ABSTRACT
Throughout antiquity, until almost its end, pre-Islamic Arabia largely stood apart from the rest of the ancient world, other than by long-distance trade. Protected by the immensity of its vast deserts and the inhospitable nature of its rocky or sandy coasts, this huge rectangle – a subcontinent as large as India – was never incorporated overall into any of the empires of Near-Eastern antiquity. The Assyrians had a brief ascendancy over the north-west corner and the early Gulf states; Nabonidus of Babylon lived in Teima (NW) fleetingly; and the Achaemenid power in turn followed Assyrian precedent. Alexander dreamed of surveying Arabia’s periphery for future acquisition of her inland resources, but achieved neither. On behalf of Caesar Augustus, Aelius Gallus in 25 BC failed heroically to reach Arabia’s remoter wealth, an early imperial failure masked by a Roman sea-squadron’s brief punitive raid on the port of Aden to overpaint defeat with a ‘success’. In the east, Parthians could overawe the Gulf kingdoms, and the Sassanids take them over; but a substantial external supremacy over Arabia only came in the late sixth century AD when the Sassanian ruler Chosroes I sent his agent to take over the entire Himyarite realm (embodying much of south and central Arabia) when his ruling protégé there was murdered in AD 577, adding all this to his ascendancy in the area of Oman and the Gulf. For most people in the Near East and Mediterranean, early Arabia and its cultures long remained conceptually hazy and distant, a situation still true in western lands into the nineteenth century and in good measure even during the twentieth. Furthermore, in practice, we have two ancient Arabias, not just one (see Figure 5.1):
● an Eastern Arabia, along the Gulf coast and including Oman (ancient Magan); and ● a Western Arabia, in two zones:
(i) the south-west (now Yemen), reaching northward towards Najran in southwesternmost Saudi Arabia, and eastward in the south through Hadramaut towards Dhofar (‘incense-territory’) in modern western Oman; and a much less extensive area in
(ii) the north-west, based on the oases of Al-‘Ula (Dedan), Teima, Dumah
Between and separating these two ‘north-south’ margins on the east and west, there extends a vast swathe of sandy and stony desert from the Nafud up north towards Syria,
all the way south to the dunes of Rub al-Khali and Ramlat Sabatayn, into Yemen’s northeastern borders.
