Ancient civilizations-2

Sabaeans

The people who called themselves Sabaʾ (biblical Sheba) are both the earliest and the most abundantly attested in the surviving written records. Their centre was at Maʾrib, east of present-day Sanaa and on the edge of the sand desert. (In the indigenous inscriptions Maʾrib is rendered Mryb or Mrb; the modern spelling is based on an unjustified “correction” by medieval Arabic writers.) The town lay in a formerly highly cultivated area watered by the great Maʾrib Dam, which controlled the flow from the extensive Wadi Dhana basin.

Sabaean rulers—who are mentioned in Assyrian annals of the late 8th and early 7th centuries bce (although some scholars date Sabaean inscriptions to about the 6th century bce)—were responsible for impressive constructions both cultic and irrigational, including the greatest part of what is now visible of the dam; but there are traces of earlier dam works, and the silt deposits indicate agricultural exploitation far back in prehistory.

From the early historic period one ruler, named Karibʾil Watar, has left a long epigraphic record of victories over peoples throughout the major part of Yemen, most importantly the Awsānian kingdom to the southeast, but the victories did not lead to permanent conquest. Nor did his campaigns ever extend into the Hadhramaut region or to the Red Sea coastal area. At no period of their history as an independent people did the Sabaeans have real control of those two areas; in the Red Sea coastal area the sole indication of their presence is a small temple near Zabīd, probably attached to a military outpost guarding a route down to the sea.

Two secondary centres were Ṣirwāh, on a tributary of the Wadi Dhana above the dam, and Nashq (now Al-Bayḍāʾ), at the western end of Wadi al-Jawf.

From perhaps just before the Christian era, however, the highland regions, both north and west of Sanaa, played a much more active part in Sabaean affairs, and some of the rulers belonged to highland clans. The early centuries of the Christian era also saw the emergence of Sanaa as a government centre and royal residence (in its palace, Ghumdān) almost rivaling the status of Maʾrib. Nevertheless, Maʾrib (with its palace, Salḥīn) retained its prestige into the 6th century ce.

Sabaean rulers of the early period employed a regnal style consisting of two names, each chosen from a very short list of alternatives; possible permutations were thus limited, and the same style recurs several times over. In drafting their own texts, the rulers adopted the title mukarrib, now generally thought to mean “unifier” (with allusion to the process of expansion of Sabaean influence over neighbouring communities). Persons other than the rulers never used this title in their texts but referred to the rulers by their regnal styles or occasionally as “king of Maʾrib.” Later the title mukarrib disappeared, and the rulers referred to themselves, and were referred to by their subjects, as “king of Sabaʾ.”

As among the Minaeans, the early rulers were only one element in a legislature including both a council and representatives of the nation. The rulers’ personal activity lay mainly in building and in leading wars. The first three centuries of the Christian era have yielded a more ample documentation than any other period, but during those centuries the Sabaeans were facing a strong threat from the Ḥimyarites to the south of them. The Ḥimyarites succeeded at times in gaining supremacy over the Sabaeans, and at the end of the 3rd century they definitively absorbed the Sabaeans into their realm. In the wars of the 1st century onward, the kings (whether Sabaean or Ḥimyarite) were supported both by a national army (khamīs) under their own command and by contingents raised from the associated communities led by qayls, belonging to the aristocratic clans that headed each associated community. The oldest documents attest a number of other kingdoms. The most important was Awsān, which lay in the highlands to the south of the Wadi Bayḥān. An early Sabaean text speaks of a massive defeat of Awsān, in terms that attest its high significance. Yet the kingdom had a brief resurgence much later, around the turn of the Christian era, when it appears to have been wealthy and heavily influenced by Hellenistic culture. One of its kings of this period was the only Yemeni ruler to be (like the Ptolemies and Seleucids) accorded divine honours, and his portrait statuette is dressed in Greek garb, contrasting with those of his predecessors who are dressed in Arabian style, with kilt and shawl. Awsānian inscriptions are in the Qatabānian language (which might account for the fact that Eratosthenes gives no separate mention to Awsān in his list of the main ethne).