Yemen: The People and Culture (II) [Archives:2006/944/Culture]

By: Abu Al-Kalmah Al-Tayyibah
Author: Qadhi Abdullah Abdul-Wahhab Al-Shamahi

Language: Arabic

Publisher: Dar Al-Hana Printing

Year Published: 1973

No. of Pages: 370

The book starts off by giving a broad anthropological and geographical view of the world, in which he traces the Yemeni people as part of the Semitic Race, within the Caucasoid Group. The other races in the group are the “Hamites1” and “Arians”. The other two groups according to the author are the “Negroid” or “Black” and the “Mongoloid” or “Yellow”. Then he notes the different sub-races among the Semites (Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Aramaics, Ethiopians, etc. He classifies the Arabs as being three sub-classes: The extinct Arabs, the Qahtanis (Southern Arabs) and Adnanis (Northern Bedouins). The latter He cites his references for these details from Western historians (Wells, Van Ness Meir ?). An interesting presentation is made of how the original Semites were in fact the Arabs and the term Semites was introduced by early Jewish historians, so as to isolate the Arabs from the Semitic race, when in fact they are the original race of all Semites, and accordingly monopolize this classification2. Later, the Western orientalists saw this as a good means of inciting friction among the Semites, thus facilitating their colonialist ambitions.

On the geographical analysis, the author notes that Yemen during the early history of man in the Glacial Age was the birthplace of civilized human settlement, for the simple reason that its climate then was accommodating to settled human life, whereas most of the Northern human settlements (Asia Minor, Europe, etc, where still under glacial cover. While maintaining Yemen as the point of origin of all the Semites, he then recounts some of the chronology passed down by Arab historians which gives the sequence of ethnic supremacy as follows: The Giants (the likes of Goliath in the Biblical tale of David and Goliath), the first A'ad people, the Second A'ad People, Thamud, Qahtan and Ya'arub, Jurhum I, Jurhum II, Oman and Hadhramaut. For the “extinct” Arabs, Shamahi notes that there is little historical record of their existence, but here is mention of them in the Scriptures (the Old Testament, Jewish Scriptures and the Qur'an) and there are some locations that bear their names. He states that chroniclers pointed out that the last stronghold of the “Giants” was in Mecca until Ya'arub the Son of Qahtan sent his brother Jurhum to drive them out of the city in prehistoric times. However, the Giants, as well as the Two A'ad nations are still drowned in mystery except what brief mention is made of them in the Qur'an. The A'ad I settled in the Al-Ahqaf area, whereas A'ad II were the descendants of the punishment inflicted upon the A'ad I people, who defied the prophet of God, who sought to remove them from idol worship and turn them to the worship of One God. The former had migrated to other areas of Hadhramaut. These were followed by the Nation of Thamud and settled in the area between Asir (now in Saudi Arabia) and Hadhramaut. Continuing his dissertation about this sequence of Arabs of prehistoric times as he calls them, the author finally comes to the Yemeni dynasties that do have ample records to depict their existence. These dynasties or kingdoms are: Ma'en, Saba, Himyar, Qataban, Hadhramaut, Awsan, Jaba or Habban, Sama'a Hashid and Arba'a. The most prominent of these kingdoms are the first three.

The Ma'en Kingdom. There were six dynasties for this Kingdom, which the author states existed between 1500 – 800 BC. Twenty eight kings succeeded to the throne and their names were found in some of the stone engravings found in Al-Jouf Governorate. The author points out that Ma'en's prosperity and expansion was not the result of conquest and war, but of trade and commerce. Ma'en's influence extended from the Northern Mediterranean coastal towns in the Levant to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea ports that it controlled. In addition to control of traffic between the East and West with the Frankincense Trail and other ancient historical trade routes, Ma'en had its own industrial output as well. To some of the historians, who suggest that the Ma'enians were offshoots of the Babylonians (there are some records of Ma'en in Sumerian inscriptions in Babel that go back to 3750 BC), the author notes that the names of the Ma'enian kings were not the same as those of Babylonian kings and other peculiarities that differentiated both nation-states of ancient times. Because of the mentioned inscriptions, the author contends that the Ma'enians existed well back into the Fourth Millennium BC.

Although the author mentions the period of the prevalence of the Sabaean Kingdom as from 850 BC to 115 BC, he asserts that they are really emanating from the same ancestral roots and both the Sabaeans and Ma'enians had used names that are normally associated with each respective nations.

The author then enters into a discussion of the advent of East-West conflict with the rise of the Roman Empire as an offshoot of Hellenic culture. The highlight of the discussion was the depiction of how Julius Caesar had extended the power of Rome in all directions and gave Rome prominence that only the German barbarians to the North East and the Yemenite Arabs in the South were still independent of. The former were not more than “bandits and nomads”, with out a settled culture, whereas the Romans saw the Yemenis as a standing civilization that had to be contended with.

1 I.e., the sons of Ham, son of Shem, son of Noah.

2 Wikipedia, the free Internet Encyclopedia notes: ” The Proto-Semitic peoples, ancestors of the Semites in the Middle East before the break-up of the hypothesized original proto-Semitic language into various modern Semitic languages, are thought to have been originally from the Arabian Peninsula. Other theories place proto-Semitic in the Ethiopian Highlands.
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