Qataban

In the dry valleys of what is now southern Yemen, Qataban grew rich for close to a thousand years on irrigated farming and the passing incense caravans. Ruled from the city of Timna in the Wadi Bayhan, it was one of six ancient South Arabian kingdoms, alongside Saba, Main, Hadramawt, Himyar and Awsan. It took shape in the early first millennium BCE and lasted until the late first or second century CE, when its neighbours divided it.

The heart of the kingdom was the Wadi Bayhan. Saba lay to the north-west and west, Awsan to the south and Hadramawt to the east. At its widest, Qatabanian territory reached south-west as far as the Bab al-Mandab strait and north to the Sayhad desert. People were living in the area by around the twentieth century BCE, and the oldest known settlements date from the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE. Over time, local traditions mixed with those brought by Semitic-speaking newcomers, forming the shared South Arabian culture to which Qataban belonged.

By the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, Qataban had become a centralised state based at Timna. For a while it was ruled by two kings at once. Around the late seventh century BCE it was first an ally and then an enemy of the Sabaean ruler Karibil Watar, and during the sixth century BCE it came under Sabaean control.

Independence returned in the late fifth century BCE. Qataban then rejected Sabaean overlordship and became, with Main and Hadramawt, one of the leading powers of the region. It conquered Main and took land from Saba down to the Bab al-Mandab, and by the third century BCE it was contesting Sabaean supremacy. Its rulers used both the title mukarrib, "unifier", claimed by regional overlords, and malik, "king".

Like their neighbours, the Qatabanians honoured Athtar as the highest god, listed first in inscriptions, and their rulers held ritual banquets for him funded by a tithe. Yet the people saw themselves as the "children of Amm", the moon god and the kingdom's patron. Scholars link his importance to the caravan trade, in which night travel and navigation by the stars mattered. Another god, Anbay, was called on in contracts. Pliny the Elder reported 65 temples in Timna.

Farming relied on wells and on flash-flood irrigation, which made efficient use of rare torrents. Qataban produced myrrh, sold on through Minaean merchants to the Fertile Crescent, and earned more from caravans carrying frankincense from Dhofar and goods imported from South Asia. Coins modelled on Athenian ones appeared in South Arabia in the fourth century BCE; in the second century BCE Qataban struck its own designs, marked with the name of its royal mint, Harib.

Around 110 BCE the Himyarite confederation broke away from Qataban's south-west and joined with Saba, and the kingdom began to fade. Pliny noted that its people were still known as good fighters at the time of the failed Roman expedition of Aelius Gallus in 26 BCE. In the late first century CE, according to the main reconstruction, Hadramawt and Himyar divided and annexed what remained. Greek and Roman writers remembered it as Kattabania, with Timna as Tamna or Thomna.

Our maps show Qataban in 323, 300, 200 and 100 BCE, in the south-west corner of Arabia beside the Kingdom of Saba. Its south-western lands later passed to the Himyarite Kingdom, and the region today lies in Yemen.