The history of Yemen

Yemen, in the south-west corner of Arabia, was the home of the ancient incense kingdoms of Saba, Qataban, Hadramawt and Ma'in, and later of Himyar, whose wealth led the Romans to call the region Arabia Felix, "fortunate Arabia". After the coming of Islam it was divided among local dynasties, the Zaydi imams of the northern highlands, and foreign powers from Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, while Britain held the port of Aden from 1839. In the twentieth century the country split into a northern republic and a Marxist south, which united in 1990. Since 2014 Yemen has been torn by a civil war between the Houthi movement and the internationally recognised government, drawn in neighbouring powers, and produced one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Settled farming communities grew in the Yemeni highlands from at least the fourth millennium BCE, terracing hillsides and harnessing seasonal floods. By the early first millennium BCE a group of kingdoms had emerged along the edge of the desert, where the wadis came down from the mountains. The greatest was Saba, generally identified with the biblical Sheba, with its capital at Ma'rib. To the south and east lay Qataban, with its capital at Timna, Hadramawt, centred on Shabwa, and Awsan, while Ma'in rose in the Jawf valley to the north. Their peoples spoke related South Arabian languages and wrote them in a distinctive alphabet, carved on thousands of stone inscriptions.

Their prosperity came from frankincense and myrrh, aromatic resins from trees that grew in southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa and were burned in temples from Egypt to Mesopotamia and later Rome. Camel caravans carried them north along the incense route to Gaza and Damascus. The Sabaeans built the great dam of Ma'rib, which watered thousands of hectares of fields for more than a thousand years, and worshipped the moon god Almaqah alongside many other deities. Sabaean rulers, who bore the title mukarrib, extended their influence across the Red Sea, and South Arabian inscriptions, temples and script appear in the highlands of what are now Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the seventh century BCE the mukarrib Karib'il Watar recorded a series of campaigns in which he crushed Awsan and made Saba dominant in the south.

Over the following centuries Qataban, Hadramawt and Ma'in broke free and the balance of power shifted repeatedly. The Minaeans became the great merchants of the incense trade, with trading posts as far north as Dedan in the Hejaz. When the sea route from Egypt to India opened up after the Greeks learned to use the monsoon winds, overland trade declined and the coastal ports gained in importance. In 26 to 25 BCE the emperor Augustus sent Aelius Gallus with some ten thousand men to conquer the land of spices for the Roman Empire, but the army, worn down by heat and disease, besieged Ma'rib briefly and retreated.

From around 110 BCE a new power rose in the southern highlands: the Himyarites, with their capital at Zafar. For several centuries Himyar contended with Saba, Hadramawt and the kingdom of Aksum across the Red Sea, and the Sabaean kings built the Ghumdan palace at Sanaa, which became an important city. By the end of the third century CE the Himyarite Kingdom had absorbed all its rivals, and Shammar Yahri'sh ruled from the Red Sea to Hadramawt, the first ruler of a united Yemen.

In the late fourth century the Himyarite rulers abandoned the old gods for monotheism, and their inscriptions speak of a single god, Rahmanan, "the Merciful". The ruling house leaned towards Judaism, while Christianity spread from the Byzantine Empire and Ethiopia, especially in the oasis of Najran. Religious conflict became entangled with the rivalry of the great powers. Around 523 the king Yusuf As'ar Yath'ar, known in Arabic tradition as Dhu Nuwas, attacked the Christians of Zafar and Najran and killed many of them, an event remembered in Christian sources as the martyrdom of Najran. With Byzantine encouragement, the Christian king Kaleb of the Kingdom of Aksum invaded around 525, defeated Dhu Nuwas and installed a Christian client king.

Soon afterwards an Aksumite commander, Abraha, made himself independent ruler of Yemen. He repaired the Ma'rib dam, built a great church at Sanaa, and according to Muslim tradition led an army, with an elephant, against Mecca in the year of the Prophet's birth. The dam was breached again in the sixth century, and its final collapse became a symbol in Arab memory of the end of the old South Arabian civilisation. Around 570 the Sasanian Empire of Persia, invited by Himyarite nobles, sent a force that drove out the Aksumites, and Yemen became a loosely held Persian province.

The Persian governor Badhan accepted Islam around 628, and over the next few years the tribes of Yemen sent delegations to Muhammad in Medina. Yemeni tribesmen then played a large part in the Arab conquests, settling in Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. Under the Rashidun Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate and then the Abbasid Caliphate, Yemen was governed by appointed officials, but central control was weak and rebellions were common.

From the ninth century Yemen fragmented into rival states. The Ziyadids, founded around 818, ruled the coastal plain of the Tihama from Zabid in the name of the Abbasids, while the Yufirids held the highlands around Sanaa. In 897 Yahya ibn al-Husayn, a descendant of the Prophet invited from Medina to arbitrate between feuding tribes, founded the Zaydi imamate at Sa'da. The Zaydis, a branch of Shia Islam, held that the community should be led by a learned and upright descendant of Ali and Fatima who claimed the imamate openly. Zaydi imams, with their strongholds among the Hashid and Bakil tribes of the north, would rule some part of Yemen for most of the next thousand years. Hadramawt, meanwhile, went its own way, and its merchants and scholars later carried Islam around the Indian Ocean to East Africa, India and South-east Asia.

In the eleventh century the Sulayhids, Isma'ili Shia allies of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, united much of Yemen. Its most famous ruler, Queen Arwa al-Sulayhi, governed from Jibla from around 1087 until her death in 1138, and is still remembered as a wise sovereign. After Saladin overthrew the Fatimids, his brother Turan-Shah conquered southern Yemen in 1174 for the Ayyubids. When the last Ayyubid governor left in 1229, his deputy Umar ibn Rasul founded the Rasulid dynasty, which ruled from Zabid and Ta'izz until 1454. The Rasulid period is often seen as a golden age. Aden prospered on the trade between Egypt and India, the sultans built mosques and colleges that made the Sunni Shafi'i school dominant in the south, and they wrote on astronomy, agriculture and medicine. Ibn Battuta visited in the 1330s, and the treasure fleets of Zheng He called at Aden in the early fifteenth century. The Rasulids were followed by the Tahirids, a local dynasty from Rada'a.

At the start of the sixteenth century the Portuguese Empire entered the Indian Ocean, and in 1513 Afonso de Albuquerque attacked Aden without success. The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt sent forces to Yemen to resist the Portuguese and overthrew the Tahirids, but the Mamluks themselves fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1517. Under Suleiman the Magnificent an Ottoman fleet stormed Aden in 1538, and by 1547 Ottoman troops had reached Sanaa. They never subdued the Zaydi highlands, and Yemen became notorious in Istanbul as a graveyard for soldiers. In 1597 Imam al-Qasim ibn Muhammad launched a revolt, and his sons completed the expulsion of the Ottomans by 1636.

The Qasimid imams then ruled most of Yemen, at times as far as Aden and Hadramawt. This was the age of coffee. Coffee drinking spread from Yemen's Sufi circles across the Islamic world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for about two hundred years Yemen was almost the only source of coffee beans, exported through the port of Mocha to Cairo, Istanbul and, from the seventeenth century, Europe. The Dutch, English and French set up trading houses at Mocha, but in the eighteenth century Europeans began growing coffee in Java, the Caribbean and Latin America, and Yemen's monopoly ended. The imamate's control weakened, tribes and local rulers broke away, and by the early nineteenth century the Wahhabi forces of the First Saudi State were raiding the Tihama.

In January 1839 a force of the East India Company under Captain Stafford Haines captured Aden, which the British Empire wanted as a coaling station on the route to India. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 it became one of the busiest ports in the world, with a population drawn from India, Somalia and the Arabian interior. Britain signed protection treaties with the sultans and sheikhs of the hinterland, which became the Aden Protectorate, extending east to Hadramawt.

Alarmed by British expansion, the Ottomans returned to the Tihama in 1849 and took Sanaa in 1872. The highland tribes again resisted, and the imams of the Hamid al-Din family led repeated revolts. In 1911 the Treaty of Da'an gave Imam Yahya autonomy over the Zaydi highlands. A boundary agreed between Britain and the Ottomans in 1904 and ratified in 1914 divided Yemen into a northern and a southern sphere, a line that later became the border between two states.

When the Ottomans withdrew after their defeat in the First World War, Imam Yahya became ruler of an independent kingdom in the north, later called the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. He claimed all of "Greater Yemen" and clashed with Britain over the Aden Protectorate and with Ibn Saud over Asir and Najran. A short war with Saudi Arabia in 1934 ended in Yemeni defeat, and the Treaty of Ta'if left those provinces under Saudi rule. Yahya kept his country deliberately isolated, with few roads, schools or hospitals, and ruled through the Zaydi aristocracy. Most of Yemen's ancient Jewish community, numbering around 50,000, was airlifted to Israel in 1949 and 1950.

In 1948 Yahya was assassinated in a coup by reformers allied with a rival family, but his son Ahmad crushed the rebels and became imam. Ahmad ruled from Ta'izz, accepted Soviet and Chinese aid, and in 1958 briefly joined Egypt and Syria in a loose federation. Opposition grew among army officers, merchants, and Yemenis who had studied in Cairo or worked in Aden, many inspired by the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Imam Ahmad died in September 1962, and a week later, on 26 September, army officers shelled the palace of his son Muhammad al-Badr and proclaimed the Yemen Arab Republic. Al-Badr escaped to the northern mountains and rallied the tribes, beginning the North Yemen Civil War. Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with help from Britain, backed the royalists, while Egypt sent up to 70,000 troops to support the republic and used chemical weapons in some attacks. After Egypt's defeat by Israel in 1967 its forces withdrew, the republicans held Sanaa against a royalist siege, and in 1970 Saudi Arabia recognised the republic.

In the south, Britain had grouped the protectorate states into the Federation of South Arabia, but from 1963 the National Liberation Front and other nationalist groups waged an armed insurgency known as the Aden Emergency. Britain withdrew, and on 30 November 1967 the south became independent as the People's Republic of South Yemen. A Marxist wing of the National Liberation Front took over in 1969, and the country was renamed in 1970 the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only Marxist state in the Arab world, closely tied to the Soviet Union. It nationalised land and businesses, built schools and gave women wide legal equality, but suppressed opposition.

The two Yemens fought border wars in 1972 and 1979, each time followed by pledges to unite. In the north, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president in 1978 and ruled through alliances with the army and the great tribes. In January 1986 a power struggle within the southern leadership turned into fighting in Aden that killed thousands. Weakened by this and by the decline of Soviet support at the end of the Cold War, the south agreed to unification.

On 22 May 1990 the two states merged as the Republic of Yemen, with Saleh as president and the southern leader Ali Salim al-Beidh as vice-president. Months later Yemen, then on the UN Security Council, refused to back the war against Iraq over Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia expelled around 800,000 Yemeni workers, a heavy blow to the economy. Tensions between the northern and southern leaderships grew, and in May 1994 war broke out. Al-Beidh declared southern independence, but northern forces took Aden in July, and many southerners came to regard the outcome as a northern conquest, a grievance that later fed the Southern Movement.

Saleh ruled the united country for more than two decades, balancing tribes, parties and military factions. Yemen signed a border treaty with Saudi Arabia in 2000 and settled disputes with Oman and, through arbitration over the Hanish Islands, with Eritrea. Al-Qaeda bombed the American destroyer USS Cole in Aden in October 2000, killing seventeen sailors, and in 2009 its Saudi and Yemeni branches merged as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen and targeted by American drone strikes. From 2004 the government fought a series of wars in the northern province of Sa'da against the Houthi movement, a Zaydi revivalist group named after its founder Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, who was killed that year.

In 2011, inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, mass protests demanded Saleh's departure. The activist Tawakkol Karman shared the Nobel Peace Prize that year. In November 2011 Saleh signed a transition deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council, and in February 2012 his vice-president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, was elected unopposed. A National Dialogue Conference proposed a federal constitution, but the transition foundered.

In September 2014 Houthi fighters, now allied with their former enemy Saleh, took control of Sanaa. In early 2015 Hadi resigned under pressure, then fled to Aden and withdrew his resignation, and as the Houthis advanced south he left for Saudi Arabia. On 26 March 2015 a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and including the United Arab Emirates began air strikes and a blockade to restore his government, saying the Houthis were backed by Iran. Iran supported the Houthis politically and, according to UN experts and Western governments, with weapons. The coalition and its allies retook Aden and much of the south, but front lines in the north changed little, and the Houthis kept Sanaa and most of the populous highlands. In December 2017 the Houthis killed Saleh after he broke with them.

The war became a humanitarian catastrophe. Air strikes hit markets, hospitals, weddings and a school bus, Houthi shelling and landmines killed civilians, and both sides were accused of war crimes. The blockade, the collapse of the currency and the destruction of infrastructure brought famine conditions and one of the largest cholera outbreaks in modern history. The UN estimated that by the end of 2021 about 377,000 people had died from the war's direct and indirect effects. The south fragmented further: the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, which seeks an independent south, took control of Aden in 2018 and 2019.

A UN-brokered truce from April 2022 brought a long lull, and that month Hadi handed power to a Presidential Leadership Council chaired by Rashad al-Alimi. After the Gaza war began in October 2023, the Houthis fired missiles at Israel and attacked merchant ships in the Red Sea, prompting foreign air strikes on Yemen, including a large American campaign from March 2025. In December 2025 the Southern Transitional Council seized Hadramawt and al-Mahra, but in January 2026 government forces backed by Saudi Arabia retook them and entered Aden; the council's leader Aidarus al-Zubaidi fled abroad, and its dissolution, announced in Riyadh, was rejected by many of its supporters. In March 2026, during the wider regional war involving Iran, the Houthis resumed missile attacks on Israel, and in September they launched an offensive on several fronts and captured the Red Sea port of Mocha. In early October 2026 al-Alimi announced a counter-offensive aimed at retaking Sanaa, the Houthis struck airports in Saudi Arabia, and the UN reported that more than 200,000 people had been newly displaced, as the country slid back towards full-scale war.