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Some observations on Greek and Latin data relating to South Arabia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

A. F. L. Beeston
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Extract

It is well known that, according to Pliny, the originating terminal for caravans conveying frankincense from South Arabia to the Mediterranean was at Shabwa; and there has been much talk of an ‘incense road’ followed by those caravans. It is, however, very unlikely that there was any single ‘road’ invariably followed. More probably, there was a multiplicity of routes, any one of which might be chosen according to prevailing circumstances. One such route runs directly from Shabwa to the eastern end of the Wādī Jawf, across a gravel corridor bisecting the Sayhad sand-desert, surveyed by Philby in 1936. The possibility of this route has been disregarded mainly because of a widely prevalent but tendentious translation of Pliny's remark, ‘evehi non potest nisi per Gebbanitas’, as ‘[the frankincense] cannot be exported [from Shabwa] except through the land of the Gebbanites’, where the text says nothing about a ‘land’ but merely ‘by the Gebbanites’. Other possible routes are one skirting the southern edge of the sand-desert and passing through Tumna', and one reaching the upper Wādī Bayḥān by way of Nisab and the Wadi Markha. West of Bayhan, the passes of Nagd. Marqad and Mablaqa clearly represent alternative routes.

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Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 1979 , pp. 7 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1979

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References

1 Naturalis historia, xii.63.

2 Sheba's daughters, London, 1939, ch. xiiGoogle Scholar.

3 ibid.

4 See more fully my ‘Pliny's Gebbanitae’, Proceedings of the fifth Seminar for Arabian Studies, 1971, London, 1972, 4–8Google Scholar.

5 It has so far proved impossible to pin-point this site. But consideration might at least be given to the claims of Thāj, which recent archaeological work has shown to have been one of the most important centres on the eastern Arabian seaboard. As for the discrepancy in the name, this could be discounted by supposing that ‘Gerrha’ simply represents Arabic qaryah ‘town’, used by the locals in preference to the distinctive name, in the same way that Constantinople became known as Istanbul, ‘in Town’.

6 xvi.4.18.

7 xvi.4.4.

8 Here Strabo (or his copyists) have got the names inverted: it was, and is, Ḥaḍramawt which was the typical incense-producing country, while myrrh came from further west in areas including Qatabān.

9 The author of the marginal note can have paid no attention to this factor; he was merely replacing a name otherwise totally unknown in the sources by one which was very familiar.

10 op. cit.

11 XII.32.

12 He also gives a mileage, but this figure is wildly discrepant in the manuscripts, and the figure of 1487½ adopted by the editors is simply the variant closest to the actual distance (since one Roman mile is fractionally less than 1.5 km., 1487½ would be slightly under 2,230 km.). However, it is difficult to see how Pliny could have known the mileage with anything like this degree of precision: the great Roman roads were marked off in milestones and thus capable of providing precise figures, but who can have paced out an Arabian caravan route in this way ? The nature of the figure strongly suggests that it could only have been obtained by calculation from the relative latitudes of Gaza and Tumna'; yet even so, it cannot be absolutely accurate for while no doubt the latitude of Gaza was known, it would be surprising if at this date the Mediterranean world had accurately known the latitude of Tumna'.

13 The adjectives are striking, for the South Arabian kingdoms were far from unwarlike, but on the contrary notably bellicose, and none more so than the Sabaeans. This suggests that the force which the Romans encountered was not one of the professional armies (khamīs) of the South Arabian states, but a collection of local farmers apprehensive of having their fields pillaged by the passing troops. At the same time, one has to admit the possibility that even a khamīs might well have appeared ‘inexperienced’ to the Romans, as having little or no knowledge of tactical array and battle order (see my Warfare in ancient South Arabia, London, 1976, 16Google Scholar).

14 xvi.4.24.

15 See the inscriptions Sharafaddin 32 and Jamme 665, for Sabaean movements, and Jamme 643 for the Haḍramite one (all translated in Beeston, , op. oit., 51, 52, 45)Google Scholar.

16 Sharafaddin 32, 1. 15. In this text, ‘BRN is explicitly called a ' town’.

17 It is true that the distance from Sabaean Mārib to Nagrān would be about right. But it seems to me incredible that a survivor of the campaign could have correctly remembered the names of the various towns, while at the same time misplacing the location of the one and only battle that had taken place, namely ‘at the river’ near ‘Asca’.

18 Jamme 643, 11. 20–21.

19 A person of this name is mentioned in RES 4085 without royal title and without the customary royal cognomen, though his father does have a royal cognomen. In this text he figures as overlord of a ‘tribe’ called the 'RYM, whose chieftain (kbr) sponsored irrigation works in palm groves at a place called RMN. RES 4938 also mentions RMN as an area of agricultural exploitation. But the original provenance of both texts is unknown; whether they have any relevance at all to Strabo's Ilasaros and Rhammanites is uncertain. But whatever be the case, it does not remove the insuperable difficulty, as I see it, of supposing that Strabo, being well aware that Mārib by the great dam belonged to the Sabaeans, should have here said that it belonged to the Rhammanites. One feature of RES 4085 is that the author is called chieftain of the whole ‘tribe’ 'RYM, an unusual expression which suggests that the group may have included more than one geographically sundered section. Is it too hazardous to surmise that one section may have migrated to al-'Abr ?