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  • Abecedary

    See Text typology

  • Abīyadaʿ Yathaʿ

    Mounir Arbach

    King of Maʿīn (South Arabia), c. 5th century BCE. His reign marked the beginning of the kingdom’s golden age with major construction projects and intense trade relations with Egypt, the Levant and Assyria.

  • Abīyathaʿ

    Mounir Arbach

    Around the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE, the name Abīyathaʿ / Abīyathaʿ Ghaylān recurs repeatedly in the region of Najrān, Qaryat al-Faw, and in Eastern Arabia. These mentions may correspond to one or more rulers who had authority over eastern and/or south-western Arabia.

  • Abīʾēl

    See Queen [Arabian]

  • Abraha

    George Hatke

    A Christian, Ethiopian-born king of Ḥimyar who participated in the Aksumite invasion of South Arabia in 525 and subsequently seized the Himyarite throne, ruling independently from Aksum. After suppressing a revolt within South Arabia, he set about re-establishing the Himyarite Empire, which during his reign extended over most of the Arabian Peninsula.

  • Administrative architecture

    See Architecture III. Palatial architecture

  • Aelius Gallus

    Laïla Nehmé

    The name of the Roman prefect of Egypt from 27 to 25 BCE. In an Arabian context, Aelius Gallus is famous as the leader of the expedition to South Arabia he was ordered to undertake by the emperor Augustus. The motives behind this expedition are usually considered to be both economic and political, but are still debated.

  • Agatharchides of Cnidus [Arabia in ...]

    Philipp Seubert

    Agatharchides (before 200 BCE? - after 145 BCE) of Cnidus is the author of 'On the Erythrean Sea', a geographic and ethnographic description of the countries around the Indian Ocean. Book V of these volumes contains one of the most detailed ancient descriptions of the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

  • Agraeans

    Philipp Seubert

    Agraeans (Greek Ἀγραῖοι, Latin Agraei), the name assigned by Eratosthenes (transmitted by Strabo Geog. XVI, 4, 2), Pliny (HN VI, 154; 159; 161), Dionysius Periegetes (v. 956, from Eratosthenes or Strabo), Ptolemy (Geog. V, 19, 2) and Stephanus (s.u. Ἀγραῖοι, according to Strabo) to one or several tribes (ethnos / gens) in Arabia.

  • Aksum (Site)

    See Aksum [Arabia and…]

  • Aksum [Arabia and…]

    George Hatke

    Aksum is both the name of a kingdom located in northern Ethiopia and the capital of said kingdom. The Aksumite kingdom, whose lingua franca was the Ethiosemitic language of Gəʿəz, enters the historical record around the turn of the Common Era and came to an end around the seventh century. Throughout much of that period, the Aksumites were in regular contact – sometimes amicable, sometimes hostile – with the South Arabian kingdoms of Sabaʾ and Ḥimyar, at times invading and occupying parts of South Arabia.

  • al-Aswad ʿAbhala ibn Kaʿb al-ʿAnsī

    See Prophets and prophecy in Arabia

  • al-Basūs war

    Peter Webb

    A protracted series of battles waged in central Arabia between the Bakr and Taghlib lineage groups during the early sixth century CE. Muslim-era literature narrates the war as one of the classic epics of pre-Islamic Arabian history, and legendary accounts proliferated in scholarly writing and popular epics.

  • al-ʿUqla

    Solène Marion de Procé

    Isolated place of worship comprising a succession of basins where enthronement ceremonies of the Ḥaḍramawt kings took place.

  • Alabaster

    Caroline Durand

    Whitish and translucent soft stone widely used in Antiquity for ornamental sculpture in high and low relief, and for small objects, in particular for perfume vases. South Arabia was one of the main calcite-alabaster sources from the first millennium BCE onwards. Quarries dating to the Sabaean period have been found in the region of Ṣirwāḥ (Yemen).

  • Altar

    See Cult objects

  • Amīr

    Mounir Arbach

    An important tribe of the Najrān oasis and the name of a kingdom in the 3rd and 2nd century BCE. Prior to this period, the tribe of Amīr was part of a tribal federation forming the core of the kingdom of Muhaʾmir.

  • Ammianus Marcellinus [Arabia in ...]

    Saliou Catherine

    Based on Ammianus Marcellinus’ 'History', it is possible to study representations pertaining to Arabs, as well as the history of the Arabs, called Saraceni, in the fourth century.

  • an-Nasāʾib

    See Kamna (Site)

  • Ancient South Arabian (Languages)

    Alessia Prioletta

    Ancient South Arabian (ASA) designates a group of four Semitic languages, Sabaic, Qatabanic, Minaic and Hadramitic, attested from the end of the 2nd- beginning of the 1st millennium BCE until the advent of Islam in what is now Yemen, in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. ASA inscriptions have also been found in Ethiopia, northern Arabia and Dhofar in Oman.

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