The two Fertile Crescents bracketed that huge peninsular parenthesis; but from early in the first millennium BC, thanks to ’arab and their pack camels, the South Arabian peoples began to trade across it. The southerners were themselves middle-men, forwarding north the luxury goods of the Indian Ocean region that came in through the fertile fringe of the coast. They were also exporters in their own right, mainly of aromatics. But the mainstay of their existence was always agriculture.
The virtuous circle in which the need to harness rainfall necessitates the building of a settled society, which in turn accelerates agricultural development, has already been touched on. The rich corpus of inscriptions left by the Sabaeans and their neighbours constantly underlines the importance of water: the earliest Sabaic inscriptions, probably dating from the eighth century BC, thank the divinity Athtar for rain. Some of the last Sabaic inscriptions, from the sixth century AD, record in the name of the Trinity repairs to the ailing Marib Dam, which were carried out by the Christian Axumites from Ethiopia then occupying the south. A typical dedication from some time in between, for a statue at the temple of Awam – the main Sabaean place of worship, not far from the Marib Dam – states that the dedicators
give as an offering to the god Ilmaqah . . . the Lord of Awam, this gilded statue, in praise for his blessings on them of plenteous crops from both irrigated and rain-fed land . . . and of the harvest from their terraces and fields and farms watered by irrigation channels and dykes, and from all the farmland of their villages . . .
Again and again such inscriptions occur, down the centuries of Sabaean harvests.
As for that greatest of all irrigation works, the Marib Dam itself, it probably reached its final shape and size in the sixth century BC; it continued to function from that time for over a thousand years. Designed to divert and distribute seasonal run-off from the mountains (rather than to store water), it may be one of the most successful works of civil engineering in human history. The silt deposits of its ‘two gardens’ mentioned in the Qur’an are still clearly visible, as are the two ancient surviving sluices that irrigated them (the barrage wall itself does not survive). The depth of the deposits suggests that the Sabaeans were farming here from a thousand years before their first surviving inscriptions, or that pre- (perhaps proto-) Sabaean inhabitants began the work of irrigation; the extent of the silt shows that the two gardens covered 9,600 hectares at their greatest expanse. All this was the fruit of cooperation. (In contrast, modern irrigation, nearly all from artesian wells, tends to promote competition, with neighbouring farmers raiding a fast-retreating water table.) In time, however, that cooperation would cease, disaster would strike, and the Marib Dam would play a new part in Arabian history – or rather, in a sort of roving folk-epic, an Arab Odyssey in which the paths of fact and fantasy cross and recross.
PEOPLE AND PILGRIMAGE
Also at Marib was another great structure which, every year in due season, brought together streams from a similarly large catchment area. This structure was a temple, the Awam temple of the inscription quoted above, a great elliptical temenos containing shrines, and the streams were human. They came in the month of Abhay; appropriately for a hydraulic civilization like that of the Sabaeans, it coincided with the summer rains. The conditions imposed on the pilgrims, including special dress and abstinence from sexual activity and fighting, were echoed in other pilgrimages across Arabia. They still are, today, at the pilgrimage of another great deity – arguably the same one – in Mecca.
Although the Marib pilgrimage was by no means unique, it was vast: ‘the House of Ilmaqah’, as the Awam temple was often called, was home to one of the great Arabian gods, the patron deity of Saba. After so long in retirement, he has become an obscure figure: he may have been in origin a god of war or of vegetation; one scholar has seen him as a male hypostasis of the (usually female) sun deity. According to the Qur’an, the Sabaeans did indeed ‘worship the sun’, but the reference could be to one or another of its female versions. The god’s name doesn’t help particularly in delineating him. However it should be vowelled – perhaps ‘Almaqah’ – his name seems to be composed of ‘Il’, the general name of the paramount Semitic deity (as in ‘al-Ilah’ a ‘Allah’), plus another element that is possibly from the Sabaic verb wqh, ‘to command’: thus Ilmaqah might be ‘God the Commander’, or ‘the Ordainer’.
Whatever his name means, it is clear that Ilmaqah was central to the whole identity and unity of the major sha’b, or people, called Saba – itself a confederation of lesser sha’bs. In theological terms, he probably ‘represents functionally the collective will of the sha’b’. The Sabaeans were seen as the ‘children’ of Ilmaqah; new members of the confederation had to make the pilgrimage to Marib, and would thus become in a sense adoptive children of the god. A key inscription found in the highlands 130 kilometres west of Marib imposes this duty on the sha’b called Sam’ay, which seems to have been newly adopted into the Sabaean confederation. Sam’ay’s own patron deity, Ta’lab, decrees to his people that they must not fail to go on pilgrimage to Marib (in the chain of divine command, deities knew their place). Ta’lab also reminds his people that on the Marib pilgrimage they must abstain from sex and from certain types of hunting, and that they should slaughter 700 sheep on each of two days. Again, the dos and don’ts and hecatombs are all strongly reminiscent of Mecca today. Ta’lab even tells his people that if they are to slaughter a camel at Marib, they should ride it there gently – a piece of advice that was repeated in the Meccan context by the Prophet Muhammad, several centuries later. There were also features that would be unfamiliar at present-day Mecca, and one that would be shocking: the fact that Ilmaqah was not alone. Not only does Ta’lab defer to him, but dedications at Marib were made, usually jointly, to a whole pantheon of lesser deities – or perhaps a constellation, since many of them were celestial.
Despite this major exception, it should be clear by now how wrong it is to think of ‘Arab history’ as beginning with Islam, or even necessarily with ‘Arabs’. South Arabians, who in their heyday never considered themselves Arabs in any sense, underlie this history; both Islam and Arabs were part of a very long continuum, one which cannot be pressed into a few prolegomena to a Muslim year zero. Many Muslim Arab historians were well aware of this: in the tenth century, as we shall see, al-Mas’udi’s compendious histories would give full justice to the pre-Islamic past; his Yemeni contemporary, al-Hamdani, largely ignored Islamic dynastic history, and viewed current events as a continuation of pre-Islamic struggles. Other long-surviving features emerge from looking at this fuller picture of the past. For example, given the ancient, Sabaean association of the body politic with the will of the deity, an idea inherited by the Islamic community, the recent coinage ‘political Islam’ looks – at least in its home constituency of the Arabian subcontinent – to be a rank tautology.
Another feature of the ancient south that would elide into the wider civilization of Islam is the way in which it was rooted in places, not pedigrees. A South Arabian sha’b, unlike a tribe, defined itself by its territory – to which it was bound by the need to harness water – and by its sanctuaries and urban centres. Its members were the children of a god who had a house in a particular spot; they were not the offspring of some putative wandering ancestor. Compared with the peninsula as a whole, the south was highly urbanized: though some of them must have been pretty small, over a hundred places described as hjr, ‘town’, are mentioned in the pre-Islamic South Arabian inscriptions. Admittedly, a northern tribal grouping like Qedar could coalesce around an ‘urban’ sanctuary like Dumah; but in the case of the settled southern peoples, sanctuaries would actually be established in order to express and define group unities. The tribal self-definition, by lineage, would form another strand of Arab-Islamic ethnicity; by itself, however, it would not have taken Islam beyond Arabs. Without the legacy of the south and its civic centres, Islam might still have become a world religion – but one that like Judaism remained attached, how
ever tenuously, to the idea of bloodlines. For Islam there are no Twelve Tribes, no Gentiles, and at least part of the reason is its South Arabian heritage.
South Arabia also presented a model of political unity that later ages would aspire to but rarely achieve; in this, too, it may have left a vital legacy for Islam. Early Sabaean inscriptions often feature the title mkrb, possibly to be read as ‘mukarrib’. (The root sense may be that of the Arabic muqarrib, ‘one who brings near, who takes someone as an associate’; a similar Arabic term, mujammi’, is used in a political sense as ‘unifier’.) The mkrb was the king of the dominant sha’b in a confederation of sha’bs – but only when he was wearing, so to speak, his other crown, as head of the confederation; the role has been nicely compared to that of the British queen as head of the Commonwealth. One important type of inscription, which scholars have called a ‘federation formula’, clarifies the mkrb’s role as unifier: ‘he established every community of god or of patron, of treaty (hbl) or alliance.’ These unions were thus founded in the names of the high god Ilmaqah and the lesser patron deities. And out of the formula jumps a word, the term for the divinely sanctioned ‘treaty’: the Sabaic hbl will resurface in the Qur’an as habl –
and hold fast, all of you together, to the habl of Allah and do not be divided among yourselves.
In Arabic, habl can be a ‘rope’, but it is also a ‘binding covenant’. I am not suggesting that seventh-century AD Meccans had studied seventh-century BC Sabaean constitutional terminology, but there is no doubt that the term is the same one, and that the two communities shared ideas about political union in the name of a god or gods – or in the later case, of God. And therein lies the difference: the unity proposed by Islam was ultimate, both political and theological. One polity, one deity.
Philip Hitti, in his detailed History of the Arabs, first published in 1937, said that the Muslim community of Medina, ‘was the first attempt in the history of Arabia at a social organization with religion, rather than blood, as its basis’. He was well over a thousand years too late in his dating. Of course, much of what we know about South Arabia (and for that matter the little we know about Dumah, the northern religious centre of the Qedar federation) was not known when Hitti was first compiling his work. But subsequent historians have been equally and less excusably islamocentric. An academic disconnect between Islamic and pre-Islamic studies has meant that most scholars do not see the dots that make the bigger picture, let alone try to join them up. When we do take that longer, wider view, we find that Islam was not something that shot up suddenly in Mecca; it is a vast, slow growth whose roots lie deep in time and all over the peninsula – particularly in its south, where they were cultivated by a people who did not even call themselves Arabs.
Today, that Qur’anic verse about holding fast to God’s covenant is quoted regularly by seekers after those ever-elusive goals of Arab and Islamic unity. They do not realize how old that call is, or how, again, it comes from before Islam and beyond Arabs.
THE CLINCH OF CIVILIZATIONS
From the ancient Mediterranean perspective, the politics and theology of the South Arabian Fertile Crescent were as much a closed book as they were, until recently, to modern historians. What fascinated Greeks and Romans was the South Arabians’ production and export of aromatics, especially frankincense and myrrh. Pliny the Elder, for example, worked out that a camel carrying frankincense from its source in Arabia Felix to the shores of the Mediterranean would have to travel 2,437,500 (human) paces, and would thus add 688 denarii to the incense merchant’s expenses. Almost as long, and a thousand years earlier, was the tenth-century BC Queen of Sheba’s biblical trek bearing aromatics and other goods to Solomon. While the queen’s exact identity has puzzled generations of scholars, most of them have agreed that she came from South Arabian Saba. To date, nothing has been found in her homeland to confirm or deny her existence; but finds of Sabaean products in modern Jordan prove that her countrymen were making the journey at least as early as 800 BC.
In the later centuries BC, the Sabaeans’ neighbours, the Minaeans, were the most active and far-ranging merchants. One, for example, left an altar to the god Wadd (‘Love’; later anathematized in the Qur’an) on the Greek island of Delos, probably in the second century BC; another left himself, mummified, in the Egyptian town of Memphis. His mummy case records that he imported myrrh for use in Egyptian temples, and in return exported cloth to his home country. Later, during the Himyari ascendancy in the first century AD, the compiler of the Greek Periplus, a merchant mariners’ guide, wrote of the vast traffic of Muza, not far inside the entrance to the Red Sea. All this busy trade is eloquent evidence of how an Arabian ‘nation far off’, as the Book of Joel calls the Sabaeans, were tied multiply into distant economies. Then it was perfumes and gums, now it is petroleum and gas.
Another people connected by trade with wider economies were the Nabataeans, whose domain straddled the trade routes where they were funnelled out of the north-west of the peninsula. Unlike the Sabaeans and their South Arabian neighbours, the Nabataeans almost certainly spoke a form of Arabic; like the Sabaeans, however, they almost certainly did not consider themselves ’arab. Not only were they a settled people, but living as they did in the Levant, in the lap of the Mediterranean rather than out on some Arabian limb, their cultural contacts had made them true cosmopolites. Vulture-like, they picked over what they fancied in the dominant neighbouring cultures, Aramaean, Hellenic and Roman, and returned to their rocky redoubts to digest and regurgitate their pickings. The results were splendid: the most enduring one, the classical architecture of their capital, Petra, is of course all facade; but it is no sham, no Hollywood set. And the fact that it is not built but carved in solid rock gives it all a Titanic magnificence – soaring colonnaded cliffs with pedimented peaks that sprout gigantic urns.
To the north-east, but occupying a similar borderland between cultures, and between fertile zone and wilderness, was the mercantile city-state of Palmyra. The Palmyrenes were also Arabic-speaking non-’arab, and deeply cosmopolitan. Their own Graeco-Roman-inspired architecture was in the round; it was the people themselves who had classical facades. Thus, the prince Wahballat (‘the Gift of al-Lat’, the female supreme deity) appeared on coinage as ‘Caesar Wahballat Augustus’, while his mother Zenobia (a Latinization of the still current Arabic name ‘Zaynab’) gave herself even more eclectic foundations by not only adopting the name ‘Augusta’ but also claiming descent from Cleopatra. It was out of this multicultural mélange, and at the same period, that a Janus-like figure such as Philip the Arab – a native of Damascus – could rise through the ranks of provincial administration to become praetorian prefect and eventually, in AD 244, Roman emperor. For the influences went both ways: even a century and a half before, Juvenal had observed that:
Iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes
Et linguam et mores.
Long since has the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber,
Bearing modes of speech and ways of life.
It is all as far as possible from the Clash of Civilizations; rather, it is a Clinch of Civilizations.
Of course, the embrace of the powerful can end up smothering weaker partners, and Rome, in time, snuffed out both Nabataean and Palmyrene independence. (Empires raid as readily as tribes: that is how they come about.) The Nabataean realm was annexed by Rome in AD 106. Palmyra had been plundered very early on by that ravisher of the Orient, Mark Antony; the Roman state eventually took it over in AD 272. Much more recently, the culture-vultures of Palmyra have been posthumous prey to other dangerous raptors: the so-called ‘Islamic State’ waged a planned and publicized campaign of vandalism against the city’s ancient monuments, defacing and demolishing. They should have pondered the fate of an earlier (and much milder) vandal: the Umayyad Caliph Marwan II is said to have unearthed at Palmyra a statue of a queen bearing an inscription that cursed anyone who disturbed it. Soon after, the Umayyad dynasty fell, and the caliph was hunted down and ki
lled. Now, the ‘Islamic State’ has fallen too.
The Nabataeans and Palmyrenes may have been arabophones, but with their settled, sometimes sybaritic ways and imported tastes, they lacked that foremost marker of being ’arab – the stripped-down, nomadic lifestyle of the steppe. In time nabat, the Arabic name for the Nabataeans, would come to be seen as an antonym to ’arab. Opposites can, however, attract. Indeed, all these Arabian elements were connected, both with each other and with a wider world, and were becoming more so over time.
CARAVAN TOWNS
Like the Sabaeans and Nabataeans, Arab camel nomads were benefiting from links with world economies. If Arabians as a whole were the mercantile mediators between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean orbits of trade, then Arabs were becoming the mobile middlemen between those poles of Arabian settled life, the southern and northern fertile crescents. Far from living some hermetic, eremitic life in the desert, they too were connected with outside worlds. Not only were the rm, the Rum or Romans, beginning to appear in their graffiti; clashes between rm and frs, the Persians, were reported in the Safaitic samizdat, together with names of international personalities – grmnqs (Germanicus), qsr (Caesar), flfs (Philippus).
Interest was reciprocal. As the Arab gaze reached beyond the peninsula, outsiders cast acquisitive looks into its interior. The Romans sent an expedition in 26 BC under the prefect of Egypt, Aelius Gallus, that got as far as Marib before giving it all up as a bad job: reports that Arabia Felix was a veritable Eldorado turned to dust as the troops slogged deeper into the parched steppe near the Sabaean capital. The expeditionary force included Nabataeans, who themselves had made independent inroads into the peninsula and established a foothold at Hegra (now Mada’in Salih in Saudi Arabia), which became a sort of Little Petra. Earlier, South Arabians too had maintained trading colonies far to the north of their domain, such as the Minaean one at Dedan, a little to the south of Hegra. Such caravan towns were theatres for the growing dialogue between hadar and badw, settled and nomadic peoples.
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