The southern coast of Arabia is not much like the rocky zone in the north or the vast wilderness in the center. And in ancient times, it was even more different. It was probably settled by people moving across the Red Sea from Africa, and again, in ancient times the sea level seems to have been lower, so the passage from Africa to Arabia was much shorter. Legends even recall a time when you could see across on a clear day. The earliest culture of South Arabia was shared with Abyssinia (ancient Somalia and Ethiopia), and the language may have been mutually comprehensible too.
The coast of South Arabia is now the nation of Yemen. Its key geographical feature is a mountain range of stunning height and beauty:
The Jabal Haraz range is one of the main reasons that Arabia Felix is “felix,” that is, fortunate. The mountains collect atmospheric water and bring it down as rain, making this one of the rainiest places in Arabia. That doesn’t mean it’s very rainy, but it does mean that there’s some water to work with. Since ancient times, settlements there have been organized around maximizing the water. The terraced fields shown above are one way water was managed.
But the outstanding feature of South Arabian settlement was that the ancient kingdoms built huge dams between the foothills of mountains. There were hundreds of dams, large and small, not so much to create reservoirs as to collect and steer the rainwater into irrigation channels. It’s not an area with natural rivers, partly because the mountains do not get snow caps. Instead, it’s full of wadis, potential rivers waiting for the monsoon season to flood them into malarial overabundance.
Arabia Felix was also fortunate in that on the Arabian and African sides of the Red Sea, small trees grew aromatic resins much prized in temples that wanted to burn incense before their gods. The tree we call Boswellia sacra was the source of frankincense; it has papery bark and grows in both Somalia and Yemen. A related, but thorny, shrub oozed myrrh. Both resins were cut from wounds in the trees, then dried. They had medicinal properties as well as a strong scent when burned. The ancient world could not get enough of them; their value stayed strong.
Let’s look closer at the complex culture that arose in South Arabia, best known from the Bible as the kingdom of Sheba.