
BY LAND AND BY SEA. A history of South Arabia before Islam recounted from inscriptions.
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- Series: Arabia Antica - Archaeological and Philological Series, 10
- Format: 14 x 21 cm
- Binding: Paperback
- Pages and Illustrations: 376, 15 b/w ill
- Publication Year: 2016
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In our collective memory there still lies the Queen of Sheba, her journey to Jerusalem to meet the wise King Salomon, or the Arabia Felix with its fame associated in the classical world with frankincense and other precious aromas. Nevertheless the history of the Arabia Felix, the country of the Queen of Sheba, is not well known to a wider public.
At the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, in south-western Arabia, in the region that today corresponds to the Republic of Yemen, some kingdoms were formed. Their history deserves to be better known.
Its desert and ocean protected Arabia Felix from the invasions of hostile armies. Its inhabitants did not remain isolated on their mountains and in their valleys. Their caravans crossed the desert, their ports hosted foreign ships, they had commercial and cultural contacts, by land and by sea, with the whole world.
The history of this culture was very long; from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD: from the Assyrian expansion into the Levant to the Roman empire, from the expedition only planned before his death by Alexander the Great to the failed expedition of Augustus, from Hellenism to the wars between Byzantium and the Persia, and from polytheism to Judaism and Christianity.
The events, the characters, the history of art, together with the beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of South Arabia, will be recounted in this book starting from direct written sources: the wealthy corpus of ancient South Arabian epigraphic public texts.
Preface
1. General remarks
Introduction
Written sources
Collections of inscriptions
The inscriptions
Minuscule writing texts
Archaeological sources
the territory
the formation of states between the late Bronze and Iron periods
The Iron period
The ideological bases of the state: the god
The ideological bases of the state: the king
The ideological bases of the state: the tribe
ASA languages
Saba? as a centre of linguistic and cultural diffusion
Writing Schools
The ?imyarite
chronology
2. The history recounted from inscriptions
the history begins (eighth-sixth centuries)
The eighth century. Saba?
The mukarrib
Wadi Ra?w
The Jawf
Nashsh
Yatha?amar Watar, son of