Wednesday 4 December 2013

South Arabia: Prosperity of the States

Assalamu'alaikum wa rahmatullah


Right now if we visit those ancient archeological sites in Hadramawt region, perhaps we could only see vast desert and sands with hot sun shining at the day. However, there was a great state with green farms and fertile land. There were city-states known as Mo'in, Saba' and Himyar. 

There were no Euphrates like in Iraq and no Nil river like in Egypt. Rain hardly pouring down there and they receive the rain once a year. They had no choice except to build a dam which is known as the Ma'arev Dam and they use the water kept their according to the necessity for agriculture activities. The original Sheba city-state was just an oval shaped city with the radius of one kilometer. They city was heavily fortified with walls and there were Eastern and Western gates. The name of the king who established the city-state was carved at the Western gate, Yas'amar Yabin the son of Samah 'Ali Yanoph, Ma'arev Saba.   

Some ancient states such as Mo'in, Baragesh, Shabwa, Sāfar and ana'ā could be grouped into vanquished old states because they were humped by thick desert sands. Only Sana'a could be managed to be reconstructed where a new city was build upon the old one. Sana'a became the center for Persian administration during their invasion in Yemen for some time around 7th century. One of its beautiful palace in ancient time was, the Ghamdan. One of Western researcher known as Halifix had discovered the city of Mu'in from the sand. The city was not known even to natives of Yemen herself until the archeologist dig up the remain of the ancient city from the sand. 

Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani (893-945 AD) in his literary work, al-Iklil mentioned that he founded the remains of palaces and edification of ancient Yemen. He even describes on how did those buildings and citadels look like in the book but many did not believe him. They accused him as exaggerating and making up stories out of his imagination. However, if we could fairly be considerate on the motives of the writer, we could also think that what benefit could he get if he tell lies? Will he acquire fortune with the lies? His stories had attracted Western researchers to see it with their own eyes and so we could see some of the such as Halifix, Arnot and Glazar among the Western archeologists who had unearthen the ancient cities from the sand in Southern Arabia. Al-Iklil talks about the genealogies of HImyarites and the wars of their kings in 10 volumes. Part eighth deals with the citadels and castles of South Arabia and it was edited and annotated by Müller in Die Burgen und Schlösser Sudarabiens (Vienna, 1879-1881).

Their efforts in the catchment of rain is among the most amazing things which we could see in the world and the dam is still in existence until nowadays.

Sealed with prayers for mercy, peace and love, amin!

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