"Thou hast chosen embers dun | that will spare of ‘Ád not one | that will leave nor father nor son | ere him to death they shall have done."
Then God drove the cloud until it stood over the land of ‘Ád, and there issued from it a roaring wind that consumed the whole people except a few who had taken the prophet's warning to heart and had renounced idolatry.
From these, in course of time, a new people arose, who are called 'the second ‘Ád.' They had their settlements in Yemen, in the region of Saba. The building of the great Dyke of Ma’rib is commonly attributed to their king, Luqmán b. ‘Ád, about whom many fables are told. He was surnamed 'The Man of the Vultures' ( Dhu ’l-Nusúr), because it had been granted to him that he should live as long as seven vultures, one after the other.
In North Arabia, between the Ḥijáz and Syria, dwelt the kindred race of Thamúd, described in the Koran (vii, 72) as inhabiting houses which they cut for themselves Legend of Thamúd. in the rocks. Evidently Muḥammad did not know the true nature of the hewn chambers which are still to be seen at Ḥijr (Madá’in Ṣáliḥ), a week's journey northward from Medína, and which are proved by the Nabaṭæan inscriptions engraved on them to have been sepulchral monuments.22 Thamúd sinned in the same way as ‘Ád, and suffered a like fate. They scouted the prophet Ṣáliḥ, refusing to believe in him unless he should work a miracle. Ṣáliḥ then caused a she-camel big with young to come forth from a rock, and bade them do her no hurt, but one of the miscreants, Qudár the Red (al-Aḥmar), hamstrung and killed her. "Whereupon a great earthquake overtook them with a noise of thunder, and in the morning they lay dead in their houses, flat upon their breasts."23 The author of this catastrophe became a byword: Arabs say, "More unlucky than the hamstringer of the she-camel," or "than Aḥmar of Thamúd." It should be pointed out that, unlike the ‘Ádites, of whom we find no trace in historical times, the Thamúdites are mentioned as still existing by Diodorus Siculus and Ptolemy; and they survived down to the fifth century a.d. in the corps of equites Thamudeniattached to the army of the Byzantine emperors.
Besides ‘Ád and Thamúd, the list of primitive races includes the ‘Amálíq (Amalekites)—a purely fictitious term under which the Moslem antiquaries lumped ‘Amálíq.together several peoples of an age long past, e.g., the Canaanites and the Philistines. We hear of Amalekite settlements in the Tiháma (Netherland) of Mecca and in other parts of the peninsula. Finally, mention should be made of Ṭasm and Jadís, sister tribes of which nothing is recorded except the fact of their destruction and the events that brought it about. The legendary Ṭasm and Jadís. narrative in which these are embodied has some archæological interest as showing the existence in early Arabian society of a barbarous feudal custom, 'le droit du seigneur,' but it is time to pass on to the main subject of this chapter.
The Pre-islamic history of the Yoqṭánids, or Southern Arabs, on which we now enter, is virtually the history of History of the Yoqṭánids. two peoples, the Sabæans and the Ḥimyarites, who formed the successive heads of a South Arabian empire extending from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.
Saba24 (Sheba of the Old Testament) is often incorrectly used to denote the whole of Arabia Felix, whereas it was only one, though doubtless the first in power and The Sabæans. importance, of several kingdoms, the names and capitals of which are set down in the works of Greek and Roman geographers. However exaggerated may be the glowing accounts that we find there of Sabæan wealth and magnificence, it is certain that Saba was a flourishing commercial state many centuries before the birth of Christ.25 "Sea-traffic between the ports of East Arabia and India was very early established, and Indian products, especially spices and rare animals (apes and peacocks) were conveyed to the coast of ‘Umán. Thence, apparently even in the tenth century b.c., they went overland to the Arabian Gulf, where they were shipped to Egypt for the use of the Pharaohs and grandees.... The difficulty of navigating the Red Sea caused the land route to be preferred for the traffic between Yemen and Syria. From Shabwat (Sabota) in Ḥaḍramawt the caravan road went to Ma’rib (Mariaba), the Sabæan capital, then northward to Macoraba (the later Mecca), and by way of Petra to Gaza on the Mediterranean."26 The prosperity of the Sabæans lasted until the Indian trade, instead of going overland, began to go by sea along the coast of Ḥaḍramawt and through the straits of Báb al-Mandab. In consequence of this change, which seems to have taken place in the first century a.d., their power gradually declined, a great part of the population was forced to seek new homes in the north, their cities became desolate, and their massive aqueducts crumbled to pieces. We shall see presently that Arabian legend has crystallised the results of a long period of decay into a single fact—the bursting of the Dyke of Ma’rib.
The disappearance of the Sabæans left the way open for a younger branch of the same stock, namely, the Ḥimyarites, or, as they are called by classical authors, The Ḥimyarites. Homeritæ, whose country lay between Saba and the sea. Under their kings, known as Tubba‘s, they soon became the dominant power in South Arabia and exercised sway, at least ostensibly, over the northern tribes down to the end of the fifth century a.d., when the latter revolted and, led by Kulayb b. Rabí‘a, shook off the suzerainty of Yemen in a great battle at Khazázá.27 The Ḥimyarites never flourished like the Sabæans. Their maritime situation exposed them more to attack, while the depopulation of the country had seriously weakened their military strength. The Abyssinians—originally colonists from Yemen—made repeated attempts to gain a foothold, and frequently managed to instal governors who were in turn expelled by native princes. Of these Abyssinian viceroys the most famous is Abraha, whose unfortunate expedition against Mecca will be related in due course. Ultimately the Ḥimyarite Empire was reduced to a Persian dependency. It had ceased to exist as a political power about a hundred years before the rise of Islam.
The chief Arabian sources of information concerning Saba and Ḥimyar are (1) the so-called 'Ḥimyarite' inscriptions, Sources of information. and (2) the traditions, almost entirely of a legendary kind, which are preserved in Muḥammadan literature.
Although the South Arabic language may have maintained itself sporadically in certain remote districts down to the Prophet's time or even later, it had long ago been superseded as a medium of daily intercourse by The South Arabic or Sabæan inscriptions. the language of the North, the Arabic par excellence, which henceforth reigns without a rival throughout the peninsula. The dead language, however, did not wholly perish. Already in the sixth century a.d. the Bedouin rider made his camel kneel down while he stopped to gaze wonderingly at inscriptions in a strange character engraved on walls of rock or fragments of hewn stone, and compared the mysterious, half-obliterated markings to the almost unrecognisable traces of the camping-ground which for him was fraught with tender memories. These inscriptions are often mentioned by Muḥammadan authors, who included them in the term Musnad. That some Moslems—probably very few—could not only read the South Arabic alphabet, but were also acquainted with the elementary rules of orthography, appears from a passage in the eighth book of Hamdání's Iklíl; but though they might decipher proper names and make out the sense of words here and there, they had no real knowledge of the language. How the inscriptions were discovered anew by the enterprise of European travellers, gradually deciphered and interpreted until they became capable of serving as a basis for historical research, and what results the study of them has produced, this I shall now set forth as briefly as possible. Before doing so it is necessary to explain why instead of 'Ḥimyarite inscriptions' and 'Ḥimyarite language' I have adopted the less familiar designations 'South Arabic' or 'Sabæan.' 'Ḥimyarite' is equally misleading, whether applied to the language of the inscriptions or to the inscriptions themselves. As regards the language, it was spoken in one form or another not by the Objections to the term 'Ḥimyarite.' Ḥimyarites alone, but also by the Sabæans, the Minæans, and all the different peoples of Yemen. Muḥammadans gave the name of 'Ḥimyarite' to the ancient language of Yemen for the simple reason that the Ḥimyarites were the most powerful race in that country during the last centuries preceding Islam. Had all the inscriptions belonged to the period of Ḥimyarite supremacy, they might with some justice have been named after the ruling people; but the fact is that many date from a far earlier age, some going back to the eighth century b.c., perhaps nearly a thousand years before the Ḥimyarite Empire was established. The term 'Sabæan' is less open to objection, for it may fairly be regarded as a national rather than a political denomination. On the whole, however, I prefer 'South Arabic' to either.