The Arabs • 25Southern Arabia
During the time when Rome and Persia seemed to dominate the Middle
East, there was actually a third power, far off and almost ignored. Southern
Arabia, with its monsoonal rain and lush vegetation, seemed a world
apart, but it fostered the growth of several city-states. Saba (whence came
that mythic queen of Sheba to call on Solomon) is the best known. Even
before the time of Christ, its people, the Sabaeans, had developed a thriv¬
ing trade between their base in Yemen and the far shores of the Indian
Ocean. They were the first people to make India and its products known
to the Roman world and to colonize East Africa. The Sabaeans dammed
up mountain streams and terraced the Yemen hillsides to support an elab¬
orate agriculture. Their main export crop was frankincense, used by the
pagan Romans to mask the offensive odor when they cremated their dead.
The spread of Christianity, which replaced cremation with burial, hurt the
frankincense trade. When Ethiopia turned Christian and teamed up with
the Byzantines, the Yemeni Arabs, whose kings had by then converted to
Judaism, got caught in the middle. Several dam breaks, an Ethiopian inva¬
sion, and a commercial depression combined during the sixth century to
weaken southern Arabia.
Sixth-Century Conditions
The political situation in Arabia then ranged from complex to chaotic. The
last of the great south Arabian kingdoms was reduced in 525 to an Ethio¬
pian dependency. Three outside powers contended for control: the Byzan¬
tine Empire, champion of Orthodox Christianity; Sasanid Persia, ruled by
Zoroastrians but harboring Nestorian Christians, Jews, Buddhists, dissi¬
dent Manichaeans, and other sects; and Ethiopia, which espoused the same
Monophysite Christianity as the Byzantines' rebellious Egyptian subjects,
the Copts. Each empire had a client Arab tribe that it paid handsomely and
furnished with the trappings of monarchy in return for military service.
The peninsula was often ravaged by wars among these three tribes: the
pro-Byzantine Ghassanids of the northwest; the pro-Sasanid Lakhmids,
with their capital at Hira, near the Euphrates; and the Christian tribe of
Kinda, situated in central Arabia and friendly to Ethiopia. Other Arab
tribes, some still animist (believing that natural objects embodied spiritual
powers), others partly Zoroastrian, Jewish, or Christian (though usually
not Orthodox), would mix in their quarrels. Southern Arabia underwent
two consecutive foreign occupations: Ethiopian (ca. 525-575) and Persian
(ca. 575-625).