The Hebrew Bible tell us that Solomon’s Iron Age kingdom grew rich enough that the Queen of Sheba traveled to Jerusalem to see it. It wasn’t a long journey, though in ancient times, every journey was long and dangerous. The Queen of Sheba probably sailed through the Red Sea, then traveled by caravan to the Judean hills. Although her kingdom’s name is given as “Sheba” in English, archeologists call it Saba. In its heyday, Saba included all of the lands on either side of the Jabal Haraz range, coastal and inland, and partway up the Indian Ocean coast toward Oman.
Saba’s government was centralized like Egypt’s, because you need a large, powerful government to organize and compel the labor required for large water engineering. It was ruled by a king whose importance could be compared to the kings of Egypt and Assyria. In 716 BC, Sargon II, conqueror of Babylon, received a gift of aromatic resins and gems from Ita’amara of Saba, who was mentioned in a list of gift-givers that included the king of Egypt and a queen of Arabs (in the Palmyra/Petra region?). (Hoyland, 39)
The patron god of Saba was Ilmaqah (or Almaqah). Cities and regions conquered by Saba were expected to adopt Ilmaqah as their god, though they could keep their own local gods. They must then make an annual pilgrimage to Ma’rib, the capital city, with sacrificial animals for the god. In this way, they became adoptive children of the god, therefore part of the nation. There’s an inscription on a rock some miles west of Ma’rib, in which a local god helpfully instructs his people how to go pay homage to Ilmaqah: stay ritually pure (no sex), and bring 1400 sheep along to sacrifice. (Mackintosh-Smith, 52)
In telling this story, Tim Mackintosh-Smith points out that one advantage of their self-concept was that other cities and tribes could be adopted at all. Presumably, once you had a Sabaean garrison in your city and had made the pilgrimage, you were on reasonably equal terms with natives. Most of Saba, in fact, was probably made up of small communities forced or invited into the confederation. This contrasts with tribal communities that emphasized literal genetic linkage, rather than adoption by a place or god.
Saba’s great power lay in creating and protecting their dams. They had upwards of a hundred dams in the region, some small, some quite large. The biggest one was the Ma’rib Dam at their capital city. This dam was ancient; its original structure may have been built around 1750 BC (Bronze Age), but recorded history has its foundation around 750 BC (Iron Age). It was mostly made of earth and gravel, piled and packed into a large structure, then faced with stone. It was further supported by stone structures that connected it to the mountains.. It collected rain from the slopes of three mountains, channeling the water into two main irrigated plains.
Saba used an ancient writing system that worked well for cutting inscriptions on rock faces. It was unrelated to the Phoenician-derived Mediterranean scripts, and apparently it is the ancestor of modern Ethiopian writing in the Ge’ez language.
All in all, it was more like Egypt or Sumer than like anything we consider “Arabian” today. It had the trappings of empire: monuments, walls, public works, and military campaigns.
- Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. Robert Hoyland. Routledge, 2001.
- Arabs: A 3000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires. Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Yale University Press, 2020.