ABSTRACT
The history of south Arabia (modern Yemen) is easier to reconstruct than that of east Arabia in that we are equipped with some ten thousand inscriptions. Unfortunately, however, these are not dated according to an absolute era until the first century AD and they almost never allude to events outside south Arabia. Scholars have tried to arrange them in chronological order according to the style of their script, but with hardly any firmly dated examples to provide a fixed point this method can offer no more than a rough indication. It is therefore very difficult to produce a sequential narrative of early south Arabian history. The period after the conquests of Alexander the Great is elucidated to some degree by the accounts of adventurous foreign explorers and merchants, but the earliest centuries, which witnessed such momentous developments as the emergence of complex states and the inception of the aromatics trade, as yet remain obscure.
