The Minaeans

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A wall fourteen meters high, ringed with more than fifty square towers, still stands in the dry bed of a wadi in northern Yemen. Inside it there is almost nothing — a tell of collapsed houses, a temple with the stumps of its columns, the wind. The Greeks and Romans knew the place as Athlula. Its own people called it Yathill, and they were the Minaeans, the merchants of Ma’in, whose business was the long carriage of incense and whose god went north with the caravans.

A kingdom of the Jawf

The land of Ma’in lay in the Jawf, the lowland valley that opens off the northern edge of the South Arabian highlands toward the great sand of the Ramlat al-Sab’atayn — the desert the medieval Arab geographers called the Sayhad. It was a country of walled towns strung along the wadis where water could be caught and held, a country whose wealth came not from its fields but from its position. The incense of the south had to cross it to reach the markets of the north, and the people of Ma’in made themselves the carriers of that traffic.

They enter the record in the eighth century BCE, not yet as a kingdom but as a settled people of the town of Qarnaw — Qarnawu, the modern village still called Ma’in — in alliance with the city of Yathill nearby. The capital was Qarnaw; the second city, and for a time the more important, was Yathill. Around the close of the seventh century BCE the towns of the Jawf consolidated into the kingdom that the inscriptions name Ma’in, and the long South Arabian sentence of their history began.

That history runs beside, and partly against, the older power of the south. To the southeast lay Saba, the founding South Arabian realm, its capital at Marib with its great dam and the temple of its god Almaqah. Ma’in began under Saba’s shadow and in peace with it; the Minaeans benefited when the Sabaeans broke the rival kingdom of Nashshan in the Jawf in the seventh century. But the alliance did not hold. As the Minaeans took control of stretches of the caravan road that Saba had run, the two kingdoms fell into the rivalry of trade, and the inscriptions record Sabaean attacks on Minaean caravans. The kingdoms of the south — Ma’in, Saba, and later Qataban, Hadramawt, and Himyar — were not a single people but a field of competing realms, and Ma’in was the one whose strength lay least in arms and most in commerce.

The dating of all of this is genuinely uncertain, and the entry on Ma’in should be read with that caution worn on its sleeve. The traditional scheme placed the kingdom early, deep in the first millennium BCE; in 1955 the Belgian scholar Jacqueline Pirenne, comparing the forms of the South Arabian letters with Greek epigraphy and art, argued for a much later “short chronology,” pulling the visible Minaean state down toward the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The argument has been refined and contested ever since, and no single column of dates commands assent. What can be said safely is that Ma’in was a flourishing kingdom across the second half of the first millennium BCE — strongest, by most reckonings, between roughly the fifth and the second centuries — and that the date of its end is, in the plain words of the record, heavily disputed, with the kingdom giving way, around the turn of the era, to the powers that absorbed it. After Ma’in fell, the long-distance trade of the region passed in time to the Nabataeans of the north.

The road and its god

What made Ma’in was the incense road. Frankincense and myrrh — the aromatic resins tapped from trees that grew only in the far south of Arabia and the Horn of Africa — were burned in quantity by the temples of the ancient world, before the gods of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, and Rome. The resin had to travel, and the route by which it traveled ran up the western side of Arabia from the incense lands of Hadramawt, through the Jawf, and on toward the oases of the Hijaz and the markets of the Mediterranean. The Minaeans organized themselves around that road. They were, of the South Arabian kingdoms, the only one to set down the business of their trade in their own monumental inscriptions, and the Greco-Roman writers who cataloged the aromatics of the south knew one grade of the resin simply as Minaean frankincense.

The instrument of the trade was the caravan and the colony. Minaean merchant families did not merely send goods north; they settled along the route, planting communities of traders in the towns through which the incense passed. Their inscriptions — close to seventy of them found outside the homeland — mark this reach. Some fifty come from Dedan, the oasis the Arabs would call al-‘Ula in the northern Hijaz, where the Minaeans lived under the neighboring Lihyanite kingdom and where a temple to their own god stood. Others come from Qaryat al-Faw in central Arabia, the caravan city on the desert’s southern rim, and from Egypt, and — most remarkably — from the Greek island of Delos in the Aegean, where Minaean merchants set up an altar far from home. The South Arabian script and the South Arabian gods traveled with the resin: the people of Ma’in carried their own monumental words, written in the musnad — the angular, columnar lettering of the Old South Arabian script — the length of the road.

The colony was not an outpost of conquest but of business. A Minaean settlement at Dedan or in Egypt was a node of kin and contract — a place where Minaean men married, made deals, witnessed each other’s dedications, and buried their dead under the same god they had left at home. The inscriptions abroad are, in their dry way, the family papers of a trading diaspora: who set up which altar, in whose name, to whose god. This is what makes the Minaean record unusual among the South Arabian kingdoms. The others left mostly dedications and royal annals; Ma’in left the documentation of commerce — the only South Arabian voice that talks, at length and on stone, about the road and the goods that moved on it. The reach of that voice is the measure of the kingdom. A people of a few walled towns in a Yemeni valley left their cut sentences from the Jawf to the Aegean, and the line that connects those points is the line of the frankincense.

The language in which they wrote it was Minaic — also called Madhabian, after the wadi — one of the Old South Arabian tongues, kin to the Sabaic of Saba and to the speech of Qataban and Hadramawt. It is first attested, like the kingdom, from the eighth century BCE. Set in the musnad, the monumental hand cut on hard stone and cast in bronze, it has the look of a script built for permanence: each letter a clean geometric figure, the lines reading in measured columns. That permanence is why we have the Minaeans at all. A people leaves much that perishes — the resin burns, the caravans scatter, the colonies are absorbed — but the stone keeps the name of the god and the names of the merchants, and the stone is what came down.

The god who went with them was Wadd. His name means love, or affection; he was the national god of Ma’in, and the Minaeans set him at the head of their dedications. A formula recurs on amulets and walls — Wd ‘b, Wadd is father — and where the formula was carved it was often accompanied by a sign: a crescent moon with the small disc of Venus beneath it, for Wadd was reckoned among the powers of the sky, his face turned toward the moon. He was the protector. His name at the head of an inscription set the work, the family, and the caravan under his keeping. On the Delos altar his emblem appears as a snake, and the dedication there records, in the Minaic tongue, the setting up of the altar of Waddum and the gods of Ma’in — the gods of a Yemeni kingdom invoked on a Greek island, carved in a South Arabian hand. Beside Wadd stood the wider South Arabian pantheon: the great astral god Athtar, kin to the Venus-powers of the Semitic world such as Astarte and Ishtar, to whom one of the temples of Yathill was raised; and the high god whom the Semitic peoples north and south knew as El. But the god whose name marked the kingdom, whose protection went out along the road, was Wadd.

Here the South Arabian record stands in sharp contrast to the religion of the Arabian north. The gods of the Hijaz — the great goddesses and the lords of the northern shrines — survive largely through the words of later authors, Greco-Roman ethnographers and, above all, Muslim writers setting down generations after the shrines were gone. Their lore reaches us at a distance, refracted, thin. Wadd does not. The god of Ma’in speaks in his own monumental sentences, on stone the Minaeans themselves cut, in the script they themselves carried — the people in their own words, naming their own god, at the head of their own accounts of their own trade. The difference is not a matter of degree. It is the difference between a faith remembered and a faith inscribed.

The cities of the merchants

The kingdom was its towns, and two of them carried its weight. Qarnaw, the capital, lay at the heart of the Jawf; it was the seat of the rulers of Ma’in and the religious center of the realm, and its name stands at the head of the kingdom’s own self-description. Beside it stood Yathill, the city the Arabs would call Baraqish — and it is Baraqish, not Qarnaw, that the eye remembers.

Ruins of the walled city of Baraqish, ancient Yathill, a Minaean caravan town in northern Yemen. txago (Ignacio), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Yathill sat on a low hill in the Wadi Farda, on a stretch of road favored by caravans because there was water. Its people built it as a fortress of trade. The wall rose some fourteen meters and ran in a near-circle studded with square towers — counts in the fifties, fifty-six or fifty-seven — projecting outward along its line, with a gate on the west. An inscription records that the Sabaeans rebuilt this wall around 450 BCE, a reminder that the city changed hands between the powers of the south; its origins reach back further still, perhaps toward the start of the first millennium, and it rose to its height around 400 BCE, when it became, for a time, the chief city of Ma’in. Even after the seat of the kingdom returned to Qarnaw, Yathill kept its standing as a religious center. Within the walls stood the temples — one in the southern quarter, with its ring of columns in the heavy Minaean manner, raised to the astral god Athtar; another that Italian excavators uncovered with its roof still in place, holding stone altars carved with the heads of bulls, taken for a sanctuary of healing. The bull’s head, the columns, the ringed wall: the vocabulary of a South Arabian city of the road.

What the towers guarded was the traffic. A caravan city’s wealth is portable and passes through, and a wall that high around a town that small is the architecture of a place that has goods worth protecting and the money to protect them. The inscriptions of Ma’in, more than those of any neighbor, are documents of that money — records of the merchant families and their dealings, their marriages and their colonies, set under the protection of Wadd. The unglamorous truth of the kingdom is written into its stones: this was a state organized to move resin, levy the road, and keep the books, and it raised its walls and its gods accordingly.

The recovery of Ma’in

For long centuries Ma’in was a name without a face. Its kingdom had vanished into the older South Arabian past; its capital survived as a village over a tell, its great walled city stood empty in the wadi. What returned it to history was its own writing. The South Arabian inscriptions were among the earliest of the ancient Yemeni records to be read, and the Minaean material — at home in the Jawf, and scattered along the road from al-‘Ula to Egypt to Delos — let scholars reconstruct a kingdom that no chronicle had preserved. The inscribed stone, mute for two thousand years, turned out to be the most reliable witness the kingdom had.

South Arabian inscribed stone block, mid-first millennium, in the musnad script. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (21.46), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (photograph CC BY-SA 3.0).

The reading is unfinished work. A small inscribed block now in the Walters Art Museum carries two lines of the South Arabian script whose sense is largely unclear — perhaps the opening of a clan name, then letters that resist a confident rendering. Much of the corpus is like this: certain in its script, partial in its meaning, a sentence half-recovered. The chronology that frames it remains, as it has since Pirenne, a matter of argument; the place of Ma’in in the sequence of the South Arabian kingdoms is sketched rather than fixed. The honest account of the Minaeans is an account with gaps left open.

The most visible monument of the kingdom is Baraqish, which stands among the most striking ruined cities of Arabia — its ring of towers still rising out of the Jawf, a Minaean caravan town whose walls outlasted its commerce by two millennia. It and the other desert towns of the incense road have been gathered onto the lists of heritage in danger; the modern history of the Jawf has not been kind to them, and the site has suffered in the wars of recent decades. Among the wider world, the Minaeans are remembered, when they are remembered, as the third name beside Saba and the Nabataeans in the story of the aromatic trade — the kingdom whose neighbors were larger and louder, and whose own distinction was that it lived by the road. The name of Wadd survived even the kingdom: he is one of the gods named in the Qur’an among the deities of the people of Noah, Wadd, nor Suwa’, nor Yaghuth and Ya’uq and Nasr — the love-god of Ma’in carried, like everything else the Minaeans carried, far past the borders of the kingdom that made him.

What the Minaeans left is not a literature or an empire but a freight: the resin that the ancient world burned, the script that recorded its passage, and a god whose name was Love, set at the head of the road. They were the people whose business was the trade, and whose god went with the caravan.

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