Hoofdartikel the Other Side of Sheba: Early Towns In
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5 THE OTHER SIDE OF SHEBA: EARLY TOWNS ON THE HIGHLANDS OF YEMEN 6 HOOFDARTIKEL could be invested in large scale irrigation systems, such as that found at Marib. These major public works, in turn, gene- rated some of the food and fodder that could be used to sup- THE OTHER SIDE OF SHEBA: EARLY TOWNS IN ply the passing caravans. The scale of such dams and irriga- THE HIGHLANDS OF YEMEN*) tion systems was such that they required a massive labour force to maintain them (and to rebuild the dams when they T.J. WILKINSON burst). This could have resulted in episodic influxes of pop- ulation which then resulted in a further increase in the size of In contrast to the arid interior of Arabia, the Yemen high- the towns and the field systems to both accommodate and lands are remarkably well watered and verdant. Despite these feed the additional labour pool. Therefore as Alessandro de advantages, until the 1990s this vast area of mountains and Maigret has suggested, agricultural resources were funda- intermontane basins had largely escaped the attention of mental to the growth of the cities of southern Arabia, even archaeologists, because attention was primarily focussed though trade itself may have been the catalyst for that growth upon the desert fringe oases where a series of well popula- (de Maigret 1999). ted and opulent settlements developed along the incense route The above summarizes some of the basic components of linking Dhofar (Oman) to the Levant and the eastern Medi- what is known about the growth of south Arabian civiliza- terranean. For most Near Eastern archaeologists, southwest tion, but what is less clear is how this civilization was able Arabia remains rather problematic, in part because the civi- to develop so rapidly out of what seemed to have been a vir- lization of the Sabaeans, which developed in the early 1st tual demographic vacuum. For example, it has been sugge- millennium BC, occurred chronologically rather late. This sted that civic institutions, technical knowledge, and part of compares with, for example Dynastic Egypt, Canaan, and the population moved in to southern Arabia (like the script) Mesopotamia, that all saw their fluorescence in the later 4th from the Levant (Kitchen, 1994). This theory received some and 3rd millennia BC. Even Oman, located in relatively arid support from the absence of any pre-existing complex south east Arabia, is now known to have actively participa- society in the region. Thus ever since the early days of archa- ted in the “world system” of the third millennium BC. In eological exploration, southern Arabia was apparently wit- contrast, Yemen and adjacent parts of Arabia apparently hout a Bronze Age, and as recently as 1988 a well-informed stood aloof from these developments; that is, until the states article reported that in western and southern Arabia there along the fringe of the southern Arabian deserts grew dra- was a general gap in occupation between the Neolithic/ matically during the first millennium BC, mainly as a result Chalcolithic and the rise of the Sabaean civilization (Sauer of the growth in the incense trade. and Blakely 1988: 100). Thus western and southern Arabia The south Arabian cities of Saba, Qataban, Hadhramaut only become extensively populated again in the later Bronze and Ma{in are perhaps best known for three shared features: Age or early Iron Age (1300-1000 BC). This gap in the superb temples that flaunt well dressed masonry detailing; archaeological record, also makes it difficult to understand their fabulous riches which were well known to classical aut- the rapid rise of the Himyarite state which occurred in the horities such as Herodotus, Agatharchides, and Pliny the 1st century BC in what had been terra incognita in the moun- Elder (Groom 1981; Breton 1999), and the use of a geome- tainous hinterland of Saba (Fig. 1). One explanation was that tric script (Epigraphic Old South Arabian) which was related with the decline of the inland incense route focussed on to certain scripts of the Levantine littoral. According to cur- Marib and the lands of Saba, a new centre grew up in the rent scholarship, the major innovations that led to the deve- lightly populated tribal highlands, so that there was then a lopment of this southern Arabian civilization took place massive injection of people from the declining kingdoms of around the 8th century BC, with the earlier phases probably the desert fringe. starting as early as 1300 BC, roughly contemporary with the The above scenarios for the development of the Sabaean Late Bronze and early Iron Ages of the Levant (Sauer and and Himyarite states share a common factor, namely that both Blakely 1988). appear to have been founded as a state level society without The growth of the South Arabian civilization appears to a plausible predecessor. In the case of the Sabaeans, this void have been founded upon the incense trade which became par- occurred during the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC, whereas for ticularly vigorous during the early 1st millennium BC when the Himyarite state it was in the 1st millennium BC and ear- merchants started to trade frankincense and myrrh from what lier. is now the Dhofar region of southern Oman, through the oases The first archaeologists to explicitly recognize the Bronze of the Hadhramaut, Timna (in Qataban), Marib (in Saba: Fig. Age predecessors of the Sabaean state were a team directed 1) and thence northward through Najran (in Saudi Arabia) by Alessandro de Maigret (de Maigret 1990; Ghaleb 1990). towards Palestine, Egypt and Mesopotamia. North of Saba the In the semi-arid Khawlan foothills to the southwest of Marib, route followed the Hijaz mountains of Saudi Arabia where the Italian team recorded numerous small straggling settle- numerous oases provided stopping places and supply points ments of what must originally have been semi-sedentary vil- for the pack animals (initially probably donkeys, and later lages dated to the third millennium BC. However, as de camels) and merchants could be fed and watered. Although Maigret has noted, these were hardly likely to have been the there is relatively little textual information that explicitly sta- immediate predecessors of the noble Sabaean state. Nevert- tes how wealth was generated by the incense trade, it seems heless the Italian team had laid a firm foundation for later most likely that tariffs generated by the caravan trade produ- investigations. ced substantial revenues for the local rulers, part of which About a decade later, in 1994, a project from the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, directed by the writer and McGuire Gibson, initiated a survey of the high plateau cen- *) Dept. of Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, UK. This article is based on a lecture held Nov. 2004 at Leiden/Holland. tred around the modern town of Dhamar. This survey was 7 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS LXII N° 1-2, januari-april 2005 8 In order to account for the loss of archaeological sites of the pre-Himyarite populations, it is necessary to postulate that much of the archaeological record has been erased as a result of processes of landscape transformation. For example, the construction of millions of terraced fields and innumerable stone houses may well have resulted in the dismantling or erasure of part of the record of earlier settlement rendering them less visible than the archaeological mounds and well- built temple sites of the often more sparsely settled zones of the desert fringe. Surveys in the highlands were initiated in the Dhamar area in 1994, and with the aid of aerial photographs, it was imme- diately evident that the selected area did indeed include thou- sands of archaeological sites, nearly 400 of which have been recorded to date. The use of aerial photographs does not simply aid in the recognition of sites, but because most ancient settlements in the region are located on hilltops, the photographs indicate which summits had once been occup- ied. Not only does this make survey more efficient but, more important to surveyors working at altitudes of between 2000 and 3000 m above sea level, this saved us the laborious task of having to scale absolutely every hill. Once sites were recognized it was then possible to date them by diagnostic ceramics, which was then supported by radiocarbon dates obtained on charcoal recovered from soundings placed in a number of key sites. Now, after six field seasons more than 50 sites of the Bronze Age have been recorded. Many of these sites formed small hilltop strongholds that cover some 3-5 ha, but by the later stages of the Bronze Age (between about 1500 and 1200 BC), some of the larger set- tlements had shifted down to lower ground and expanded to cover up to 15 ha in area. In contrast to the oval buildings of the small (less than 1 ha) villages in the semi-arid desert fringe, buildings in the highland settlements are usually rec- tangular and frequently densely packed. The best example Fig. 1 Southern Arabia showing highlands (stipple) and the investigated so far is the 5 ha settlement of Hammat al-Qa, incense route leading from southern Oman to Hadhramaut, situated on a small mesa to the northeast of Dhamar. Here a Qataban and Saba and thence north through Ma{in towards the Levant. dense concentration of some sixty to eighty buildings were mapped stone-by-stone by Christopher Edens, Glynn Barratt and the author. Groups of buildings were ordered into blocks, intended to investigate the origins of the systems of terraced separated by occasional streets, the entire settlement being fields, as well as possible prehistoric antecedents of the Saba- enclosed by a fragmented circuit wall pierced by occasional eans and Himyarite states (Wilkinson et al.