Kingdom of Saba

Saba, the Sheba of the Bible and the Quran, was one of the kingdoms of ancient South Arabia, centred on the oasis of Marib in what is now Yemen. Its people, the Sabaeans, grew rich on the incense trade and left thousands of inscriptions in their own language, Sabaic. For a time in the first millennium BCE they dominated the whole south-west of the Arabian Peninsula, and their influence reached across the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa. The kingdom came to a final end around 275 CE.

Two quite different bodies of material describe Saba. The first is religious tradition. The Hebrew Bible tells of a queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon with gifts of spices and gold, and the Quran (27:15–44) recounts a similar meeting; a whole chapter of the Quran is named after Saba. Later tradition named the queen Bilqis in Arabic and Makeda in Ethiopia, where the medieval Kebra Nagast placed Sheba itself. Historians regard the Solomon story as legendary: the early inscriptions mention no such diplomatic mission and no female rulers.

The second is the archaeological and epigraphic record. About 6,500 of the roughly 12,000 known Ancient South Arabian inscriptions are in Sabaic, and they form the main source for the kingdom's history. A continuous record begins only in the 8th century BCE, and Assyrian cuneiform texts mention the Sabaeans from the same century.

Scholars disagree about when the kingdom began. Marib itself appears to have been settled in the late 2nd millennium BCE, and estimates for the state itself range from about 1200 BCE to the 8th century BCE; many put its emergence between about 1000 and 800 BCE. The early Sabaeans were a tribal community on the edge of the Sayhad desert, whose leaders built a commonwealth of allied groups and took the title mukarrib, "federator".

Saba was strongest between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Two long inscriptions at Sirwah record the campaigns of Karib'il Watar, who destroyed the rival kingdom of Awsan, subdued Nashshan and extended Sabaean rule to Najran and the Gulf of Aden; the texts claim 16,000 enemies killed in Awsan alone. Karib'il was in contact with the Assyrian king Sennacherib of Assyria. Sabaic inscriptions and temples to the god Almaqah in the northern Horn of Africa, including one at Yeha, show strong links with the kingdom of Dʿmt, though scholars debate whether this reflects migration or local adoption.

Marib was the largest city of ancient South Arabia, walled and watered by a great dam that irrigated about 10,000 hectares. Nearby stood the Awwam Temple, the main sanctuary of Almaqah, the national god. Kings led armies and built public works but were not worshipped as gods. Wealth came from caravans carrying frankincense and myrrh north to Gaza and later Petra.

After the 6th century BCE, Qataban, Hadramaut and Ma'in pushed Saba back to its heartland, and its rulers took the humbler title malik, "king". Roman conquests in Syria and Egypt redirected trade to the sea, and a Roman expedition under Aelius Gallus besieged Marib around 25 BCE but soon withdrew. Saba was absorbed by the Himyarite Kingdom, then revived from about 100 CE, with Sanaa as a second capital, before Himyar conquered it for good around 275 CE.

Our maps show Saba from 1500 BCE through 1000, 700, 500, 323 and 300 BCE to 200 and 100 BCE, beside Qataban and Hadramaut on the later maps. The 1500 BCE map in particular predates the evidence: the kingdom itself is usually dated from about 1000 to 800 BCE, with written records beginning in the 8th century BCE.