The historical setting
South Arabia
From the middle of the 2nd millennium bc a sedentary agrarian civilization developed in Yemen in the oases along the edge of the desert. The people of this civilization had gradually mastered techniques enabling them to accumulate water from seasonal mountain rivers and distribute it into extensive irrigation systems. At the end of the 8th century appeared the oldest monumental inscriptions so far recorded, displayed on the walls of buildings. A total of about 8,000 such texts, whole or fragmentary, which correspond to 13 centuries of South Arabian history, have been discovered.
The texts from the 6th century bc mention the main South Arabian kingdoms, which were spaced out from the northwest to the southeast in the oases along the edge of the desert. There were successively Maʿīn, the kingdom of the Minaeans; Sabaʾ, the most important, with its capital, Mārib; Qatabān and Awsān (both located in the area of former Aden Territory [Yemen]); and finally Ḥaḍramawt (the eastern part of the former Aden Protectorate), extending inland from and along the coast of the Gulf of Aden toward Oman; its capital was Shabwa. The coastal area of Ḥaḍramawt was the nearly exclusive biotope of the wild tree from which was extracted the best kind of frankincense, which was the most precious aromatic in the Middle East used for the cult of the gods and of the dead. Along with other aromatics, frankincense was carried inland northwestward on the caravan route through Yemen to a place north of Yemen, where the route bifurcated, running through the oases of the Hejaz (on the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula) toward Egypt and Syria, and through Qaryat al-Faʾw on the caravan route to central Arabia toward the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. Minaean merchants, established in Dedān in the Hejaz and in Qaryat al-Faʾw, were in control of that trade. During the following centuries Sabaʾ struggled with Qatabān for hegemony. About the beginning of the Common era the rise of overseas trade between Egypt and India disrupted the political and economic balance in South Arabia and resulted in a period of general conflict. At the end of the 3rd century ad, Sabaʾ, which had meanwhile conquered Maʿīn, Qatabān, and finally Ḥaḍramawt, was in turn conquered, with the whole of South Arabia, by Ḥimyar, a little kingdom that had risen in the southwestern corner of Yemen. This political unification hastened the decay of the overly diversified polytheistic beliefs. After about ad 350 monotheistic invocations to Raḥmānān, “the Merciful” (an epithet of Aramaic origin used for God by both Jews and Christians), or to the “Lord of Heaven and Earth,” take the place of former polytheistic formulas and dedications. These early monotheistic texts probably emanated from Jewish immigrants from the oases of the Hejaz, although Christianity had already been introduced in South Arabia by Byzantine and Syrian missionaries.
About ad 523 Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar (nicknamed Dhū Nuwās by the Muslim tradition), a Ḥimyarite king of Jewish faith, persecuted and killed numerous monophysite Christians in Najrān on the northern frontier of Yemen. He also killed Byzantine merchants elsewhere in his kingdom. Outraged by the massacre and pressed by the Christian world to intervene, the Negus of Ethiopia gathered a fleet and landed with troops in Yemen. Having killed the Ḥimyarite king in battle, the Negus appointed an indigenous Christian as his viceroy and sailed back home. Somewhat later Abraha, a former Ethiopian general, took power. The Muslim tradition credits him with a fruitless military expedition with elephants (alluded to in the title, “the Elephant,” of chapter 105 of the Qurʾān), directed in 570 against Mecca and its polytheistic shrine. About the end of the 6th century the famous Mārib dam finally collapsed after several major dam bursts. This was a symptom rather than the cause of the long decline of the South Arabian culture, which had led to the emigration northward of several Yemeni tribes. About 572 South Arabia came under Persian occupation. This lasted until 628, when the local satrap in charge embraced Islām, thus opening his province to the new faith and to the Islāmic culture.