Saba and the Sabeans | Middle East And North Africa

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SABA AND SABEANS

Bronze Man from ancient Yemen

The Sabaeans or Sabeans were an ancient group of South Arabians.They spoke Sabaic, one of the Old South Arabian languages and founded the kingdom of Saba in modern-day Yemen, which is considered to be the biblical land of Sheba and "the oldest and most important of the South Arabian kingdoms". The exact date of the foundation of Sabaʾ is a point of disagreement among scholars. Kenneth Kitchen dates the kingdom to between 1200 B.C. and A.D. 275 CE, with its capital at Maʾrib, in what is now Yemen.

Present-day Yemen was once part of the ancient kingdom of Saba, the most well-known and the strongest of the kingdoms that appeared along the Frankincense Trail trade routes and endured to the A.D. 4th century. The Koran describes Saba as a land with "two gardens on the right hand and the left...A fair land and indulgent Lord!" Because the people rejected Allah they were cursed with "gardens bearing bitter fruit, the tamarisk and here and there a lote-tree."

Saba grew rich from trade between Africa and India. It was at its height between the 6th century B.C. and the A.D. 2nd century. Among Saba’s rivals were Najran (in what is now Saudi Arabia) and Main, Awsan, Qataban and Hadramawt (all in modern-day Yemen). At its height Saba was able to dominate these cities but as it weakened they were able break away and then challenge Sheba. Sheba weakened further when the frankincense trade declined.

Sheba

The Bible said the Queen of Sheba ruled over one of five ancient kingdoms that flourished in a region called Arabia Felix, which may have included Ethiopia and Yemen. The Queens of Sheba lived in the time of Solomon in the 10th century B.C. Trade in frankincense and myrrh were the mainstays of the Arabia Feleix economy. According to the Biblical scripture 1 Kings 10:1-13, the Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem when Solomon was king, arriving “with a very great train, with camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones...there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.” Solomon returned the gesture by giving her precious objects and the satisfaction of "very desire she expressed" before she returned to her "own land."

Many link the name “Sheba” to the kingdom of Saba in what is now Yemen (See Below). The spices the queen brought to Solomon, perhaps frankincense and myrrh,could have been grown there. Caravans traveled on trade routes in the first millennium B.C. between Yemen and Palestine.

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: The identification of Saba as ancient Sheba is controversial, and not just because there’s a competing claim that Sheba was in Ethiopia. As archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman have written, the Sabaean kingdom began to flourish only in the eighth century B.C. — some two hundred years after the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon were said to have known one another. If Saba is the biblical Sheba then it’s unlikely that there ever was a historical Queen of Sheba. Regardless, the story offers evidence of trade relations between Judah and the Arabian peninsula, where the Sabaean Kingdom was located. There are other references to the Sabaeans in prophetic literature that offer further evidence of the relationship. For example, Isaiah tells us that people from the region were tall (Isaiah 45:14) [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, March 23, 2019]

Marib, the Capital of Saba

from pre-Islamic Yemen

Marib was the capital of Saba and the largest of the caravan cities on the Frankincense Trail. Located at an important passage from the Qana frankincense production areas through the Hadramawt Valley, it grew from rich trade and supported a large population with agriculture nourished by water from a massive dam that was built in the 8th century B.C. and stood for more a thousand years.

Over time the dam was enlarged. When Marin was at its peak, the dam was 680 meters long and 16 meters high and embraced sluice gates made from 500-pound stone blocks. It irrigated an area of 96 square miles and supported 50,000 people and the caravans and merchants that passed through. According to one inscription from the Himyarites “20,000 men, 14,600 camels and 12,000 pairs of donkeys were needed just to repair it.

Archeologist believe that as Sheba declined the dam at Marib was neglected. By the A.D. 6th century it had silted up and large rocks blocked the irrigation canals. When the dam broke open around A.D. 570. Saba collapsed. According to the Koran, the dam collapse was a punishment from Allah to the people of Saba for turning their back on him. Some local people believe it happened because one of the cats tied to the dam to keep rats from making holes in the dam escaped.

Marib today is regarded as the most impressive archeological site in Yemen. The ruins are scattered over a wide area and you need a vehicle to do the site justice. In Old Marib, you can see the remains of blocky, multi-story buildings. Some have small windows and slabs with Sabean inscriptions. One of the most famous inscriptions found at site is a request to the moon god for protection of the requester’s sons and favors of their king. Statues of bronze and alabaster found here have made their way to some of Yemen’s museums.

There is a ruined oval-shaped temple dedicated to the Sabaean moon god Ilumquh. A fine example of South Arabian architecture, it contains eight thick rectangular limestone pillars that rise like standing stones from the stone-littered desert. Little remains of the Great Dam, other than the sluice, and the canal network that once made the desert bloom.

Strabo on the Sabeans in Yemen

Strabo (64 B.C. – c. A.D. 24) was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who came from Asia Minor at around the time the Roman Republic was becoming the Roman Empire. Strabo is best known for his work Geographica ("Geography"), which describes the history and characteristics of people and places in different regions known during his lifetime, [Source: Wikipedia]

Strabo wrote in A.D. 22: “XVI.iv.19. The country of the Sabaei, a very populous nation, is contiguous [most of modern Yemen], and is the most fertile of all, producing myrrh, frankincense, and cinnamon. On the coast is found balsamum and another kind of herb of a very fragrant smell, but which is soon dissipated. There are also sweet-smelling palms and the calamus. There are snakes also of a dark red color, a span in length, which spring up as high as a man's waist, and whose bite is incurable. On account of the abundance which the soil produces, the people are lazy and indolent in their mode of life. The lower class of people live on roots, and sleep on the trees. The people who live near each other receive, in continued succession, the loads of perfumes and deliver them to others, who convey them as far as Syria and Mesopotamia. When the carriers become drowsy by the odor of the aromatics, the drowsiness is removed by the fumes of asphalt and of oat's beard. [Source: Strabo: Geography, Book XVI, Chap. iv, 1-4, 18-19, 21-26, c. A.D. 22, Strabo, The Geography of Strabo: Literally Translated, with Notes, trans. by H. C. Hamilton & W. Falconer (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854-1857), pp. 185-215]

“Mariaba, the capital of the Sabaeans [the same as Saba], is situated upon a mountain, well wooded. A king resides there, who determines absolutely all disputes and other matters; but he is forbidden to leave his palace, or if he does so, the rabble immediately assail him with stones, according to the direction of an oracle. He himself, and those about his person, pass their lives in effeminate voluptuousness. The people cultivate the ground, or follow the trade of dealing in aromatics, both the indigenous sort and those brought from Ethiopia; in order to procure them, they sail through the straits in vessels covered with skins. There is such an abundance of these aromatics, that cinnamon, cassia, and other spices are used by them instead of sticks and firewood.

“By the trade in these aromatics both the Sabaeans and the Gerrhaei have become the richest of all the tribes, and possess a great quantity of wrought articles in gold and silver, as couches, tripods, basins, drinking-vessels, to which we must add the costly magnificence of their houses; for the doors, walls, and roofs are variegated with inlaid ivory, gold, silver, and precious stones.”

Sabean God Athtar Harman

Pre-Islam Arab god from Yemen
The Sabaeans were an ancient people that lived in Yemen and are associated with the Biblical Queen of Sheba. A tablet from Yemen written in Sabean made public in 2019 is remarkable because of its inscription: it is the first and only reference to a previously unknown ancient deity named Athtar Harman. Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: The tablet is somewhere between 2000-3000 years old and is written in the ancient Yemeni alphabet. Though it sold at auction for only $1200, this tablet is remarkable because of its inscription: it makes the first and only reference to a previously unknown ancient deity named Athtar Harmān. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, March 23, 2019]

The inscription on the tablet is written in Sabaean, an old South Arabian language spoken by the Sabaeans. According to a translation by Christian Robin, a researcher emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, it reads: “Ilīmataʿ and Khabīʾat, the two servants of Khawliyān offered to Athtar armān, the owner of Bana, with a tablet of bronze, their sons and those he will add, for their salvation.”

Robin told Live Science that the plaque comes from a temple (the “Bana” referred to in the text) dedicated to the god Athtar Harmān. All of which is fascinating for scholars who had no idea that this god or his temple existed before this discovery. Robin added that there are reasons to think that the temple was originally located close to the ancient city of Sana (close to the modern capital of Yemen, which has a similar name). An inscription noted by Robin and discovered in 1909 at Shibām al-Ghirās mentions the presence of another nearby temple, which might be the one dedicated to Athtar Harmān.

What can we say about Athtar Harmān? Well, Athtar is the standard Southern Arabian rendering of the god Istar (also known as Attar or Astar), a Mesopotamian deity who is sometimes male and sometimes female depending on which tradition and culture is discussing him/her. Harman is almost certainly related to the Arabic term haram which means essentially “consecrated” (al-haram is the name of the Saudi mosque in Mecca). So this deity, who crops up elsewhere in the ancient world, is essentially identified as the god of this holy place. Did the Queen of Sheba worship this god? Even if she’s a real person, it would take many more archaeological discoveries to be sure.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024