Stirrups were imported innovations. But the camel+horse combination was exclusively Arab, and may have been decisive in the transformation of ’arab from plodding hauliers into dashing warriors. It may have been the crucial factor that brought them into closer contact with the neighbouring powers, north and south, first as mercenaries, then as power brokers, finally as power-breakers – and brought them ultimately, as conquerors and imperialists, on to the international stage. It may too have been a hamartia, a tragic flaw that sealed their destiny, their disunity: as a military innovation that spread rapidly and became common to all Arabs, it ensured that none of them ever gained the upper hand over the others for long. It perpetuated a seething stalemate, and sparked an explosion in raiding.
‘ALL THE ARABS’
Among Arabs a virtuous cycle was in motion, a gradual standardization of language that was beginning to create a cultural ‘nation’. But running counter to it were many smaller tribal cycles of raid and counter-raid, whose effect was chronically divisive. They were fuelled by an increasing amount of horsepower, and by a gradual drop in overland traffic that left camels and cameleers out of work and pocket. In particular, the fall of Petra and Palmyra in the second and third centuries AD, and instability in the southern Fertile Crescent, had disturbed peninsular trade. But at least since the time of the first named Arab, Gindibu, whose thousand camels saw service against the Assyrians, Arabs had freelanced for their powerful neighbours in logistics and then in border control as well as in commercial haulage. Now, as trade gave way to raid, came renewed opportunities for a change of career, from mercantile to mercenary.
The Roman takeover of Palmyra in 272 had brought the two great imperial spheres, Rome and Persia, into closer contact than ever before. For Arabs this proximity brought risks, but also advantages. As Eugene Rogan has said, ‘The Arabs were always most empowered when there was more than one dominant [neighbouring] power to the Age’. Rogan was thinking of more recent powers – Britain and France, NATO and the Warsaw Pact – but his insight applies equally to the age of Rome and Persia (and for that matter to the age of Assyria and Babylon). One piece of evidence for such empowerment in the fourth century is a tomb inscription discovered in 1901 near the fortress of al-Namarah, 120 kilometres south-east of Damascus. Written in ‘a developed form of the Nabataean alphabet, well on its way to becoming Arabic’, it is no easy read. But despite the possible variants and cruces, it is a foundational text of Arab history as important as that first Assyrian mention of Arabs. The Namarah epitaph is not only one of the earliest in what was becoming the standard, unified Arabic; it is also the first known mention of Arabs as such, by themselves, in their own language. ‘This’, it begins, ‘is the monument of Imru’ al-Qays son of Amr, king of all the Arabs . . .’ It goes on to record that he subjugated four major Arabian tribes of the day, and raided Najran, 1,700 kilometres south of al-Namarah, ‘in the irrigated land’ of the Himyari ruler. It concludes, ‘no king had matched his achievements up to the time when he died . . . in the year 223, the seventh day of Kislul’. The year, given according to a local calendar, coincides with AD 328.
There is general agreement over that much of the text. But in addition to the linguistic puzzles in the rest of it, there is a historical enigma. Later Arab historians list Imru’ al-Qays as the second ruler of al-Hirah, in Persian-dominated Iraq, and a Persian inscription confirms that his father was a vassal of the Sasanian empire. But his tomb at al-Namarah is 750 kilometres from al-Hirah, and well within the Roman sphere. There may be other explanations, but the likeliest reason is defection – that he and at least part of his tribe, Lakhm, had ‘gone over’ to Rome; one Arab historian claims that he had gone over in the religious sense, and become a Christian. Furthermore, a possible reading of a contested phrase in the inscription has it that he appointed as viceroys the nobles of the sha’bs, the peoples, ‘and they became leaders for the Romans’.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that superpower politics were part of the picture, and more than possible that Imru’ al-Qays took advantage of them to give himself a trans-Arabian presence, all the way from the northern Fertile Crescent to the ‘irrigated land’ of its southern counterpart. It is also clear that in the fourth-century round of the Great Game – the seemingly perennial confrontation of empires north of the Arabian subcontinent – Arab pawns were starting to cross the board and become kings, major players in their own right. (Queens seem to have gone out of fashion with Palmyra’s flamboyant but vanquished Zenobia, who must have been a hard act to follow.)
The Game was as old as that oldest mention of Arabs, a thousand years before the fall of Petra and Palmyra, and it is far from over now. But the particular part played in it by Imru’ al-Qays, ‘king of all the Arabs’, begs a question: was the royal title assumed by himself, or bestowed by one or other of his imperial neighbours? There are later examples where the superpowers handed out royal titles. Procopius, for example, mentions the Romans dubbing their early sixth-century Ghassanid client-ruler ‘king of the Arabs’, as a riposte to Persian support for Imru’ al-Qays’s dynasty, the Lakhmids (long back in the Persian bosom). On the other side, later Arab sources confirm that the Persians were the ones who bestowed the title ‘king of the Arabs’ on Lakhmid leaders in this period. It seems more than possible that Imru’ al-Qays was an early beneficiary in this titular tit-for-tat, in other words, that he saw himself as ‘king of all the Arabs’ because someone else, either Rome or Persia, told him he was that.
If the supposition is right, then it begs a further question: did a first sense of all-embracing Arab unity come not from within Arabs themselves, but from outside – from their non-Arab neighbours? There could be nothing like being told that you’re a king, officially, by one or other (perhaps even both) of the two great powers of your age, to make you feel and act like a king; to make you look on your potential subjects, however divided they might be in reality, as a unity – ‘all the Arabs’. Perhaps, after more than a millennium of being told by their neighbours that they were Arabs, a discrete group with an identity, the message had finally got through. Admittedly, I am reading between the lines of Imru’ al-Qays’s epitaph. But it is undeniable that from the time of his rule in the fourth century, as we shall see, the power of a unified Arab culture would surge – importantly, under the patronage of the imperial client-kings who succeeded him on both the Roman and Persian sides.
Certainly, empires and their shennanigans have nurtured national identity and spurred the pursuit of political unity in more recent times. A century ago, the British promoted their own self-proclaimed ‘king of the Arabs’, Sharif Husayn of Mecca. Subsequent imperial double dealings and dashings of hope would fuel resentment and nourish nationalism. So too, almost certainly, in the days of Rome/Byzantium and Persia. The imperial masters held out crowns to their Arab protégés; but they were just as ready at times to snatch back the crowns and to undermine the unity they symbolized by setting Arabs against each other. In the end it could all only strengthen an Arab sense of identity. The seed of selfhood, even if planted by the imperial Others, would grow in contradistinction to those Others: it would grow into a search for self-determination.
In King Imru’ al-Qays’s time it was, however, still a seed. No doubt the vast majority of ‘all the Arabs’ would have been bemused, at best, by the idea of belonging to a single body of people with a single king. Both royal pretensions and imperial policies, whether of the unite-and-rule or divide-and-rule sort, were trumped by the reality on the ground – by the fact that Arabs remained divided and unrulable. And yet the king’s successors would sit on their borrowed thrones, and the superpowers would loom over them and over Arabia, crowning and dethroning, for three more centuries to come. As a commentator of the early Islamic age would put it, Arabs of these times were ‘stuck on top of a rock between two lions, Persia and Rome’ – which sounds, if anything, even more uncomfortable than being caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER THREE
SCATTERED FAR
AND WIDE
THE CHANGING GRAMMAR
OF HISTORY
Up on their rock between the two imperial lions of Persia and Rome, Arabs often had a third lion to contend with: the Himyari empire of the south.
If the boast of Imru’ al-Qays, ‘king of all the Arabs’, is true, his people had already twisted the southern lion’s tail by invading the Himyari King Shammar’s irrigated lands around Najran. But such lion-baiting was exceptional and short-lived, and probably instigated by one or other of the northern powers: there is a mention by the early Islamic historian al-Tabari of the Sasanian shah of Persia ordering a mighty expedition against the tribes of the peninsula at about this time; this might well be the campaign mentioned in Imru’ al-Qays’s epitaph. If so, then to raid King Shammar’s fertile southern lands would have been a tempting side-track to the main campaign against these tribes – and especially useful in Persian eyes as Shammar himself had been in expansionist mood in the early fourth century, campaigning far north and east into Arabia. Well into Islamic times, writers of fabulous accounts of the ancient south would claim that the Himyari king’s campaigns had taken him as far as Samarqand in Central Asia (to which, in legend, he gave his name – Shammar-kand, ‘Shammar destroyed it’) and even that he had led Himyaris to Tibet. For the Persians, who were expanding their own influence in the east of the peninsula, that Shammar had got as far as central Arabia was threatening enough.
It seems likely, then, that before his probable defection to the Romans, Imru’ al-Qays acted as cat’s paw for the Persian lion, subduing truculent tribes. But the expedition would have more fateful consequences for the South Arabians than a one-off raid on Najran. Along the way, Imru’ al-Qays says he ‘chastised’ a major tribal conglomeration called Madhhij. At about this time, and probably because of Persian pressure, Madhhij and their tribal overlords, Kindah, upped sticks from central Arabia and moved south en masse. As we have seen, some of Kindah led a semi-urbanized existence in their caravan-capital, Qaryat; but at heart they and the tribes associated with them remained badw, and their policy when the odds were against them was not to strike back, but to strike camp and move out of harm’s way.
The arrival of tens of thousands of nomads and semi-nomads in the settled south – Madhhij in the foothills to the east of the lush Himyari highlands, Kindah in the heart of the fertile Himyari-ruled complex of valleys called Hadramawt – would bring irreversible change. Arabs and their language had already made inroads in the old Sabaic-speaking south; now, the influx of tribal nomads increased, and as the Himyari lion grew older and weaker, they would gnaw away at the foundations of his settled civilization. The skyscraper palaces of Zafar would soon be tottering.
THE RAT WITH IRON TEETH
In the south, with its patchwork of kingdoms, claims to unity were expressed by the rhetoric of royal titles. Saba had remained the senior kingdom from the earliest days. In its shadow, lesser kingdoms had risen and decayed around the ‘shores’ of the inland desert – the short-lived states of Ma’in, Qataban and Awsan. Early in the first millennium AD, the Himyari people living in the mountains between the desert and the Red Sea had become prominent; the next few centuries saw struggles for control, and at times coalitions, between Himyaris and Sabaeans. Further to the east beyond a gulf of the sands, the great oasis of branching canyons, Hadramawt, had long maintained its independence and its irrigation systems, but fell to the Himyari-dominated Sabaean state towards the end of the third century. By the time of Hadramawt’s conqueror, the expansionist King Shammar who reigned from the late third to the early fourth century, South Arabia was as unified as it ever would be – certainly more unified than it is as I write. Shammar’s title proclaimed this: he was, ‘King of Saba, Dhu Raydan [the Himyari palace, symbolizing the Himyari realm], Hadramawt and Yamanat’. That last term, Yamanat, ‘the Southlands’, probably means the former kingdoms of Awsan and Qataban. To this list, later Himyari kings would add, ‘and of their Arabs of the Highlands and Lowlands’, in a nominal attempt to contain a growing problem.
It was that last and most recent element, the Arab one, which would unravel the rest of the royal title and end the short-lived unity of the realm. A’rab mercenaries in the king’s service were joined by ever more hangers-on – tribesmen who had been pushed south and west by Persian pressure. Under a strong king like Shammar, the mercenaries could be a useful force. Later, weaker rulers used the a’rab ‘to pursue vendettas . . . The only result for the land was destruction’ and, two centuries after Shammar, successive occupations by Ethiopia and Persia. The pattern of the mercenary undermining his master would repeat itself through Arab history. So too would that of the nomad destroying his settled neighbour’s way of life. It is worth noting again that Ibn Khaldun observed, with the hindsight of a thousand years from the time of King Shammar, ‘how civilization always collapsed in places where the [Arab] Bedouins took over’. He goes on to cite the example of South Arabia and then the later ones of Iraq, Syria and his own North Africa. (The pattern repeats itself now outside my window, where gun-slinging tribesmen from the northern highlands have been unleashed on the capital of Saba’s successor by an ex-ruler pursuing a vendetta. So too, mutatis mutandis, in Iraq, Syria and Libya, two-thirds of a millennium on from Ibn Khaldun.)
The long and bitty narrative of the decline and fall of settled civilization in South Arabia would be simplified by later Arab memory, boiled down into the story of the literal fall of the Marib Dam, a tale told and retold in verse, prose and sacred text. The tenth-century version by al-Mas’udi begins by describing Saba in its heyday:
The Sabaeans enjoyed the finest and most luxurious standards of living . . . in the most fertile land imaginable . . . They wielded military might, and their word was gathered …
That is, they were a united people who spoke with one voice. Their wealth, and the fertility of their land, were due to the mighty wadi-spanning dam of Marib. One of the greatest works of hydro-engineering in the ancient world, it was 680 metres long, 18 metres high and, as we have seen, channeled the run-off from a catchment area of 10,000 square kilometres to irrigate an area of as many hectares – the size of Rhode Island, or five times all the Royal Parks of London put together. According to the folk version, the trouble began when the king’s kahinah, or seeress, began to have nightmare visions of destruction, and then daytime glimpses of the natural order overturned: three gerbils standing on their hind legs, covering their eyes with their front paws; a tortoise stuck on its back, urinating; trees swaying when there was no breeze. Solving the algebra of these portents, she told the king that he would find a rat undermining the dam. ‘And there was the rat, using its paws to roll a stone [out of the dam] which fifty men could not have rolled . . .’
Al-Mas’udi, perhaps fearing for his credibility, prefaces the tale with a more sober account in which general neglect results in the dam’s destruction. In the much sparer Qur’anic account, the dam and its blessings are portent enough. They are a favour from Allah, and to ignore Him invites destruction:
There was for Saba a sign in their dwelling-place: two gardens, one on the right hand and one on the left . . . a fair land and a forgiving Lord.
But they turned away [from divine favour,] so We sent against them the flood of the Dam; and We gave them, instead of their two gardens, gardens of bitter fruit, and tamarisks, and a few lote-trees.
. . .
. . . And so We made them as tales once told, and We scattered them far and wide . . .
That last phrase also means, ‘and We tore them apart in every manner of tearing’. As both ancient Sabaeans and modern-day Arab refugees know to their cost, it is a warning of what happens when the foundations of a settled and united society are allowed to crumble.
The Marib Dam probably suffered its final, irreparable breach in the Prophet Muhammad’s own lifetime, early in the seventh century. But inscriptions at its site suggest that the problems had been g
oing on for almost three hundred years before that: instead of the regular maintenance needed to clear build-ups of silt, long periods of neglect were interspersed with frantic bouts of emergency repair. It all bears witness to the gradual breakdown of central authority, which had formerly organized regular maintenance of the structure. The breakdown was accelerated by the Ethiopian and Persian occupations of the sixth century, but it was due, ultimately, to the infiltration and growing power of a’rab tribes over the two preceding centuries. It was ‘these human rats,’ says a modern-day Yemeni historian of ancient South Arabia, still palpably angry about the disaster, ‘the badw and a’rab mercenaries . . . that played the major part in finishing off its last [independent] state’. Their growing numbers and military strength had turned them from mercenaries into power-brokers, then into power-breakers and power-grabbers; once in charge, their tribal methods of rule, relying chiefly on arbitration, were – in the flipside sense – arbitrary. The rodent effect on centuries-old civic structures ate into the foundations of settled society.
Like all the best parables, the story of the Marib Dam’s decline and fall works at different levels. For the farmer and folk historian, it is a warning about what happens when the portents of nature are ignored; for the prophet and his people, it is an example of what goes wrong when divinely given order is not maintained; and for the social historian, it is a parable of the increasing permeability of another legendary ‘dam’ – the ever-porous barrier between nomad and sedentary – and of the resulting human floods.
Arabs Page 11