Exodus of the Marib Dam

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Ruth

For most of Arabia’s history (and prehistory), the Eastern region was oriented toward Persia, the Southern region was oriented toward Africa and Egypt, and the central desert was culturally different from both. But during the years before Muhammad’s birth, a great natural disaster sent many people of the South into other regions as refugees, settlers and traders. This was a major step in the creation of an “Arabian” identity.

Keeping up a civilization based on large-scale water technology requires a lot of central planning and power. We know that ancient Saba (Sheba) used its military and economic muscle to harness the thousands of workers required to build and maintain irrigation canals and dams. But all kingdoms weaken eventually, and Saba’s rule came to an end. None of its successor kingdoms, Ma’in, Qataban and Himyar, were as powerful, and gradually, the water engineering grew weaker too. The Jewish kingdom of Himyar (ca. 450) and the later Ethiopian (Aksumian) occupiers (ca. 540) both tried to repair the dams, especially the great Marib Dam. They were also up against forces of nature, since the soil of Yemen was basically sandy and didn’t do well at sealing in water.

Medieval Arabic historians give different accounts of when the Marib Dam finally failed. It was before Muhammad’s birth, but it may have been three centuries before, or two decades. It sounds like it was probably at least a century before, because of the developments that came after and were already in place by Muhammad’s time. Additionally, the dam’s health must have wavered long enough to have breaches that each seemed like “the big one.” In any case, the event’s timing matters less than its result: a mass emigration of South Arabians whose way of life had been dependent on irrigation.

Marib ruins. Dennis/Flickr

Legends tell that a local king’s wife, a seer, foretold the collapse of the Marib Dam. Tarifah said that the dam was being eaten by rats from within, and that the people should all leave the area. Her people, the tribe of Ghassan or Jafnan, obeyed. They emigrated en masse northwards, out of Yemen and into modern Jordan. There they set up a capital at Jabiyah and became a client and buffer state for Rome.

The tribe of Lakhm also migrated northward, staying to the east of the Ghassanids. They resettled along the eastern coast of Arabia and into Iraq, where they set up a kingdom with a capital city of al-Hirah. They were allied with, and a buffer state for, Persia. The two Arabic immigrant kingdoms faced each other, and the empires counted on them to stay even in their arms race. Both of these Arab-origin buffer states come into the early story of Islam.

The tribe of Azd migrated north and settled in the area of modern United Arab Emirates. This fact is important in our time because in the 1980s, Sheikh Zayed, president of the UAE, funded a new Marib Dam in Yemen. He probably had many reasons to do this, but among them, he said that his tribe of Azd had come from Yemen, so he was just doing something for the Old Country.

The tribe of Kindah moved northward toward Bahrain, but they were not allowed to settle. They established a caravan town at Qaryat al-Faw in central Arabia, and some of them became neo-nomads. Some of the tribe went back to the south and re-established a power base. The Kindah tribe in central Arabia is part of Muhammad’s story because they were the local rivals to Mecca’s power. Other southern tribes, such as the Madh’hijj, also settled in the central area but did not become Mecca’s rivals. Rather, they were part of the pilgrim wave that swelled Mecca’s business each year.

This massive northward migration was somewhat balanced by a tendency among the nomads to move closer to the cities. Nomadic tribes originally from the north and central areas drifted southward, setting up camp close enough to cities like Mecca that they could interface with other caravan businesses. They brought their families near to the cities who were hiring mercenaries and security guards. By the time of Muhammad, there had been two centuries of ethnic and linguistic mixing, moving toward a national identity.

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Arabian Monotheism before Islam

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Ruth

During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Jews began moving to other parts of the Empire and its edges. Rome didn’t rule Arabia proper, but its province of Arabia Petraea included the legendary town of Petra and its trade routes. After the Jewish revolt and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, many Jews fled in all directions, including eastward into nearby Arabia. There are some Jewish tombs in north-western Arabia that date back to Roman times.

During the 4th century, many Arabian petty kings and tribal leaders adopted either Judaism or Christianity. In one story, some rabbis with Torah scrolls were not harmed by fire, and so the South Arabian kingdom of Himyar (a successor to Saba) became Jewish. Regardless of who converted to Judaism, Jewish families settled in Arabian towns and grew to become extended-family tribes in the Arabian manner. By the time of Muhammad, on the surface it was impossible to tell which “Jewish” tribes were originally from Israel but spoke Arabic, as opposed to being Arabs who had adopted Judaism. Some towns and even kingdoms were mostly Jewish, especially in the South, where Yemen’s Jewish communities have been famous in modern times.

Christianity’s first inroad to Arabia was its 3rd and 4th century love affair with deserts, where hermits could live truly holy lives away from temptation. Christian Egypt began the hermit tradition in its western desert, but monasteries spread to other deserts. St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai was built during the generation before Mohammad.

Around the same time, Emperor Justinian founded a monastery in Saidnaya, Syria.

These flagship monasteries had many other hermitages and smaller retreats all through the desert, where the monks sometimes met and talked to Arabs, including those who passed through with caravans.

But during these centuries, religion was not a simple matter of the heart. It usually signaled a political alliance. In South Arabia, it began with an Ethiopian conquest of Himyar, a South Arabian kingdom that had adopted Judaism, around the same time that the desert monasteries were founded. The Ethiopian governor, Abraha al-Ashram, built a Christian basilica in Sana’a, riding roughshod over Jewish practices. But Ethiopia was a sideshow compared to the battle between two empires to the north: New Rome and the Sasanian Empire of Persia, based in Ctesiphon.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is The-Persian-Sassanid-Empire-224-651-AD.gif
This was the clearest map I could find, sorry for its being labeled in Russian!

In 5th and 6th century Arabia, a Christian city with a Catholic church in it was allied to Rome, that is, Constantinople (Arabic calls them both “Rum”). The Emperor Justinian had been especially aggressive in forcing conversion on the territories he conquered, including pressure on the Nabataeans and on Yemen to increase their Christian presence. But an Arabian king who held to Nestorian Christian tenets was allied with Persia, since followers of Nestorius had been expelled from the Roman Empire in 451. It’s not clear how Jewish towns were allied, but possibly with Persia, where Jews had also fled. Additionally, in towns allied with Persia—mostly in the East and the South—there were Zoroastrian temples to Ahura Mazda.

Polytheism was increasingly only practiced in old-fashioned places such as Mecca. Mecca’s economic power rested on the polytheistic pilgrimage, so it was not ready to adopt one of the imperial or foreign religions. Many of the nomadic Arabs still followed the sunnah of an ancestor, including his gods. But the monotheistic idea was catching on everywhere. In South Arabia, there are pre-Islamic inscriptions to Al-Rahman, “the Merciful.” This may have been a reference to one of the already-established religions, but it may also have signaled an indigenous movement toward monotheism without imperial ties.

Early Muslim writings refer to “Hanif” people who did not practice polytheism. Mohammad accepted them as forerunners to his message; in his view, they were people who held onto the religion of Abraham. In addition to the name Al-Rahman, they may also have referred to God by the name “Allah.” The name “Allah” seems to be a contraction of Al-Ilah, “the god.” The word “ilah,” god, is in the Muslim confession “There is no god but Allah.” It’s cognate with Hebrew “Elohim,” god. Among pagans, it was not used as a name, since individual gods had their own names. Just using it alone was a statement for monotheism.

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Origins of Mecca

Posted on November 14, 2020 by Ruth

At the time Mohammad was born there, Mecca was a central place for polytheistic worship. We don’t have much to go on, for its history.

The Quran suggests a faith-based account of Mecca’s history. The story begins with Abraham’s having gone to Egypt, where his wife Sarah was taken into Pharaoh’s house. When Pharaoh realized that she was already married, he sent her away; the Muslim account adds that he was so impressed with her piety that he gave his daughter, Hagar (Hajar in Arabic? I think), to be her servant. Hagar gives birth to Abraham’s first child, at Sarah’s request. Later, Sarah demands that Hagar and her son Ishmael be sent away, but Abraham sends them away with honor. He takes a retinue of servants and accompanies Hagar and Ishmael to a new place, then stays long enough to help build the nub of a new town. This town is Mecca, also called Becca (or Bakkah or Makkah).

Abraham comes back to visit Ishmael, who has married into the local tribe of Jurham, keepers of the Well of Zamzam, which an angel revealed to Hagar when they were thirsty.

On such a visit, Abraham helps his son build a temple for God: the Ka’aba (Surah 2:125, “And We made the House a focal point for the people, and a sanctuary. Use the shrine of Abraham as a place of prayer. And We commissioned Abraham and Ishmael, “Sanctify My House for those who circle around it, and those who seclude themselves in it, and those who kneel and prostrate.”). Muslims believe that for several generations, the descendants of Abraham periodically came to visit Ishmael’s family and worship at the Ka’aba.

Secular, non-Muslim accounts can’t confirm any of this; archeology and outside records have not been able to establish when Mecca was founded. All accounts agree that the Ka’aba was an important structure during Muhammad’s lifetime, and that it was part of the polytheistic system. In the Muslim understanding, idol-worship was a degradation of its original purpose, signifying loss of knowledge of the true God. All accounts also agree that the Ka’aba we have now can’t possibly be the original one, whenever it was built; in a story from Muhammad’s life, he witnesses a rebuilding of the Ka’aba. In the story, Muhammad finds a tactful way to keep the leading men of the city from quarreling over who is to lift the Black Stone into place in the new structure.

Later Muslim records tell of the structure’s being destroyed by fire or war. The part that remains the same is the black stone, though at one time, it was stolen and broken, and has now been encased in silver and restored.

Mecca was one of the pilgrimage sites that hosted a religious festival. It seems to have been linked into the South Arabian economic and social orbit, so the festival may have been similar to Marib’s annual pilgrimage to Almaqah. But Mecca was also on the edge of the great desert, and it operated as a caravan hub. People from many parts of Arabia came through Mecca, including nomads who were at war against each other before and after the festival’s truce.

Mecca was a point on the Incense Route, the road that led up the western coast of Arabia from Yemen to Jordan, but it was also near the seacoast. I believe gold had also been mined in that center-western part of Arabia, so in addition to incense and pearls, gold would have been traded through Mecca. Several caravan roads crossed near Mecca, so it was a major provisioning stop.

The city was basically in the coastal plain, but also at the foothills of the mountains that lead into Arabia’s inner plateau. There were rocky hills all through the city and small mountains just outside it. The city has now grown to include some of those mountains.

Mecca was ruled by the tribe of the Quraysh, of whom Mohammad was a minor member. The Quraysh ran the city as a business, including the pilgrimage festival. Their chief god was Hubal, along with a trio of goddesses—sisters—Manat, Al-Lat and Al-Uzzah.

The goddesses had their own shrines near Mecca, where Manat was the goddess of fate, and one of the others (Al-Lat?) may have represented the moon. Hubal was a god of divination; arrows were cast in front of his idol, and the way they fell determined the omen and its message. But the Ka’aba included other gods, so that most options were available to pilgrims: Almaqah and other gods of South Arabia, gods of Canaan and Greece, and by Muhammad’s time, even an icon of Mary. For the Quraysh, the point of the pilgrimage festival was that it brought a lot of business into the town. Doctrine was very low on the priority chain.

When pilgrims came to Mecca, they worshipped at the Ka’aba by walking around it. They also touched or kissed the sacred stone, and sometimes they used it to make binding oaths, pouring water across it and using the water as sacred. If there was a belief that the stone stood for something, we don’t know of it. Periodically, the Ka’aba had to be rebuilt, as it was in Muhammad’s time. When the city was under attack, the Ka’aba was a major target, since it functioned as the city’s spiritual center.

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Arabian Pagan Religion

Posted on November 14, 2020 by Ruth

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.
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Arabia Deserta in the Iron Age

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Ruth

The interior of Arabia has been a difficult terrain during the period of recorded history, although we know that it had been much wetter in the past, supporting animals like hippopotami. The animal best suited to survive in Arabia as it is now is, of course, the camel—or if you will, the dromedary. Camels are adapted to extremely dry conditions in various ways you wouldn’t immediately think of; for example, their blood cells are oval, fitting more easily through dehydrated veins than round cells. Camels were domesticated in this region a long time ago, used for fuel (dung), milk, meat, and transport.

When we meet desert-dwellers in the Bible, during the Iron Age, they are the Midianites, Moabites, Edomites, Amorites, Amalekites, and possibly others. Not until later are they called “Arabs.” It’s unclear how the term “Arab” came about; one theory is that its root meaning is “mixed,” that is, the mixture of all these tribes living similar nomadic lifestyles in the harsh dry environment. (Hebrew speakers may think of לְעַרְבֵּב, which means “to mix.”) Moab, Midian, and Edom were gradually forgotten, and the resulting population was just called “Arab” by those who lived in cities. The word “Arab” also resembles the compass direction “west,” so that might be part of the root. The earlier Bible-era names matter because they suggest that “Arab” was not a tribal identity in the beginning; each group called itself something else. “Arab” is a label imposed from the outside on people who may not have considered themselves much related, at first.

Nomads in the desert move about to find better pasture for their sheep and goats, using camels to pack and carry their gear. The camels can also form caravans, and they can be ridden to war. But additionally, nomads in the desert adopted horses, who were less hardy but much faster. The one-two punch of desert warfare became the combination of camel and horse. The camel could carry the horse’s food and water, while the horse could attack swiftly on local raids.

Desert tribes tended to be very large extended families that focused on remembering their lineage; perhaps if you have no fixed place, your lineage matters more to locate you in space and time. They were highly aware of following the customs of their particular ancestors, so that customs varied a lot through the region. We tend to assume that, for example, nomadic desert people have always been polygamous, as some Muslim desert sheikhs are now. But the pre-Islamic marriage customs are all over the place, in old records: some brides joined the husband’s family. while some grooms joined the wife’s family. Some tribes permitted multiple husbands (brothers) for one wife, while others allowed a man to leave his property only to his sister’s children, not his own. Some tribes permitted temporary marriage, while others permitted a wife to dismiss a husband by turning the tent so the door faced away. (Hoyland, 128-31)

The point was that each extended family followed the ways of its ancestors, and that’s the culturally unifying point: to follow the sunnah of your progenitor. We know the word “sunnah” from Muslim use, as it refers to the Prophet’s customs. But we can only understand this use if we understand the previous one: to follow the ways of your tribal ancestor. Where he went, you go. What he worshipped, you do too. How he settled disputes, that’s how you will. It was a very basic legal system among nomads, as long as most people operated only within their family groups where the same sunnah was known.

Desert nomads cared for their flocks and worked in caravans, but they also raided each other to steal livestock or other wealth. It’s a traditional way of life around the world: Tim Mackintosh-Smith points out that Sanskrit has a root word that refers to both cattle and war, as Arabic’s word for livestock is also cognate with “plunder, loot.” (Mackintosh-Smith, 62) My Scots ancestors raided cattle and received protection money not to raid the cattle; it was called “reiving.” Raiding only works if you have a wilderness to fall back to, getting lost so your pursuers face real danger if they try to recoup their losses.

Because of the desert tribes’ raiding skill, there was one more social role they played: the mercenary. Having no city to defend, they could be hired to beef up any city’s defensive or offensive forces. They had large families and limited resources, always the formula for supplying fighting men. As their supply of both camels and horses grew, they filled more and more of the interior and came closer to the cities at the edges of the desert, where they picked up work for fighting or for transport. Gradually, some desert tribes came to be semi-settled near some towns, working as bodyguards or other fighters. There was still a clear separation between townsfolk and nomads, but they started to mingle socially much more.

  • 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.

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Saba: Kingdom of the Ma’rib Dam

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Ruth

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.

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Arabia Felix in the Iron Age

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Ruth

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.

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Arabia Petraea in the Iron Age

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Ruth

With the Iron Age, we move into the heart of Hebrew Bible history, familiar to many Americans from Sunday School. Iron was more easily available than tin or copper, so the switch to iron technology contributed to growing power of smaller groups. Controlling the Nile still required Pharaoh’s centralized power, but small groups like the Hebrews, the Moabites, the Philistines, or the Arameans could arm themselves without empires to bring metals from far-off places.

Most probably, the core population that spoke Old Arabic was centered in the rocky zone between Palmyra in Syria and Petra in Jordan.

This placed the culture squarely in an iron region. Damascus, which at the time was Aramaean, became an early iron-smelting center. Damascus steel was later famous for its quality.

Arabic-speaking societies seem to have always been primarily traders. Their rocky zone between Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia was difficult for transport, so they were specialists in traveling there. They adopted camels early, so they could travel slowly but surely with heavy loads. Caravans connected settled places, bringing steel from Aram, copper and pearls from Oman (former Dilmun), and especially myrrh and frankincense from South Arabia. Pearls and incense were light compared to their value, so they were perfect for camel caravans. South Arabia struck gold, too. Gold could flow from Africa as well as Arabia, with caravans transporting it all.

As the Old Arabs became caravan specialists, they settled farther into Arabia Deserta, the great wilderness in the center of the peninsula. Old Arabic speakers also spread into southern Mesopotamia, toward modern Basra. From the deep desert, to the Nabataean settlement of Petra, to the marshes of the Mesopotamian river delta, there was some degree of shared language, though the dialects varied widely.

We have no reason to believe that they called themselves “Arabs,” at this time. They would have named themselves for the place where they lived, without a sense of shared culture with others whose language they could most easily understand. Aramaic, too, was a widely-understood language across the region, and both being Semitic, they may have been as similar as Italian and Spanish. So they knew they understood each other, but at this time, they had no cultural or ethnic story for why.

Let’s turn next to South Arabia, which was culturally very different.

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Dilmun: East Arabia in the Bronze Age

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Ruth

When we dial back in time to the Bronze Age, we’re in the time of the first Pharaohs who built pyramids, the heroic Mycenean Greeks, the Hittite Empire with its chariots, and the flourishing civilizations of Sumer. If the people of Sumer sailed down the Tigris or Euphrates River, to where the rivers meet and flow into the Arabian/Persian Gulf, they would soon come to the settlement they called Dilmun. It was on the southern–Arabian–bank of the Gulf. We’re not sure how large an area it covered, since we know of it mostly through sales receipts on clay tablets in Sumer.

We do know that it included the island of Bahrain. Here is the main island called Bahrain; the modern nation includes this island and many smaller ones around it.

It’s very close to the shores of eastern Arabia and the peninsula of modern Qatar. We know that some ancient cities around the Mediterranean are now under water; the water level might have been low enough at that time that Bahrain Island was joined to the mainland. There was certainly more land above water, and Dilmun may have occupied much of it, including Qatar and on down the coast. Bahrain Island has archeological diggings that appear to be from Dilmun, though only some of the graves discovered on the island are that ancient. Bahrain Island is one of the oldest continuously-occupied places on earth.

You can read more about digs on Bahrain here, with an approximate map of Dilmun.

Dilmun was a shipping powerhouse of the ancient world, because its ships traveled to the Indus Valley region to pick up cotton fabric, which was highly valued in Sumer. During the Bronze Age, all metal technology depended on mining copper and tin. Down the coast of Arabia, in the area of modern Oman, there were many copper mines, so Dilmun also provided the transport of copper back up the Gulf to Mesopotamia. Additionally, pearl-diving in Dilmun’s own coastal region began very early. Dilmun’s fortunes lasted as long as the Indus Valley society was doing well, but when that civilization went down for reasons unknown, Dilmun also fell on hard times. Copper’s price may have dropped, as iron began to replace bronze.

But in its heyday, Dilmun gave us some famous clay tablets, a series of letters written to a merchant named Ea-Nasir. These tablets with cuneiform writing in Akkadian, the language of Sumer, survived in the ruins of a house in Ur. They are now in the British Museum.

Ea-Nasir may have been a merchant of Dilmun whose trading base was in Ur. In the letters, his correspondents complain about the type of copper he has been selling them. The letters are amusing because they feel so modern. Here’s the text of the most famous one, translated by A. Leo Oppenheim, a leading scholar of Akkadian cuneiform:

Tell Ea-nа̄ṣir: Nanni sends the following message:

“When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Ṣīt-Sin) and said “If you want to take them, take them, if you do not want to take them, go away!”

“What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun [Dilmun] who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and Šumi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Šamaš.

“How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.

“Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.”

Ea-Nasir has his own modern fan club: here’s a Facebook page dedicated to memes about his really terrible copper ingots. Tell anyone with a sense of humor, Nanni sends this message: These are fine quality memes!

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Arabia: who are the Arabs?

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Ruth

It seems like we know the answer to this question, but do we? The Arabs live in Arabia, but they also live in Iraq and Syria. Not in Iran, in spite of the similarity of religion. Are Egyptians Arabs? I always used to think they were, but if you talk to some Egyptians, you’ll learn that they actually aren’t Arabs, although their country is officially called the Arab Republic of Egypt. What about Libyans?

At the end of the day, the simplest answer is that Arabs are people whose mother tongue is Arabic (unless they are Egyptians). This isn’t quite the case with English-speaking people, since some are Americans or Australians, while some may grow up with English as a mother tongue in Singapore or India. But it turns out that for Arabs in particular, the answer “those who speak Arabic as a mother-tongue” is and has always been the correct answer (leaving aside the Egyptians for now).

But it’s also more complicated than that, because in ancient times, only some people in Arabia spoke Arabic. Arabia had at least three distinctly different cultures, perhaps more. Greek geographers called the whole peninsula “Arabia,” but even then they split it into three zones: Arabia Petraea, Arabia Deserta, and Arabia Felix. Arabia Felix meant the fortunate parts that received enough rainfall to farm on a large scale, while Arabia Petraea meant the rocky area from Petra, Jordan to Palmyra, Syria.

I want to start by looking at the earliest Arabian culture in recorded history, the merchant society of Dilmun during the Bronze Age. As we outline the various zones of Arabian settlement, we’ll be following the thread of this question: who were the original Arabs, how should we view the other cultures near them, and how did they call come to call themselves “Arab”?

For this topic, I am deeply indebted to Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Any readers who wish to learn in more depth should go to his Arabs. It’s a hefty book, so if you prefer the short version, stick with me.

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