Until about the 4th century AD, Arabians were polytheists with beliefs and practices similar to the rest of the world. Their customs were mostly common to other polytheists, but they had a few interesting distinctives. One of the common polytheistic beliefs is that each place or tribe can have its own god, and there is no quarrel over whose god is more real. Gods tend to be local; when you go to a new place, of course there is a new god to honor. So Arabia’s polytheism had many divine personae.
In South Arabia, where civilization was organized around public works and buildings, each place had a chief god. Saba’s chief god was Almaqah, with his primary temple in Marib. He may have been a sun god, but the Arabian gods weren’t organized into sky pantheons as carefully as the Greek ones. Almaqah might have just been “the god.” God of the sun, god of war, god of Sabah. Every year, during the summer rains, Sabaeans had a procession to the temple to ask Almaqah for the blessing of water. Cities that had fallen into Saba’s ruling sphere were expected to send delegations to join them; they could keep their old gods, but they were expected to call Almaqah the chief of the gods.
In Arabia Deserta, there were few temples or fixed places for gods. Tribes paid honor to some god, perhaps borrowed from an important place like Saba. One way to honor the gods was to keep a certain sacred place and time. At a designated season, for some weeks, there would be a pilgrim festival. Animals were off limits for hunting, no fighting or raiding was permitted, and pilgrims were supposed to refrain from sex. ‘Ukaz, a place near modern Riyadh, was one such gathering point. Tribes that usually fought each other could meet for trade, litigation, and contests.
Nomads also honored the gods with temporary idols that didn’t need any particular place. Greek geographers bringing back intelligence for Alexander the Great reported that Arabian nomads used stones to stand for their gods. They didn’t carve or paint the stones, nor did they carry the same stones around. They just chose a stone when setting up camp, and designated it to stand for the god. Hisham al-Kalbi’s 8th century Book of Idols describes this process: “Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station in order to rest or spend the night, he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest among them and adopt it as his god, and use the remaining three as supports for his cooking-pot.”
Stones were a central feature of Arabian custom. In the northern area where they were more influenced by Greek and Phoenician cultures, the stones were more likely to be carved to look like a person.
But in the interior, long flat stones served as altars, while standing stones served as the gods. The particular way that standing stones were honored as gods was to walk around them in circles. Nomads who had a reason to beseech the god’s favor could sacrifice an animal on a lying stone, then walk in circles a sacred number of times around a nearby standing stone.
Stones may have become objects of worship because of the number of meteorites scattered through Arabia’s interior. Meteorite falls are impresive if you witness them: in 2016, a meteorite crashed into the earth, catching a grove of trees on fire. Chunks of meteorite iron could easily have been the first divine stones.
We know that a stone, possibly a meteorite, is built into the Ka’aba at Mecca. There is some evidence that a few cities other than Mecca had cube-shaped shrines. It’s possible that they were shrines set up for meteorites, or for other stand-out stones. Mohammad ordered such a Ka’aba to be destroyed in Yemen; it had an idol made of white quartz.
- Arabia and the Arabs: from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. Robert Hoyland. New York: Routledge, 2001.