A people who wrote on stone
The Sabaeans are called forgotten, but few ancient peoples left a larger body of their own words. South Arabian inscriptions number in the thousands, and they are the main reason the culture can be studied at all. They were cut in stone and bronze by the people of Saba and its neighbours in what is now Yemen. The texts cover roughly the first millennium BCE and the early centuries CE. This article is about what the writing says and how it is read; the political outline and the trade economy are covered separately.
The Musnad script
The inscriptions use a script often called Musnad, or monumental South Arabian. It is an alphabet of 29 letters that records consonants and was usually written from right to left, though early texts can run in other directions. It belongs to the broad family of consonantal alphabets that also includes the Phoenician and Hebrew scripts, although the exact path of its descent is debated.
Letters are crisp and geometric, which suits carving. Many texts were set on temple walls, boundary stones, altars and bronze plaques. A second, cursive form, usually called Zabur, was written on thin wooden sticks with a pen. Hundreds of such sticks have survived in the dry climate and give a view of everyday matters such as letters, contracts and accounts, and unlike the monuments they were not meant for display.
The inscriptions are in Sabaic and related languages of the region, such as Minaic, Qatabanic and Hadramitic. These are Semitic languages related to Arabic and Hebrew, though distinct from them.
How the texts were recovered
Europeans first became aware of the script in the nineteenth century, when travellers brought back copies and a few objects. Joseph Halévy, travelling in Yemen around 1870, copied hundreds of inscriptions at some personal risk, and Eduard Glaser later made large collections in the 1880s and 1890s. Scholars were able to read the texts through comparison with known Semitic languages and the recurrence of names and formulas. The process was slow, in the way that cuneiform decipherment and the work on the Rosetta Stone were slow, but South Arabian had no single key text. Today, projects continue to record and publish inscriptions, though work in Yemen has been hampered by conflict and by the risk to monuments.
Religion in the inscriptions
Most surviving texts are religious in purpose. They are dedications, in which a person offers a statue, an altar or a building to a god, usually asking for protection or reward. Formulas often name the donor, the god and the reason for the gift.
The chief god of Saba was Almaqah, whose title in texts is something like “lord of” particular places. Other deities appear too, including Athtar, who is widely found across South Arabia, and various local protector gods. The meaning of each god is partly guessed. A claim that Almaqah was a moon god is common in books, but it rests on interpretation and is not accepted by every scholar.
The inscriptions also record rituals, such as ceremonial hunts, offerings and confessions of wrongdoing. A set of texts describes people admitting ritual offences and asking the god’s pardon, which is an unusual kind of source for an ancient society.
The temples of Almaqah at Marib
Near Marib are two large sanctuaries dedicated to Almaqah. One, now known by the modern name Awwam, or Mahram Bilqis, is an oval enclosure with a colonnade. The other, known as Barran or Arsh Bilqis, was a temple with a row of tall pillars standing in front of its entrance. Both modern names refer to the queen of the Bible and Qur’an, but the names are later, and nothing in the inscriptions ties the sites to her.
The temples are known partly through their texts. Rulers added long inscriptions on the walls of the sanctuaries, which record building work, offerings and campaigns. The inscriptions help to date the structures, though dating is not always agreed. The ordered stone masonry and the large pillars show the skill of Sabaean builders, comparable in ambition to temple architecture elsewhere in the ancient Near East.
Law, property and public works
Beyond religion, inscriptions record practical law. Texts deal with the division of water, since irrigation was central to life around Marib, and with rules about property, boundaries and the duties of communities. Some record decrees that apply to a whole town, and sets of regulations that show something of how ancient legal systems worked in South Arabia, even if no complete law code has been found.
Building works are also reported. Rulers describe rebuilding city walls, digging canals and repairing the dam. The best-known text of this kind was set up by a ruler of Saba in the sixth century CE and describes the repair of the Marib dam after a breach, listing the numbers of workers and supplies. Its figures are the king’s own, and should be treated with caution, but they show how large such repairs were.
Limits of the evidence
Inscriptions are written by the powerful and the pious, so they tell more about kings and temples than about ordinary households. Many texts are formulaic, and their precise dates often depend on cross-references. Even so, the combination of stone monuments and wooden sticks gives a rare chance to read a South Arabian society in its own language, and new finds continue to refine the picture.