Old South Arabian

Old South Arabian is a group of closely related Semitic languages of pre-Islamic Yemen, among them Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian and Hadramitic. Almost everything known of it comes from inscriptions, of which many thousands survive, cut in a distinctive monumental alphabet of angular letters designed to be carved rather than written, and A. F. L. Beeston's grammar of Sabaic is the standard description of the best attested member of the group. A cursive form written on wooden sticks was identified much later and has widened the picture considerably, because it records ordinary correspondence rather than public dedications.

The inscriptions are largely religious. Each kingdom had a principal deity: Almaqah for Saba, Wadd for Main, Amm for Qataban, Sayin for Hadramawt, alongside the star god Athtar, who is shared between them. The great temple of Almaqah at Marib was a pilgrimage centre with an oval precinct, and the state and the temple were not separable, since the king's standing and the god's cult supported one another.

Much of the corpus consists of dedications, and of confession texts in which a person records an offence, states the affliction that followed it, and dedicates an object in acknowledgement. That genre is unusually direct evidence for what ordinary people believed the gods punished, because it is their own account of the matter rather than a priestly prescription written for them.

The South Arabian kingdoms were built on incense. Frankincense and myrrh grow in Dhofar and Hadramawt and almost nowhere else, and the caravan route north through the Hejaz to the Mediterranean carried them to temples across the ancient world, so that a religion in Rome or Jerusalem depended on the agriculture of southern Arabia. Nigel Groom's study reconstructs the trade in detail. The dam at Marib, one of the great engineering works of the ancient world, watered the kingdom that controlled it.

Late in the period the region turned monotheist. From the fourth century the inscriptions stop naming the old gods and begin invoking a single lord of heaven, and both Judaism and Christianity became established there. The Himyarite king known as Dhu Nuwas adopted Judaism and is associated with a massacre of Christians at Najran in the sixth century, which brought Aksumite intervention from across the Red Sea and a period of Ethiopian and then Persian rule.

That is the immediate background to Islam, and the Quran alludes both to the people of the ditch and to the collapse of the dam. Old South Arabian died out as Arabic spread. The unrelated Modern South Arabian languages, Mehri and Soqotri among them, are still spoken and are not its descendants, a point regularly confused in general accounts.