The Sabaeans

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On a limestone slab now in the Louvre, cut sometime in the eighth century before the common era, a man named ‘Alihumu records that he has dedicated something to a god — the letters tall and squared, each standing apart from its neighbor, ruled out across the stone like a row of small monuments. It is among the oldest things written in the Sabaic tongue, and it does the thing the Sabaeans would go on doing for more than a thousand years: it speaks for itself. Where most of ancient Arabia reaches us only through the report of outsiders — Greek geographers, Assyrian scribes, much later Arabic authors — the people of Saba left their own account, by the thousand, carved in their own hand. They are the rare ancient Arabian people one can read in their own words.

An early Sabaic dedication on limestone, eighth century BCE, southern Arabia (Louvre AO4091). Mbzt, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The first of the kingdoms of the south

The Sabaeans were the people of Saba, in the highlands and desert margins of what is now Yemen — the first and the longest-lived of the kingdoms of ancient South Arabia. Their land lay along the inner edge of the great central desert, the Ramlat al-Sabatayn, where wadis draining the western mountains spilled their seasonal floods onto the desert floor before the sand swallowed them. The kingdom takes shape in the documentary record at the start of the first millennium BCE; excavation at Marib and at Sirwah has pushed the earliest Sabaean material back toward the tenth and eleventh centuries BCE, and the kingdom’s main political and religious life runs from roughly the eighth century BCE to the late third century CE, when Saba was finally swallowed by the rising highland power of Himyar around 275 CE. For most of a millennium, Saba was the gravitational center of the south, and the other South Arabian realms — Ma’in, Qataban, Hadramawt — defined themselves partly in relation to it.

The early Sabaean state was not a kingdom in the ordinary sense, and its rulers did not at first call themselves kings. They bore the title mukarrib, a Sabaic word usually rendered “federator” or “unifier” — the one who bound the tribes of the south into a single covenanted body under the patronage of the national god. The mukarrib was a priest-ruler as much as a sovereign; the title carried the weight of cult and confederation together, and was understood as standing above the plain malik, “king.” The decisive figure of this federating age is Karib’il Watar, who reigned about 620 to 600 BCE and whose campaigns, cut at length into the stone of the Almaqah temple at Sirwah, narrate how he broke the rival polities of the south — Awsan, Nashshan, and others — and carried Sabaean reach north toward Najran, southwest to the Gulf of Aden, and east toward the Hadramawt. The conquests are framed throughout as warfare waged for Almaqah and for Saba: the god and the realm named together, the enlargement of the one an offering to the other. Only later, around the fourth century BCE, did the federating title fall away, and the rulers of Saba style themselves simply malik, king of Saba — a contraction of ambition into the heartland that mirrors the kingdom’s slow recession before its neighbors and successors. The arc from mukarrib to malik, as the Wikipedia synthesis on the Sabaeans sets it out, traces the whole curve of Sabaean fortunes in a single shifting word.

What held this people together was not a single dynasty but a god and a flood. The formula recurs across the inscriptions — Saba and Almaqah, the realm and its lord — and the institutions of the kingdom answered to both. The state acted in Almaqah’s name; the tribes met in his sanctuary; the king’s deeds were dedicated to him. To be a Sabaean was, in the language of the stones, to belong to the people of Almaqah and of Saba at once.

The god, the dam, and the script

Almaqah — also written Ilmuqah — was the national god of Saba, lord of the federation and patron of its kings, whose ruling house counted itself his descent. His great sanctuary was the oval temple of Awwam, southeast of Marib, the largest temple known from pre-Islamic South Arabia: an immense walled oval with a pillared hall and an attendant cemetery, active from early in the first millennium BCE to the end of the fourth century CE. Pilgrimage to Awwam in the month of dhu-Abhi was a binding obligation that drew the whole kingdom inward, and the precinct has yielded close to a thousand Sabaic inscriptions — one of the densest single deposits of pre-Islamic Arabian text anywhere. What kind of god Almaqah was remains genuinely contested. The older scholarship, building the South Arabian pantheon on a lunar pattern, classed him a moon-god, masculine against a feminine sun — a placement that set him alongside the Mesopotamian Sin as one of the great moon-lords of the Semitic world. From the 1970s a revisionist line objected that his emblems — the bull, the cluster of lightning around a curved blade, the vine — carry solar, warlike, and vegetative associations that fit a sun-god or a god of the fertilizing storm better than a moon. The matter has not closed, and it is properly left open: the god the Sabaeans served is named on every other stone and pictured by his symbols, but his exact celestial nature is one of the standing problems of the field.

The flood was the other binding power. At Marib the seasonal torrents of the Wadi Dhana, draining the western highlands, could be captured and spread across the basin floor — and the Sabaeans built, from about the eighth century BCE, the great dam that did exactly that: an earthen barrage anchored to the rock on either side by dressed stone, with spillways and sluices that fed the water out across the fields. At its height the works watered an oasis of perhaps a hundred square kilometers, an artificial garden on the rim of the desert whose grain and dates fed the capital and provisioned the caravans. The dam was less a monument than a permanent obligation, demanding constant labor and the clearing of silt; the inscriptions that record its repairs are also records of the political order that could command such work. The god and the water met at the capital, and the cult and the engineering were a single thing — the same hands that dedicated to Almaqah maintained the sluices that made his land rich.

And the people wrote. The Sabaeans set down their Sabaic — one of the Old South Arabian, or Sayhadic, languages — in the tall monumental hand the Arabic tradition would call the musnad: the Ancient South Arabian script, a consonantal abjad of twenty-eight letters, geometric and unjoined, each character standing free and squared as if built rather than written. Its mature form was reached around 800 BCE, and it remained in use, across Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic, until the late sixth century CE. Beside the monumental hand ran a cursive minuscule, the zabur, scratched with a stick on wooden stalks and palm-ribs for the ordinary business of letters and accounts — the everyday shadow of the lapidary script. From the same root the writing of Ethiopia, the Ge’ez script, would later grow. What the musnad gave the Sabaeans was a public voice in stone: temple dedications, dam-repairs, royal campaigns, oaths, expiations, and law, cut in their thousands across the south. It is the reason Saba is among the best-documented civilizations of pre-Islamic Arabia, and the reason the Sabaeans are not a silent people.

The source-distance inversion

Here the Sabaeans pose a quiet reversal of the usual order of evidence. The gods of northern and Hijazi Arabia — the great goddesses, the lords of the desert shrines — reach the modern reader chiefly through outsiders: Greco-Roman geographers passing along the caravan rumor, and Arabic authors writing generations after the sanctuaries were gone, working from memory and tradition. Their record is thin, late, and external. The Sabaean south is the opposite case. Its god is not described for us by a foreign hand; he is invoked, again and again, by the people who served him, in their own language and their own script, on dated and provenanced stone. The asymmetry runs deep. The northern powers must be reconstructed from report; Almaqah and Saba can largely be read. It is one of the structural facts of Arabian religious history that the further south one goes, the louder the ancient voices become — and the people of Saba are the loudest of all, the south speaking for itself where the north can only be spoken of.

That self-witness shapes what can be known. We do not have to ask whether a late author has reported the Sabaeans fairly, because for most of what matters the Sabaeans are their own authors. The campaigns of Karib’il Watar are his own boast; the dedications at Awwam are the worshipers’ own words; the repairs to the dam are the engineers’ own accounts of grain and labor. The classical writers — the Greek and Roman geographers who knew the south as the land of frankincense and the realm of “the Sabaeans” — supply an outside frame, sometimes admiring, sometimes fanciful, of a people grown rich beyond reckoning on the resin trade. The Hebrew scriptures and the Assyrian annals supply still another. But these are the margins of a record whose center the Sabaeans wrote themselves.

The incense road and the wider world

The wealth that made Saba famous came out of the south of Arabia: frankincense, the pale aromatic tear wept from the tapped bark of the Boswellia tree, and myrrh, the darker resin of the Commiphora. These grew in Dhofar and the Hadramawt, and the harvest of incense moved north by camel caravan along a narrow, tolled, and guarded road — gathered toward the Hadrami and Qatabanian capitals, carried up through Marib and the oasis of Najran, then station by station along the Hijaz to the markets of the Mediterranean and the desert emporia of the north, where the merchant-state of the Minaeans and, later, the caravan kingdom of the Nabataeans grew wealthy on the road’s northern legs. Saba sat near the head of this traffic, the gatekeeper of commodities that the temples of the ancient world consumed by the ton. The Roman appetite for southern resin was famous enough that Roman writers complained of the silver it drained eastward into Arabia.

This trade tied Saba into a world far larger than the peninsula. The same maritime and overland networks that carried the resin also carried the Sabaean name and the Sabaean script across the Red Sea, where Almaqah was worshiped among the South-Arabian-influenced polities of the Horn — the cultural reach that lies behind the later kingdom of Aksum. And it brought the Sabaeans into the field of vision of the great powers to the north. The earliest secure notices of the people called Sabaeans appear in the Assyrian annals — tribute of aromatics under Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon in the eighth century BCE, and contact with the Assyrians under Sennacherib, who reigned from 705 to 681 BCE — the south Arabian traders entering the imperial record as bearers of the precious incense the Mesopotamian temples burned. The Hebrew Bible knew the same people, under the name Sheba, as the byword for the rich merchants of the far south, whose camels brought gold and spices and precious stones.

The queen, and the kingdom remembered as Sheba

Outside its own inscriptions, Saba lived longest as the kingdom of a queen. The first book of Kings tells of the queen of Sheba who came to Solomon in Jerusalem to test him with hard questions, bringing camels laden with spices, gold, and precious stones — the very freight of the incense road, set in the mouth of a sovereign of the resin lands. Whether that queen’s kingdom is to be identified with the historical Saba is itself a contested matter, argued both ways in the South Arabian and the Ethiopian traditions; the equation of Saba with the biblical Sheba is old and widely held, but it is an identification, not a datum the Sabaean stones confirm. The historical Saba left no queen’s name in its own monumental record. Its rulers, in their own words, were the mukarribs and the kings who federated the south, raised the dam, dedicated their conquests to Almaqah, and cut their deeds in the musnad — campaign by campaign and sluice by sluice. The spice-bearing queen belongs to the reception of Saba, not to its self-portrait: she is the outer world’s image of the resin kingdom, set at a great distance, refracted through the scriptures of three faiths.

That afterlife is rich. Later Islamic tradition gave the queen the name Bilqis, and folded the memory of Saba into the wider account of the prophetic past; the Qur’an retells the encounter with Solomon, and takes the people of Saba and the breaking of their dam as a parable of a people who turned from gratitude. In Ethiopia she became Makeda, mother by Solomon of the founder of the Solomonic royal line, a claim still living in Ethiopian Orthodox identity. The name of Awwam, the great oval temple of Almaqah, passed into local Arabic as Mahram Bilqis, the Sanctuary of Bilqis — the god’s house renamed for the legendary queen, the older cult overwritten by the later story. One sacred order gave way to another across the centuries, as the polytheism of the south yielded first to the monotheism of the Himyarite kings and then to Islam; the inscriptions thin and stop, and Saba passes out of its own keeping and into the memory of others.

Old Marib, Yemen: the mound of the ancient Sabaean capital, with the ruins of multi-story buildings on the tell and exposed ancient walls in the foreground. Tapatio, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The recovery of a self-inscribing people

The modern recovery of Saba has been, fittingly, a recovery through reading. The kingdom was lifted back into history less by the spade than by the decipherment of its script and the patient gathering of its texts. The foundational corpus is the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, its fourth part, the South Arabian volumes published in Paris from the 1880s, which assembled the Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic inscriptions into a single edited series. The Austrian explorer Eduard Glaser, traveling in Yemen in the late nineteenth century, brought back squeezes and copies of hundreds of texts, including the long Sabaic records of the dam. In the twentieth century the American Foundation for the Study of Man excavated the Awwam temple in 1951 and 1952, and again from 1997, recovering the great body of Almaqah dedications; the standard modern synthesis of the whole pre-Islamic Arabian world remains Robert Hoyland’s Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. What the field reconstructs, almost uniquely for ancient Arabia, is a civilization read in its own writing — its religion from its own prayers, its history from its own annals, its law from its own oaths.

In January 2023 the heart of that civilization was placed on the World Heritage List, and in the same act on the List of World Heritage in Danger. The serial property, the Landmarks of the Ancient Kingdom of Saba, Marib, gathers seven archaeological sites — the ancient city of Marib, the old dam, the Awwam and Barran temples of Almaqah, and the city of Sirwah among them — as witnesses to a kingdom that controlled the incense road and built, in its great oasis, hydraulic engineering unmatched in ancient South Arabia. UNESCO reached for its emergency procedure: the landmarks of Saba now lie along a front line of the Yemeni war, and the realm that once held back the floodwaters is again at the mercy of forces it cannot command. The Sabaeans built in stone and wrote their own history into it. That doubled inheritance — the dam that watered the desert and the musnad that recorded the watering — is what survives of the founding people of the South Arabian world, and it is what the present war now threatens.

→ Related: Kingdom Of Saba · Marib · Almaqah · The Minaeans · The Nabataeans · Himyar · Incense · Aksum · Venus · Ishtar · Sin Moon God · El God · The Assyrians · Idolatry · Revelation · Divination