Saba in context
The Sabaeans were the people of Saba, one of several kingdoms in the highland and desert-edge regions of what is now Yemen. Their capital was Marib, on the edge of the desert east of the highlands. The society is well known from inscriptions and excavations, and the label “lost” or “forgotten” overstates it: scholars have studied Saba for well over a century. What is thin is the narrative history, which depends on its own inscriptions and on outside writers, who often repeated stories.
Saba’s wealth came from two things: trade and irrigated farming. Both are covered below, along with the better-known tradition of a queen from Sheba. The kingdom’s political chronology and its writing are treated in companion articles; this one stays with the economy and with the traditions that grew up around it.
Frankincense, myrrh and the incense trade
Frankincense and myrrh are resins from trees that grow in southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Burned as incense, they were used in temples, funerals and households across the Near East and the Mediterranean, and myrrh also had a role in perfumes and medicines. Demand was steady and the supply came from a limited area, which created profit for those who controlled the routes.
In the first millennium BCE, the incense trade ran in caravans up the western side of the Arabian Peninsula, passing oases and market towns, towards Egypt, Gaza and the Levant. The use of the domesticated camel for long-distance transport is generally thought to have helped make these routes practical. Saba sat at a junction where goods from the coast and from neighbouring producing regions could be gathered and sent north. Other kingdoms, such as Ma’in and Qataban, shared in the business, and in later centuries the Nabataean society of Petra took over much of the northern end.
We should not picture a single “Incense Road” with one owner. The routes shifted, and the trade included other goods, such as spices and aromatics, some of which probably came by sea from farther east. Greek and Roman writers, including the author of a first-century CE sailing handbook for the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, describe South Arabia as rich, but they sometimes exaggerate. Later, as sea voyages made use of the monsoon trade winds, the sea route gained ground and the overland caravans became less dominant, though the exact balance is debated.
Incense also had religious weight. Ancient Egyptians had long sought aromatic resins, and expeditions to the land of Punt, described in Egyptian records, are often connected with incense trees. Egyptian practice in embalming techniques also made use of resins. The Sabaeans were therefore supplying a good with a long history of cultural importance.
Farming and the Marib dam
Marib lies in a region with little rain but with seasonal floods that run down from the highlands through the wadi called Wadi Adhanah. The Sabaeans built canals, sluices and a dam to spread these floodwaters over fields. The Marib dam is the best known of these works. Its earliest phases are commonly dated to roughly the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, though the dating is debated, and the structure was raised and repaired many times over the following centuries.
The dam was not a high wall that stored water for the whole year. It diverted and distributed floodwater to two irrigated areas, north and south of the wadi, supporting crops and an oasis around the capital. Keeping it working took organised labour, and inscriptions record repairs. One later text from the sixth century CE reports work after the dam failed, and traditionally the final breach is placed around 570 CE. The Qur’an refers to a flood connected with a dam in the story of Saba, and later writers made this a symbol of the end of an old order. As a historical account of a single catastrophe, the story is simplified, since the decline of the oasis seems to have been gradual.
The Queen of Sheba
The best-known Sabaean in popular memory may be a person who is unlikely to be documented at all. The Hebrew Bible, in the books of Kings and Chronicles, describes a queen of Sheba who travels to Jerusalem to test King Solomon with riddles, bringing spices, gold and precious stones. The Qur’an tells a related story of a queen and Solomon, and she is given the name Bilqis in later Islamic tradition. Ethiopian tradition, preserved in a medieval text called the Kebra Nagast, gives the queen a different story and links her to the Ethiopian royal line.
Whether a historical queen lies behind these accounts is not known. No South Arabian inscription mentions her, and the dating of Solomon’s reign is itself debated. Some scholars see the story as reflecting memory of South Arabian trade with the Levant, and that is a reasonable reading, but it is an interpretation, not a finding. Local ruins in Marib are sometimes named after Bilqis in modern times, but this is a naming tradition and not evidence.
Trade and society
Saba was organised around towns, temples and tribal groups, and its merchants and rulers shared in the wealth from the caravans. The Romans knew of the region as “Arabia Felix”, fortunate Arabia. A Roman expedition under Aelius Gallus around 26 to 25 BCE reached the Sabaean area but did not succeed in conquering it. The survival of the kingdom for so long owes something to its position, its water management and the demand for its products.