthodox identity. Whether her kingdom lay in Yemen or across the Red Sea in the highlands of Ethiopia is asked and answered both ways, in the south Arabian and the Ethiopian traditions alike.

The historical Saba left no queen’s name in its own stone. Its rulers were the mukarribs and kings who federated the south, raised the dam, and dedicated their conquests to Almaqah. Today the dam is broken and the oasis it watered has gone back to silt and sand, the temple of Awwam a ruined oval in the desert south of Marib. The kingdom that grew around the holding of the floodwaters could not, in the end, hold them. The mukarribs and kings who raised Marib cut their deeds in stone for Almaqah, dam-sluice by dam-sluice and campaign by campaign; the spice-bearing queen whom three scriptures remember is the outside world’s later reflection of that resin-trading realm, not the self-portrait its own inscriptions set down.

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