Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  At a very early date, these South Arabian states had become aware of the demand for aromatic gums, as the Pharaonic Egyptians were great burners of incense and consumers of another Arabian product, myrrh, used medicinally and in the mummification process. By the tenth century BC, the Yemenis had been able to develop the overland camel trade with the north, as the visit of the Queen of Sheba/Saba to Solomon shows. The appearance of civilizations in the Fertile Crescent had opened up more markets for aromatics, and in the time of Herodotus no Assyrian lady would make love without first censing herself. Incense-burners from this period, remarkably similar in form to Arabian examples, are found over the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean. But it was the growth of Rome that provided the biggest boost to ancient Yemen’s prosperity. As their empire expanded, the Romans developed a fascination for the Orient and things oriental that became entrenched in society.

  Frankincense and myrrh were not the only commodities traded. Cinnamon, for example, was brought from India although the South Arabians managed to keep its source a secret in order to retain their monopoly on its carriage. But frankincense was their principal export, and by leaking selected information or disinformation on production methods, they added to its mystique and its desirability. The Romans were led to believe that the incense groves were guarded by vicious flying serpents which could only be subdued by the smoke of rare plants. It was an early case of advertising hype.

  Thus the Mediterranean world viewed the people who produced the fuel for its prayers with the same mixture of awe, envy and incomprehension that the West reserves today for the oil shaykhs who produce the fuel for its motor cars. South Arabia exported an estimated 3,000 tons of incense and 600 tons of myrrh annually. Given that the people of Rome alone spent 85 tons of coined silver a year on incense, that myrrh was vastly more expensive, and that the spices and other luxury goods which passed in transit through South Arabia fetched similarly high prices, the income for the Sabaeans and their neighbours would have compared favourably with the present-day revenues of an oil-exporting state.*

  Rome continued to consume the gum of Boswellia sacra until it embraced Christianity and Pauline disapproval blew away the smallest whiff of heathenism. From the end of the second century onwards, the early Church fathers campaigned successfully against the use of incense. A certain amount of backsliding was to occur and incense later found a place in Christian rites, but never at the obsessive level it had reached under the pagans. Besides, the Romans had developed the navigational skills needed to sail down the Red Sea and beyond, bypassing Southern Arabia, and so land routes turned to carrying more prosaic and far less profitable commodities like hides.

  In its heyday, most of the incense was brought by boat and raft to Qana – the modern Bir Ali on the Hadramawt coast – from the eastern Hadrami domains where it was grown. The rafts, we are told by the anonymous Graeco-Egyptian author of the first-century navigational guide, The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, were ‘held up on inflated skins after the manner of the country’. (Such rafts were still to be found off the southern coast of Arabia early last century, when the British Indian naval officer Wellsted noticed fishermen using them in the Kuria Muria Islands.) From Qana the incense was taken inland to the Hadrami capital, Shabwah. Rules governing carriage were stringent, and a reminder of this can be seen in the 180-yard-long wall which blocks the Shabwah route as it passes up a narrow valley, forcing caravans to pass through a single gate. Other checkpoints lined the way for, Pliny says, ‘the laws have made it a capital offence to deviate from the highroad’. At Shabwah, Pliny goes on, a tithe of the incense was taken in honour of the Hadrami god and used for defraying expenses such as the entertainment of strangers. Civil servants and taxes had to be paid, and money found for water and fodder, so that ‘the expense for each camel before it arrives at the shore of our sea [the Mediterranean] is 688 denarii’.

  The way to the Romans’ mare nostrum was long – according to Pliny, 2,437,500 paces – and each territory the caravans passed through extracted duty. From Shabwah the caravans, thousands strong and miles long, went via Marib and al-Jawf to Najran. Here the route split, one branch cutting across the peninsula to the head of the Gulf, the other going through al-Madinah and on to Petra for shipment at Gaza or onward carriage to Damascus.

  The vital position of Gaza in the incense trade is illustrated by an anecdote in Plutarch’s life of Alexander the Great. Alexander, as a young man, had been ticked off by his tutor Leonidas for burning too much incense in the temple. Years later, when he captured Gaza, he sent Leonidas a message: ‘No longer need you be so stingy towards the gods.’ With the message were thirteen tons of incense and two tons of myrrh.

  Trade was two-way. Money, ideas, goods and gods also came to South Arabia from the Eastern Mediterranean. People were imported, too: an inscription of the third century BC in the temple of Athtar (also the name of a Phoenician deity) at Qarnaw, which mentions Gaza no fewer than twenty-eight times, lists details of naturalization requirements for foreign women. Some of the women were Phoenician, others Egyptian or Arab; most came as wives or concubines of Ma’inian men. The God of the Old Testament used the prospect of transportation to Yemen as a threat: ‘I will sell your sons and daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabaeans, to a people far off.’

  Individual ancient South Arabians are hard to picture; but disparate clues and a dash of imagination can help sketch the outlines of, say, the life of a well-to-do trader of Baraqish like Zayd Il ibn Zayd, a merchant who exported myrrh and frankincense to Egypt in the mid-third century BC. At this time the Greeks controlled merchant shipping in the Mediterranean, and it was one of their vessels that he boarded in Alexandria to make a tour of the eastern end of the sea. The journey took him to cosmopolitan Delos, where one of his countrymen was later to dedicate an altar with a bilingual South Arabian-Greek inscription to the Ma’inian national god, Wadd. Zayd Il would naturally have looked into frankincense futures before leaving Delos for Gaza, where he picked up a Phoenician concubine to take back to his home town. On a later trip to Egypt he succumbed to the rigours of an international businessman’s life. He was embalmed with his own myrrh and buried in a sarcophagus inscribed with his name and occupation in Ma’inian.

  Contemporary Classical writers transmit a fair amount of information on the ancient Arabian peoples, some fabulous but much with a factual basis. Herodotus is the earliest and, as usual, the most entertaining. He wrote that cinnamon was collected from birds’ nests and the gum ladanum from the beards of billy goats; Arabian sheep had such fat tails that they had to trundle them along on little wooden trailers.* Herodotus’s successors are more credible. For example, most of the place-names on Ptolemy’s map of Arabia can be identified at least tentatively and, except for sites far inland like Mara (Marib) and Nagara (Najran), latitudes are little more than fifteen per cent out. The map was not substantially updated until the Niebuhr expedition of the 1760s.

  A strange story linking South Arabia, Byzantium and Northern Europe perhaps demonstrates that the Mediterranean world knew something of the celestial nature of early Yemeni religion: the Empress Helena, famous for her search for the True Cross, also sent envoys to Hadramawt. There, in ‘Sessania Adrumetorum’, they discovered the bones of one of the Magi which, after travelling via Constantinople and Milan, finally came to rest in Cologne in 1164.†

  The Mediterranean peoples saw the ancient Yemenis only as traders in aromatics and other luxury goods. But to the Yemenis themselves, the cultivation of essential crops was the basis of life. The two gardens at Marib stretched for at least fifteen miles and were clearly a masterpiece of irrigation. Elsewhere, too, enormous effort was put into getting the best out of limited water supplies. Around the Hadrami capital Shabwah, now a barren place on the edge of the desert, some 12,000 acres were under cultivation, while after the Marib Dam the most impressive irrigation works are to be found at Baynun in the central highlands. Here, floodwater was cha
nnelled out of its natural course, through tunnels cut in the solid rock of two small mountains, and into a dam. One of the tunnels is still intact, 150 yards long and big enough to drive a car through. Today, many villages of highland Yemen still rely on rainwater collecting tanks that were built two thousand years ago.

  As Yemen opened itself increasingly to outsiders over the first few centuries of the Christian era, Arabia Felix was demystified. Sailors from Ptolemaic Egypt had learned to navigate the dangerous shoals of the Red Sea, and the overland trade went into recession. The nomads saw their earnings as guards and camel men plummet, and turned on their former employers by raiding the settled lands of Yemen. The rulers of Himyar – a people whom the genealogists, with their rationalizing minds, traced back to ‘Himyar ibn Saba’ – were now able to use their position in the central highlands, safe from the nomads, to increase their authority; they claimed the title ‘Kings of Saba and Dhu Raydan’, Raydan being the area around their capital, Zafar. Towards the end of the third century AD the Himyari leader Shammar Yuhar’ish had most of present-day Yemen under his control and assumed the title ‘King of Saba, Dhu Raydan, Hadramawt and Yamanat’ – the latter probably the southern coast. But Yemen was to fall prey to the rivalry of superpowers who, acting through satellites, concealed imperialism in ideology.

  From the third century onwards, Ethiopian Axumite influence had grown in Yemen; later, there were many converts to Christianity. The backlash was extreme: a Judaized noble, Yusuf As’ar, seized the Himyari throne and began an anti-Christian campaign, resulting in his burning the Christians of Najran. The Axumites thus had their pretext to mount a full-scale expedition to South Arabia. So, in AD 525, began the final eclipse of Yemen’s pre-Islamic civilizations.

  Yusuf As’ar (whom the historians call Dhu Nuwas, He of the Ponytail) had ascended the throne by unorthodox means. Nashwan tells us that his predecessor had been warned that he would be killed by the most beautiful youth of Himyar: the king was scornful of the prophecy but took the precaution of having his many handsome young visitors frisked. The power-hungry and good-looking Yusuf, on whom the royal eye inevitably fell, overcame the problem by designing a double-soled sandal. When he was admitted to the royal chambers he got the old king drunk and, like James Bond’s adversary Rosa Klebb, whipped out a stiletto concealed in the sole. He killed his would-be seducer, and proclaimed himself king.

  Whatever the truth of Nashwan’s account, other evidence seems to confirm that Yusuf As’ar grabbed the throne in a coup. His come-uppance, following the Najran incident and years of resistance to the Ethiopians, was bathetic. After his final defeat on the shores of the Red Sea he spurred his horse into the waves and was never seen again. So ended the Kingdom of Saba, Dhu Raydan, Hadramawt, Yamanat and – as it had lately been styled – the Arabs of the Highlands and the Lowlands. The most plangent laments on its passing were composed by the blind poet Alqamah ibn Dhi Jadan, known as the Mourner of Himyar. His verse on Duran, a great Himyari castle ravaged by the Axumites, recalls the apocalyptic vision of Babylon:

  Himyar and its kings are dead, destroyed by Time;

  Duran by the Great Leveller laid waste.

  Around its courts the wolves and foxes howl,

  And owls dwell there as though it never was.

  The Great Leveller had a bizarre end in store for the most famous Axumite ruler of Yemen, Abrahah. At some time after the middle of the sixth century, Abrahah declared himself independent from Axum and assumed the title of the old Himyari kings. He then began trying to divert lucrative pilgrim traffic from Mecca – the major centre of pilgrimage even before Islam – to San’a. When, in AD 570, one of the Meccan family in charge of the Ka’bah passed comment on this policy by defecating in the San’a ecclesia,* Abrahah set off to capture the northern city. He took with him a secret weapon which gave the final battle its name: the Day of the Elephant. Destruction would have been certain for the city of the Ka’bah had events not taken a Hitchcockian twist. Flocks of partridge suddenly appeared and bombarded the Ethiopians with stones, killing all but a few of them. The defeat is commemorated in the Qur’an, and in folklore; the route from San’a to Mecca is still known as the Way of the People of the Elephant, and al-Hasabah, now a suburb of San’a, is said to have been named after the pebbles, hasab, that finished off the remnants of the fleeing Axumite army. Villagers around Amran, north of San’a, say that the small fossilized shells found in the area are the actual projectiles. It is claimed that they fell with such force that they entered through the victims’ skulls and left by their anuses.

  Yemeni resistance to Abrahah’s successors coalesced under the Himyari prince Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan. Sayf, however, was too weak to pursue a policy of non-alignment and summoned Persian military assistance. The call resulted in Yemen becoming a Sasanian satrapy. But the rule of these new incomers was short-lived: a new power was rising, inexorably, to the north.

  The Prophet Muhammad, born in Mecca in the year of the Day of the Elephant, was dispatching delegates to all corners of Arabia from the new Muslim state in al-Madinah. To San’a he sent Farwah ibn Musayk, a Yemeni who had embraced Islam at the Prophet’s own hand. Muhammad commanded Farwah to spread the new religion, killing those who did not accept it. However, a timely visit by the angel Gabriel, who enjoined Muhammad to ‘show kindness to the children of Saba’, prevented a slaughter. In the event the Yemenis accepted Islam willingly. The Prophet developed a soft spot for them: ‘The people of Yemen’, he said, ‘have the kindest and gentlest hearts of all. Faith is Yemeni, wisdom is Yemeni.’

  Nonetheless, there was opposition. In the following year, AH II, a soothsayer named al-Aswad al-Ansi declared himself a prophet and mustered a force of tribesmen whom he led on San’a and Najran. He was defeated and killed by Farwah. Reviled by the Islamic historians, who record that he had a pair of demonic familiars in the form of swine, al-Aswad was later hailed by the PDRY Marxists as a revolutionary. A later false prophet claimed to the tribes of Hamdan that the Archangel Gabriel had also revealed a qur’an to him. As an ecumenical measure he had, too, an Ark of the Covenant, which followed him around on the back of a mule.

  Islam swept away the most obvious signs of paganism. The spirit of iconoclasm was at large, and all over Arabia the idols were toppling. As a poet said, ‘Can we call it “Lord” if foxes piss upon its head?’ And as Islam spread, Yemen became politically marginalized. Yemenis had been the spearhead of Islamic expansion; but during the century of Umayyad rule up to AD 750, and then under the Abbasid caliphs, they felt themselves increasingly eclipsed by Arabs of northern origin who came to have more in common with the Byzantines and Persians they had conquered than with their Arabian roots. Yemen’s intellectual counter-attack produced a great treasure of history and poetry. More important, it created for the Yemenis powerful concepts of their own past. In the tenth century, al-Hamdani, known as the Tongue of Yemen, drew on the works of his predecessors and supplemented them with his own research to produce the massive ten-part genealogical and historical compendium al-Iklil. A pioneering antiquary who recorded inscriptions from Baraqish and elsewhere, al-Hamdani was also at heart a romantic who dwelt on the melancholy of ruins and faded glory.

  A large section of Iklil VIII is devoted to tombs and their occupants. The most notable feature of al-Hamdani’s deceased ancients, ‘old men dried out upon their beds’, is that they were often buried with an inscription bearing the first half – and sometimes, prophetically, both halves – of the Muslim creed: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. The historian, therefore, is demonstrating the existence of Islam in Yemen before Muhammad – hardly a deviant view, since Islam is the old religion, the faith of Abraham and all the pre-Muhammadan prophets.*

  Al-Hamdani, like Nashwan ibn Sa’id, includes many tales of expeditions made by pre-Islamic kings. One, the unbelievably energetic Malik, reached Soghdia, the lands of the Franks and the Saxons, and the shore of the Atlantic where he set up a statue with the warning, �
�He who goes beyond this point will perish.’ Shammar Yuhar’ish, already seen colonizing Tibet, gave his name to Samarqand which, al-Hamdani claims, comes from the Persian Shammar kand – Shammar destroyed it.

  It is a history made not by the mind but by the heart. But however wild some of the claims may be, al-Hamdani was insistent on setting them down, for they attempted to show that the armies of Yemen had reached as far as those of Islam. Geographically as well as doctrinally, the sons of Qahtan had got there first.

  There are, then, two pasts: the past of the archaeologists and epigraphers, and the more richly embroidered past of al-Hamdani and his school. The two versions are not mutually exclusive; each complements and informs the other. A third past is only beginning to be charted: that of the mass of curious practices inherited from pre-Islamic times. Children in San’a, for example, throw their milk teeth to the sun and call on it to give them the teeth of a gazelle; farmers in some areas butter the horns of a bull when the sorghum is sown, to ensure a good crop; Hadrami townsmen go on annual ibex hunts and present the animal’s thigh and forequarters to the religious authorities – precisely the same cuts that are given to the priest in South Arabian inscriptions and, hardly by coincidence, in both the Book of Leviticus and a Carthaginian tariff found in Marseille.*

  And then there is the linguistic past. Arabic, which started as a dialect of North Arabian and had for some time been the lingua franca of trade and poetry, seems to have taken over from the old languages by the end of the third Islamic century. But Yemeni speech is still haunted by the ghosts of South Arabian. Some words have undergone strange metamorphoses as they passed through the twilight areas of meaning between Himyari, Yemeni dialects of Arabic, and standard Arabic. For example, wathan to a Himyari was ‘a boundary marker’; today in some dialects it has taken on the extra meaning of ‘an oath’; in the lexicon, it is ‘an idol of stone or wood’.