Qataban

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In the Wadi Bayhan, a long fertile gash in the desert north of the great inland sands of southern Arabia, the dressed-stone walls of a city stand where the wadi narrows at its head. This was Timna — Tamna’ to those who built it — capital of the kingdom of Qataban, set at the point where the run-off of the highlands could be turned onto fields and where the caravan track to the north had to pass through a single gate. The position was not accidental. A kingdom that lived by moving frankincense and myrrh wanted the road in its hand, and Qataban held a stretch of that road as tightly as a man holds a rope across a current. From roughly the early seventh century BCE the city was the commercial and religious heart of one of the four powers of incense-country South Arabia, and for a span in the last centuries before the common era it was the strongest of them.

The land it governed was small by the measure of the river-empires to the north, but it was rich in the one thing late antiquity could not get enough of. The aromatic resins — frankincense from the Boswellia trees of the eastern coast and the Horn of Africa beyond the strait, myrrh from the Commiphora of the southern uplands — were burned in temples from Egypt to Italy, and every grain of them that reached the Mediterranean had crossed Arabia by camel. The kingdoms astride the route grew wealthy on the carrying of it. Qataban’s heartland lay in the Wadi Bayhan and the neighboring Wadi Harib to its west, terraced and irrigated by check-dams that caught the seasonal floods; the surplus fed a population that could spare hands for trade, for stonework, and for the gods.

The polity and its kings

The kings of Qataban styled themselves first as mukarrib and then as malik. The two titles mark two registers of the same authority. Malik is plainly “king.” Mukarrib — borne by the hegemons of several South Arabian states before the royal title displaced it — carried a sacral and federative weight: the mukarrib was the one who bound the tribes together and stood between them and the patron god, the figure under whose hand the works of the commonwealth were carried out. The Qatabanian mukarribs did the things a binding-king did. They led the army in war and the ritual hunt in the valleys. They built the walls and gates of the capital. They cut roads through the mountain spurs that divided one wadi from the next, opening passes so that men and laden animals could move between the watersheds. One such king, Yada’ab Dhubyan son of Shahr, is named in inscriptions commemorating the cutting of a mountain pass, and by the close of the fifth century BCE a mukarrib of that line had raised the monumental South Gate of Timna through which the incense road entered the city.

Native Qatabanian inscriptions do not appear to run back much before the fourth century BCE, though the kingdom itself is older; its early history is read through the records of its neighbors and through the archaeology of its capital. By the third century BCE Qataban had grown bold enough to challenge the long supremacy of Saba, the kingdom of Marib to the north. It absorbed the territory of Ma’in, the merchant kingdom of the Minaeans, and pressed Saba hard, taking ground as far as the strait of Bab al-Mandab — the narrow gate where the Red Sea meets the ocean and where the African and Arabian shores almost touch. For a stretch of the first century BCE Qataban stood at the head of a coalition of southern powers, drawing in Hadramawt to the east, the tribes of Radman and Madhay, and the desert nomads, ranged against Saba. To control Bab al-Mandab was to control the seaward end of the incense world, the point through which African aromatics crossed to the Arabian carrying-trade. At its height Qataban touched both ends of that commerce, the inland road and the strait.

Greek and Latin geographers who never saw the country still knew its shape. Strabo, drawing on the earlier survey of Eratosthenes, set down four great nations in the far south of Arabia: the Minaeans toward the Red Sea, the Sabaeans with their metropolis at Mariaba, the Cattabanians whose territory reached down to the straits and the crossing, and — farthest east — the Chatramotitae. The royal seat of the Cattabanians, he wrote, was called Tamna. A reader in Augustan Rome, then, could open a book and find Qataban’s capital named correctly, its territory placed against the strait, its rank set beside Saba and Hadramawt. The intelligence had traveled the same road as the incense.

The road and the resin

What moved along that road, and how, is described with unusual exactness by Pliny the Elder, who had access to merchants’ accounts of the trade in his own century. Frankincense, he reports, could leave the growing-country only by a single route, gathered first at the Hadrami capital where the priests took a tithe for the god before any of it could be sold, then carried north under a regime of tolls. He names the Gebbanitae — the people whose chief town was Thomna, that is the Qatabanians of Tamna — as holding one of the gates of the trade: incense could be exported only through their country, and a tax was paid to their king. From Thomna to Gaza on the Mediterranean Pliny reckons the journey at some sixty-five stages, with halts for the camels, and tallies the mounting charges — to priests and royal scribes, to guards and gatekeepers and the keepers of the watering-places — until a single camel-load arrived at the sea having paid out hundreds of denarii along the way. The figures are a merchant’s, not a historian’s, but they convey the thing exactly: the resin was taxed at every threshold it crossed, and Qataban owned one of those thresholds.

The stations of the road were not bare camps. The route was marked by sanctuaries, and the sanctuaries by inscriptions, so that the line of the trade can still be traced through the temples and the carved Qatabanian texts that cluster along it. A caravan halting to water and to pay its dues halted, in effect, at a place under a god’s protection, where oaths were sworn and tolls rendered in the same precinct. The wealth that came back the other way is visible in what the spade has recovered at the capital. Excavation at Timna turned up imported fine pottery — Arretine ware of the Roman west reaching the Wadi Bayhan around the turn of the era — alongside the local alabaster sculpture, bronze, and inscribed monuments of a prosperous trading town. The kingdom sold smoke and bought the goods of the Mediterranean with the proceeds.

Amm, the god of the kingdom

Over Qataban stood Amm. The name means “paternal uncle” — the father’s brother, the kinsman of the male line — and the kingdom’s own people called themselves the Banu Amm, the children of Amm, as though the whole polity were a household under his roof. His principal temple stood at Tamna, and it was under his authority that the king acted: the works of the commonwealth, the building and the warring and the road-cutting, were done in his name. The most solemn Qatabanian inscriptions record the gods of the kingdom in a fixed order — Athtar at the head, then Amm, then the judge-god Anbay, then the goddesses Dhat-Sanatum and Dhat-Zahran. Amm’s consort was named, and beside him Anbay served as the divine arbiter, the god of the spoken verdict and the oath, whose presence in the formulas binds the legal and the sacred together.

Athtar, set above Amm in that ranking, was the great astral deity shared across all the southern kingdoms — the Venus-star, the morning star, masculine in South Arabia as he was nowhere in the Mediterranean. This is the strangeness, to a Greek or Roman eye, of the South Arabian heaven, and it runs through the whole region’s religion. The pattern of the sexes is reversed. The moon is masculine; the sun, Shams, is feminine; Venus, Athtar, is masculine — the inverse of the Greco-Roman scheme, and faithful to the grammatical gender of the words in the language itself, where qamar, the moon, is masculine and shams, the sun, feminine. Each of the four kingdoms had its own national patron set within this shared astral frame: Saba’s Almaqah at the great sanctuary of Awwam near Marib; the Minaean Wadd, “Love,” whose amulet-formula names him father; the Hadrami Sayin to the east; and Qataban’s Amm.

Whether Amm was, strictly, the moon is a question the inscriptions do not settle, and on which the scholarship of the last century has openly divided. The older reconstruction, given its sharpest form by the Danish scholar Ditlef Nielsen early in the twentieth century, reduced the whole South Arabian pantheon to a single primitive triad — father Moon, mother Sun, son Venus — and assigned each national patron a place in it; on that scheme Amm was the moon-god of his kingdom. From the 1970s a revisionist current — Jacqueline Pirenne, Jacques Ryckmans, Giovanni Garbini, and, for the southern patrons, A. F. L. Beeston — pulled the triad apart. They showed that the emblems attached to a god like Almaqah, the bull’s head and the vine, read more naturally as solar and Dionysiac than lunar, and they argued that the tidy astral assignment of every deity had been imposed rather than found. Of Amm in particular Beeston held that nothing certain could be said about his astral character at all: the title “paternal uncle” tells us he was conceived as kin, the patron and progenitor of his people, but not which body in the sky he ruled. The kingdom’s own description of him is kinship before it is astronomy. He is the uncle of the house — its protector and the source of its legitimacy — and the heavens are read into him by later hands.

The cult had its monuments. Within the walls of Timna the excavators found a large temple of Athtar, private houses, and just outside the city, on a slope called Haid bin Aqil, the cemetery of the town — chambered tombs furnished with the carved alabaster heads, schematic and large-eyed, that are among the most recognizable products of South Arabian art. The dead were laid out under the same gods who taxed the living. The whole apparatus of the kingdom — temple, gate, market, and grave — sat in the protection of Amm and the order of deities ranked behind Athtar at the head of every solemn text.

Tamna’ under the spade

The capital was lost to memory for the better part of two thousand years and recovered by excavation in the middle of the twentieth century. The American Foundation for the Study of Man, under Wendell Phillips, dug at Timna in 1950 and 1951, and at the tell of Hajar bin Humeid a little down the wadi, where the archaeologist Gus Van Beek read eighteen superimposed strata out of a sixty-foot mound and built from them the first stratigraphic sequence for the region — a column of pottery and debris against which the rest of South Arabian chronology could be measured. At Timna itself the dig opened the South Gate, houses, and the temple precinct.

The single most telling find was a pair of cast-bronze lions, each bearing on its back a small rider, recovered from a wealthy residence near the city’s south gate. The bases carry an inscription naming the men who dedicated them and the place they were set — a house called Yafash — and the figures can be dated to the last century before the era and the first of it, fixing the floruit of Qataban in the first century CE. The lions matter not only for their craftsmanship but for the condition in which they were found: they lay under a layer of ash. A great fire swept Timna in the first century CE, and its people abandoned the city. Commerce and cult moved a short way down the valley to Hajar bin Humeid, which carried on for perhaps another hundred years, but the capital itself was finished. The bronze lions came out of the ground still wearing the soot of the burning that ended the city that made them.

After the fire the political weight of the south shifted. Qataban’s eastern partner Hadramawt absorbed much of its territory, and in the first centuries of the common era the rising power of Himyar — coming out of the southern highlands — gathered the old incense kingdoms one after another into a single rule, Qataban among them, before turning, in its later centuries, away from the astral gods altogether toward the worship of one God. The four languages in which the kingdoms had written — Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic, and Minaic, the better-documented members of the Ancient South Arabian or Sayhadic group, set down in the angular monumental script the South Arabians called musnad and attested across some fifteen centuries from the ninth before the era to the sixth after — were a family, and Qatabanic was one branch of it, alive on stone roughly from the fifth century BCE to the second CE, in something near two thousand surviving texts.

What Qataban left is legible because it was carved. The kingdom inscribed its kings, its laws, its dedications, and its boundary-claims into the rock of the wadi walls and the stone of its temples, in a script built to last, and it did. The lion-riders of the House Yafash, the cut passes between the watersheds, the toll-rolls that reached Pliny’s desk in Rome, the order of the gods with Athtar above and Amm the uncle beside him — these are not the residue of a forgotten people but the deliberate record of one that wrote down what it meant to keep. A caravan-kingdom that lived by holding a gate on the incense road set its own account of itself into the most durable medium it had, and addressed it, first of all, to the paternal god whose children it claimed to be.

Sources and scholarship

The Qatabanian record is, at base, an epigraphic one. The South Arabian inscriptions were gathered in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars quarta (Paris, from 1889), the foundational public-domain collection, and are now cataloged and re-edited in the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions and in the Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions. The grammar and lexicon of Qatabanic were placed on a modern footing by A. F. L. Beeston, whose work on Sabaic and the wider Sayhadic group established the framework within which the Qatabanian texts are read; the same scholar’s caution about the astral identity of Amm remains the prudent verdict.

The capital is known chiefly through the campaigns of the American Foundation for the Study of Man. Wendell Phillips’s own popular account of the 1950–1951 seasons appeared as Qataban and Sheba (1955); the stratigraphic foundation was laid by Gus W. Van Beek’s Hajar Bin Humeid: Investigations at a Pre-Islamic Site in South Arabia (Johns Hopkins, 1969), still the reference excavation report. The finds — including the bronze lions of Timna — and the dating they fixed are presented in the Smithsonian’s documentation of the expedition.

The classical testimony is short but precise and entirely in the public domain. Strabo’s account of the four South Arabian nations and of Tamna as the Cattabanian royal seat stands in Book XVI of the Geography, drawing on Eratosthenes; Pliny’s description of the frankincense road, the Gebbanitae, and the tolls levied at every halt is in Book XII of the Natural History; and the first-century mariner’s Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes the seaward end of the trade at the Hadrami port of Kane. The economics of the resin trade these texts describe is analyzed in Hiroshi Ogino’s study of the frankincense and myrrh of ancient South Arabia in the journal Orient. For the religious matrix in which Amm stood, the older syntheses of D. Nielsen and the South Arabian sections of the Handbuch der altarabischen Altertumskunde (1927) supply the now-contested triad reading, against which the studies of Pirenne, Ryckmans, and Garbini from the 1970s onward should be read.

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