Article table of contents: S
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In pre-Islamic times, large quantities and a wide variety of artefacts, such as statues, statuettes, stelae, decorative friezes, etc., either of monumental proportions or of small dimensions, record the spread of sculpture in North and South Arabia. For the most part, these works are in stone, but bronze is also common, especially in South Arabia, while wood is rarely attested on account of its perishability. These sculptures are generally related to funerary or religious contexts but some of them come from an institutional context of royal power celebration.
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A distinct glyptic tradition in ancient South Arabia spans the period from the first millennium BCE to the early Christian era. Crafted from gold, silver, bronze and quartz, seals served as much as jewellery as they did as signing tools.
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For the Seleucid kingdom, East Arabia and the Gulf represented the main gateways to both the overland trade routes of the Peninsula and the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean. The available evidence suggests that the Seleucids established direct rule over the main Gulf islands for some periods of time, but exerted at most indirect and intermittent control over the East Arabian mainland.
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Rock art site with several hundred prehistoric and historic rock art panels, inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2015.
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A small monastery with a church, SBY9, has been identified and partially excavated on the island of Ṣīr Banī Yās. It dates to the late 7th and/or 8th century CE, and is considered to be a religious centre of the Church of the East. Other buildings are found nearby with related material culture, and are considered to be senior monks' cells (SBY2–7).
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Ancient fortified Sabaean city located in modern Yemen, west of Maʾrib. In the central courtyard of its main temple, dedicated to Almaqah, two Sabaean royal accounts of the late 8th – early 7th cent. BCE were displayed, illustrating the highly symbolic nature of this monument.
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Symbol of fertility and prosperity widely distributed in Arabia and in the nearby regions (Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran) from the 4th-3rd mill. BCE onwards. In Arabia, the snake symbol developed in particular during the end of the 2nd and the 1st mill. BCE.
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The largest island of the homonym archipelago comprising the islands Soqotra, ʿAbd al-Kūri, Samḥa and Darsa. It functioned as an important maritime hub within the Indian Ocean trading networks during the first centuries BCE / CE, and was one of the principal producers of frankincense, aloes, and dragon’s blood resin.
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Sorghum is a hot-climate drought-resistant crop used for human and animal consumption. It was domesticated in eastern Africa at least as early as the 4th millennium BCE before spreading throughout the African and the Asian continents in the following millennia and diversifying into five main landraces. Most of the early archaeobotanical evidence in Arabia has now been called into question and sorghum might in fact only date back to Classical and Islamic medieval periods.