Marib

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Two great stone wing-walls still stand on the flanks of a gap in the Balaq hills, where for more than a thousand years a wall of packed earth and dressed masonry crossed the bed of the Wadi Adhanah and held back the floods that drained the western highlands. The barrier itself is gone. The sluice structures that bled its water out across the basin remain, weathered to bone, and around them lies the plain that the water once made green. This is the floor of Ma’rib, on the eastern rim of the Yemeni highlands where the wadi runs down toward the open desert, and the works in the gap are the reason a city stood here at all. Out of a single feat of water-engineering grew the capital of Saba, the first of the great kingdoms of the Arabian south.

The capital on the desert edge

Ma’rib sits in the Marib Governorate of present-day Yemen, some 120 kilometers east of Sanaa, where the Sarawat mountains break down toward the sand sea of the Ramlat al-Sab’atayn. The position is the whole of the matter. Here the seasonal torrents that gather in the highlands spill out of a narrow gorge onto a flat basin before the water is swallowed by the desert — a place where, if the flood could be caught and spread, the desert margin could be made to bloom. The Sabaeans caught it. They became the masters of the basin, and from it the masters of the trade that ran the length of the peninsula.

The city is named in the documentary record as the seat of the kings of Saba from early in the first millennium before the common era. Their earliest title was not “king” but mukarrib — a Sabaic word best rendered “federator” or “unifier,” the style of a priest-ruler who held primacy over a confederation of tribes bound by covenant and held them together under the patronage of the kingdom’s god. The mukarrib presided over the cult and the federation as a single office; only later, around the fourth century BCE, did the rulers set the older title aside and call themselves simply malik, king of Saba. The state they governed wrote in the musnad, the monumental South Arabian script — a tall, severe alphabet of geometric letters incised on stone — and it is in that script, in tens of thousands of inscriptions, that Saba speaks for itself. This is the great fact that sets Ma’rib apart from the shrine-cities of the Arabian north, whose gods survive mostly through later hands writing generations after the cult was gone. The Sabaeans left their own record, dated and dedicated, in their own monumental hand.

Two urban centers anchored the early kingdom, Sirwah to the west and Ma’rib in the basin, and it was Ma’rib that endured as the capital. The walled city covered a low mound above the oasis; beyond the walls lay the gardens, the cemeteries, and the temples. The wealth that built and rebuilt it came from two sources at once, and they are inseparable in the Sabaean mind: the water that fed the fields, and the god in whose name the water and the trade were owed.

The trade was the wider engine. South and east of Ma’rib grew the two resin-bearing trees of the ancient luxury market — the frankincense of the Dhofar coast and the Hadramawt, and the myrrh of the same dry uplands — and the South Arabian kingdoms held both the trees and their export. The resin moved north by camel caravan along the incense road, gathered toward the Hadrami centers and led up through the wadis to Ma’rib, then on to the oasis of Najran and the long string of watering stations through the Hejaz toward the markets of the Mediterranean and the desert emporia of the north. Ma’rib stood near the head of that road, the gatekeeper of the most coveted commodities of antiquity, and the gardens its dam had made fed the caravans that carried them. The grain and the dates of the oasis sustained the city; the frankincense and myrrh that passed through it made the city known to a world that reached from the Red Sea ports to imperial Rome, whose appetite for southern resin the Roman writers deplored as a steady drain of silver into Arabia. The Sabaeans and the polity they raised, the kingdom of Saba, are the people and the state of which Ma’rib was the heart; the city is where the engineering, the cult, and the commerce met.

The Barran temple (‘Arsh Bilqis) outside Ma’rib, its tall monolithic pillars standing where the cult of Almaqah was served. Dan from Brussels, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The works of water and of the god

Above the city, where the Wadi Adhanah — also written Dhana — broke from the hills, the Sabaeans threw their great barrier across the bed. The dam at Ma’rib was not a single wall but a system: a long embankment of packed earth, triangular in section, faced and reinforced with masonry, tied to spillway channels and to sluice structures of dressed stone that let the impounded flood out in measured volumes toward the canals. The earliest works are placed around the eighth century BCE, with earthen forerunners and a canal network perhaps older still, and the barrier was raised and enlarged over centuries — to seven meters in height by about 500 BCE, and to some fourteen meters under the later Himyarite mastery of the basin, with five spillway channels, two masonry-reinforced sluices, a settling pond, and a canal running a thousand meters to a distribution tank.

What the system did is the measure of the achievement. The water was led out to two great oases, one on either bank of the wadi, and the irrigated land has been reckoned at about a hundred square kilometers — on the order of twenty-five thousand acres — of grain, dates, and fodder on the rim of the southern Arabian desert. It was, in the ancient world, the largest artificial oasis of the peninsula, and it was a permanent obligation as much as a monument. The flood carried silt that settled in the channels and had to be cleared; the embankment had to be watched, mended, and built up; the labor had to be commanded and the work provisioned. The inscriptions that record the dam’s repairs are therefore also records of the political order that could marshal such effort — a kingdom legible in the upkeep of its own waterworks. The final great restoration is fixed by a dated Sabaic text, the long inscription known as CIH 541, which records the rebuilding of the dam in 548 CE under the Christian ruler Abraha and lists the provisioning of the work in vast quantities of grain, dates, livestock, and wine. It is the last ancient notice of the standing dam.

The masonry sluice and wing-wall structures of the ancient dam at Ma’rib, where the floodwaters of the Wadi Adhanah were spread across the oasis. H. Grobe, 1988, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The other half of Ma’rib’s sacred geography lay outside the walls, in the temples of the god in whose name the kingdom acted. That god was Almaqah, the national deity of Saba, lord of the federation and patron of the king — the power to whom, in the foundational inscriptions, the conquests of the federating age were dedicated as offerings and the enlargement of his domain. His federal sanctuary was the temple of Awwam, the great oval precinct some seven kilometers southeast of the city, which 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, reported at roughly 757 meters in circumference, fronted by a hall whose monolithic pillars and a propylon of eight columns marked the way in, with a vast attached necropolis — the sacred cemetery, walled and entered only from the precinct, where the dead were laid in multi-story limestone tombs by the thousands. Near it stood a second sanctuary of the same god, the Barran temple, the ‘Arsh Bilqis of the later name, whose tall pillars still stand. A processional route bound the sanctuaries together, and pilgrims came to Awwam from across the kingdom in the appointed month.

What Almaqah was, exactly, is among the things the record does not settle. The long convention has named him a moon-god, set beside the sun-goddess Shams and the morning-star god Athtar in a South Arabian astral triad — a reading that places him in the family of the great Semitic lunar powers, near the Mesopotamian moon-god Sin. Against this, scholars from the 1970s onward have argued that the iconography attached to Almaqah — the bull’s head, the vine, the lion’s skin — is solar rather than lunar, and that the lunar identification rests on convention more than on epigraphic proof; others hold to the moon-god reading. The dispute is real and is marked here as a dispute, not resolved. What the inscriptions make plain, whatever his celestial nature, is the god’s place at the center of the state: the mukarrib federated the south in his name, the dam and the field were owed to him, and the thousand dedications laid up at Awwam were addressed to him.

Those dedications are the heart of what the place holds. Close to a thousand Sabaic inscriptions have been recovered from the Awwam temple alone — among the densest single concentrations of pre-Islamic Arabian text anywhere, and the single most important collection of South Arabian epigraphy. They are the record of a cult in its own words: oaths, thank-offerings, expiations, the setting up of bronze and stone images before the god, the obligations of pilgrimage discharged. The architecture of that cult — the procession, the dedication, the offering — is described in the texts; its operative detail belonged to the priests who kept it, and it is not a thing to be reconstructed as a manual.

Sheba, the broken dam, and the recovered city

The kingdom that Ma’rib ruled was known to the outside world by another name. To the Hebrew Bible and, after it, to the Qur’an and the wide cycle of Near Eastern legend, Saba was Sheba — the realm of the queen who came to Solomon at the head of a camel caravan bearing gold, spices, and precious stones. The biblical account stands in the first book of Kings and is taken up again in the Qur’an, where the ruler of Saba is named only as a woman who ruled her people; the name Bilqis is supplied by later Muslim commentators, and the figure of Makeda by the Ethiopian tradition. The identification of the scriptural Sheba with the South Arabian Saba is the common position of historians, who place the kingdom in present-day Yemen with its capital at Ma’rib. The queen herself is another matter. No trace of her has been found — the folk-name Mahram Bilqis attached itself to the Awwam temple, but the excavations turned up nothing to tie the sanctuary to any historical queen, and her existence is left to legend. The proper distance is the one the sources keep: a kingdom of Saba that is firmly historical, and a queen of Sheba who belongs to the long afterlife of its memory rather than to its record.

That afterlife took its sharpest form in the breaking of the dam. The dated inscriptions record recurring breaches in the fifth and sixth centuries — incidents noted in 449 and 450, again in 542, and the great repair of 548 under Abraha. Within a generation the works failed for the last time. Around the year 570 — the tradition puts it near there — the dam was overtopped and this time left unrepaired; the irrigation system collapsed, the oasis went back to the desert, and the people scattered. Arab memory mourned the event as the end of an age and named it the Sayl al-‘Arim, the Flood of the Dam, weaving into it the dispersal of the South Arabian tribes to the north. The thirty-fourth sura of the Qur’an, Surat Saba’, takes the people of Saba as a parable: it recalls the two gardens to the right and to the left, the abundance given and the turning away, and the flood loosed upon them, the gardens left bearing only bitter fruit. The historical breaches and the scriptural flood are not the same kind of statement, and more than one dam-failure has been tied to the migrations; but the silting of Ma’rib and the going-out of its people are real, and they close the long age of the federated south. The broken dam became, in the later memory, the very figure of a vanished glory.

Ma’rib returned to knowledge through its own stones. From the nineteenth century the South Arabian inscriptions were copied and read, and the corpus of Sabaic epigraphy — gathered in collections such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum — let the Sabaean state be reconstructed from its own monumental writing rather than from outside report. The Awwam temple was excavated in 1951 and 1952 by the American Foundation for the Study of Man under Wendell Phillips, who found only the tops of the great pillars and the upper run of the oval wall showing above the sand; the work cleared the entrance court and recovered bronze statuary and a wealth of text before it broke off. Excavation resumed in the late 1990s, carried on across a series of seasons, and the German Archaeological Institute has worked at Ma’rib as well, setting the dam and the temples on firm chronological ground. In January 2023 the landmarks of Ma’rib — the dam and its sluices, the Awwam, Barran, and Harunum temples with their processional links, and the remains of the ancient city — were inscribed together on the World Heritage list as the Landmarks of the Ancient Kingdom of Saba, and entered at the same moment on the list of World Heritage in danger, for the war that has run through the region. The recognition fixes in international record what the inscriptions had already shown: that here, on the desert’s edge, the god, the dam, and the trade had made the first great civilization of South Arabia.

Among that civilization’s neighbors and heirs were the Minaeans, the merchant-state of the same incense road, and the later power of Himyar, which absorbed Saba and held the basin in its last centuries; to the north, the caravan kingdom of the Nabataeans at Petra grew rich on the far end of the route whose southern gate was Ma’rib. The frankincense and myrrh that the Sabaeans controlled passed through every hand along that road. But the road began here, at the green edge the dam had made — at the city where, for a thousand years, the water of the god ran out across the desert.

→ Related: The Sabaeans · Kingdom Of Saba · Almaqah · The Minaeans · The Nabataeans · Nabataean Kingdom · Hegra · Qaryat Al Faw · Tayma · Himyar · Petra · Sin Moon God · Ishtar · El God · Divination · Idolatry · Revelation