THE ANCIENT KINGDOMS OF SOUTHERN ARABIA

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27706, 9 July 1955, Page 3

THE ANCIENT KINGDOMS OF SOUTHERN ARABIA

[Reviewed by J.J.S.}

Qataban and Sheba. By Wendell Phil-I lips. Gollanez. 335 pp. Few areas of the globe offer richer j possibilities to the archaeologist thanl j Southern Arabia. Long before the ; j Christian era it was the home of a I flourishing civilisation which had! ! risen to wealth and power chiefly on the profits of the trade in incense and j spices. Classical writers like Strabo j and Pliny refer to its great walled | cities, magnificent temples and palaces.i and marvellous irrigation works. The Emperor Augustus was tempted to add i it to the Roman Empire, but his legions I were lost in the desert sands, and the; one and only attempt to effect a milt-1 tary conquest of Arabia ended in disas- j trous failure. Soon afterwards, however, the Romans and the Abyssmians secured control of the sea routes j through the Red Sea and the Indian, Ocean, and the kingdoms of South .'.labia fell slowly into decay. Their I commerce declined; many of their | people emigrated; their cities crumbled . into ruin, and in the sixth century the i oreat dam of Marib. a stupendous work . of engineering, burst and was never, repaired, and the desert sand covered j what had once been fertile fields. ■ Then came the rise of Islam, and ■ later generations of Arabs, having accepted the religion of the Prophet, had no interest in their pagan ancestors, whose history and past glories were speedily forgotten. Only within the last century or so have Western explorers come across the long-buried ! ruins of ancient towns and learnt to i read the language of the innumerable inscriptions that have been dug out of them. But no thorough archaeological investigation has been possible. A good deal of the country is un- ■: mapped: much of it is controlled by | turbulent nomad tribes, and even • many civilised Arabs view all foreign [ unbelievers with suspicion and disi trust. A handful of individual > travellers, like Freya Stark and St., John Philby. have penetrated some I hitherto forbidden areas and added; to our knowledge of Arabian antiqui- : ties, but the first big scientific j

archaeological expedition to these . parts was not organised till 1950. I Its leader, a young American named Wendell Phillips, has now told the story of the two seasons he and his colleagues spent in Southern Arabia between 1950 and 1952. Their object was to search for traces of two ancient kingdoms, Qataban and Saba, by uncovering the ruins of their capitals, Timna and Marib, in the hope of finding inscriptions which would enable them to settle many difficult points of chronology, for little or nothing was known of the origin of these states or of their relations j with one another. Saba, the stronger i of the two, eventually absorbed: Qataban, and the inhabitants of this. corner of Arabia were known to ; the Greeks and Romans as Sabaeans. i The kingdom of Saba must have been i at least as old at Solomon’s time,! since the Book of Kings relates the. visit of a Queen of Sheba ( the i Hebrew name for Saba) to that wise | monarch. The members of the expedition cherished the hope of unearthing some reference to her. but; in this they were disappointed. The site of Timna lies in the territory of the Aden‘Protectorate, and the explorers were thus able to secure the help and co-operation of the British authorities, but to reach Marib it was necessary to enter the kingdom of Yemen, whose relations with Britain were not over friendly because of a long and unsettled frontier dispute, and whose rulers had little desire to have foreigners poking around their countrv In 1948 there had been an attempted coup d’etat in the Yemen: the 84-year-old king was murdered:

i the throne was seized by a usurper, I and after a sharp struggle he was i defeated and killed by the dead ' monarch’s son, a man in his fifties, I who although he had gained power, ■ lived in perpetual dread of suffering ' his father’s fate. The American ' archaeologists arrived at a particularly | awkward time. However, much to ! their surprise, they were admitted and I were allowed to work at Marib for (several months. Then they ran into i trouble; their hosts grew increasingly i hostile; they were subjected to I harrassing restrictions; a friendly ! governor was removed, and they were left isolated in the midst of armed | guards who treated them as prisoners, i Believing their lives were in danger, j they decided to escape, and abandonI ing their expensive equipment and j valuable finds, they piled into a couple ;of lorries and made a dash for the ! frontier 40 miles away. The Yemeni ' side of the storv has not been fully I told, so it is difficult to determine i the precise degree of blame for this j unhappy outcome. ' However, the expedition was by no j means fruitless. In Timna a Temple !of Athtar <the Arabian Venus) was i excavated: statues were found .bear- ' ing obvious marks of Hellenistic in--1 fluence, and evidence came to light 'to indicate that the place had been ! burnt about the beginning of the Christian era. when the ‘ Sabaeans apparently annexed Qataban to their dominions. Among the inscriptions dug up was one assigned by the experts to the tenth century 8.C.: if this is correct, it is the oldest so far found in Arabia, and provides a valuable link in the chain connecting the South Arabian alphabet with the Phoenician. In Marib the archaeologists were able to make a detailed survey of two remarkable structures, the fabulous dam i with walls 50 feet high, which had been iseen by only three Europeans ■ before 11951. and the Temple of Bilqis (the 1 Mohammedan name for the Biblical ' Queen of Sheba, though there is I nothing to show that she was connected with the building), an oval- | shaped edifice 1000 feet in circumference with many of its huge columns [and pillars still standing. In the fori tress overlooking the ruined city the ' explorers were shown 600 alabaster (statues which had been collected and i stored there over a long period of vears, but they were forbidden to make a close examination of them. It is indeed lamentable that so much precious material had to be left behind in their flight, but enough has been revealed to whet the appetites of all who are interested in Semitic antiquity, and one cap only hope that the work so abruptly broken off will be resumed in happier circumstances in the near future. Dr. Phillips’s book is a lively record of adventure and discovery, and is illustrated by maps, (diagrams and over 80 excellent photographs. ,

: ANDREW OF GALILEE (Longmans. : 1276 p.p.) by I. G. Capaldi, S.J., is a i straightforward and moving re- 1 | telling of the life of the Apostle ; Andrew. Both in the Gospels and . ■in the history of the early Church, the : ' figure of Andrew is overshadowed i by that of Simon Peter, his brother, : and of John, the son of Zebedee, his ; [ close friend. Father Capaldi has therefore endeavoured, with con- , siderable success, to extract his story and reconstruct his personality for [ the benefit of the ordinary Christian reader. Bringing Biblical Palestine vividly before his reader’s eye, he also writes well and perceptively of , the character of the Apostle. His , story is based almost exclusively on the' Gospel narrative, rejecting all legendary and spurious material; and the life ends with the Resurrection, and without attempting to pursue Andrew into the more obscure days of his later apostolate.