Ḥimyar is the Arabic form of the name of a people who appear in the inscriptions as Ḥmyr and in Greek sources as Homeritai. They occupied the extreme southwest of the peninsula and had their capital at Ẓafār, a site some nine miles southeast of present-day Yarīm, on the motor road from Aden and Taʿizz to Sanaa. The first appearance of Ḥimyar in history is in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (latter half of the 1st century ce); a short time later the Greek document known to scholars as the Periplus Maris Erythraei mentions an individual who was “king of two nations, the Homerites and the Sabaeans.” But this dual kingship was not definitive: throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries there were phases of warfare between native Sabaean rulers and Ḥimyarite ones. Royal titulature in this period is confusing: alongside “kings of Sabaʾ” are found “kings of Sabaʾ and the Raydān,” but the implications of the latter are still debated. A thesis advanced by the Arab scholar M.A. Bafaqih is that the former are native Sabaeans and the latter heads of a dual kingship over both peoples. Others have held that native Sabaean rulers sometimes claimed the longer title even when there was little reality behind it. Moreover, the Ḥimyarites, until the 6th century ce, used the Sabaean language for their epigraphic records, and there are no inscriptions or other monuments at Ẓafār or elsewhere in the true Ḥimyarite area that can be confidently dated before 300 ce.

In the last decades of the 3rd century ce, a Ḥimyarite ruler named Shammar Yuharʿish ended the independent existence of both Sabaʾ and Hadhramaut, and, inasmuch as Qatabān had already disappeared from the political map, the whole of Yemen was united under his rule. Thereafter, the royal style was “King of Sabaʾ and the Raydān and Hadhramaut and Yamnat.” Arabic writers call him and his successors the Tabābiʿah (singular Tubbaʿ), and, because in the centuries immediately preceding Islam Yemen was dominated by the Ḥimyarites, the Arabic writers (followed by many 19th-century Europeans) apply the term Ḥimyaritic to all pre-Islamic monuments of Yemen, irrespective of date or location.

The Tubbaʿ kings

A major break with the past was made in the 4th century ce, when the polytheistic religion of the earlier cultures was replaced by a monotheistic cult of “The Merciful (Raḥmān), Lord of heaven and earth.” There was also an increasing interest, both friendly and hostile, in central Arabia. Already in the 2nd and 3rd centuries ce Sabaean, Ḥimyaro-Sabaean, and Ḥimyarite rulers had employed central Arabian Bedouin mercenaries; and the first Tubbaʿ king, Shammar Yuharʿish, sent a diplomatic mission to the Sasanian court at Ctesiphon.

The kingdom of Aksum in Eritrea is mentioned in Sabaean texts of the 2nd century ce as having some not very definable link with Habashite (“Abyssinian”) people settled in the Arabian coastal areas, who were throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries a thorn in the flesh of both Sabaean and Ḥimyaro-Sabaean rulers, even at one point occupying Ẓafār. Tension between Aksum and Ḥimyar reached a climax in 517 or 522 ce, with a Jewish Ḥimyarite king (traditionally said to have been a convert to Judaism) named Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar. It seems that the conflict escalated from what had been (in one account) a trade dispute. Yūsuf massacred the entire Ethiopian population of the port of Mocha and of Ẓafār and, about a year later, the Christians of Najrān. Aksum retaliated with invasion, leading to the defeat and death of Yūsuf (who is known in Arabic tradition mostly by the nickname Dhū Nuwās) and the establishment of a puppet kingdom in Yemen subject to Aksum. Somewhat later the Ḥimyarite king Abraha regained some measure of independence, and he was responsible for major repairs to the Maʾrib Dam in the 540s. His reign was followed by a fairly brief Persian occupation of Yemen. Early in the 7th century Yemen accepted Islam peacefully, and its antique native culture merged into the Islamic culture.

Dedān and Al-Ḥijr

It is possible that the Minaean settlement at Dedān (see above) coexisted with a native Dedānite town. But only one “king of Dedān” is recorded. This kingdom seems to have been replaced quite soon by a kingdom of Liḥyān (Greek: Lechienoi). The entire area, however, was not long in coming under the rule of the Nabataean kings of a dynasty (centred at Petra) covering the 1st century bce and the 1st ce; and the ancient town of Dedān was eclipsed by a new Nabataean foundation just to the north at Al-Ḥijr (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ). At the beginning of the 2nd century ce the Nabataean kingdom was annexed by Rome, the official decree of annexation being dated 111. The Nabataeans, like the Minaeans before them, had been involved in the caravan trade, and it would appear probable that for at least a time after the annexation they continued this role, under Roman aegis. Subsequent history of the area remains obscure.

Kindah

Kindah was a Bedouin tribal kingdom quite unlike the organized states of Yemen; its kings exercised an influence over a number of associated tribes more by personal prestige than by coercive settled authority. Its area of influence was south-central Arabia, from the Yemeni border nearly up to Mecca. The discovery of the tomb of a king of Kindah (datable to perhaps the 3rd century ce) at Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil, on the trade route linking Najrān with the east coast, suggests that this site was in all likelihood the royal headquarters. Sabaean texts of the 2nd and 3rd centuries contain a number of references to Kindah, attesting relations sometimes hostile (as when an assault was made on Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil) and other times friendly (as evidenced by the supply of Kindite troops for the Yemenite rulers). This pattern of relationship seems to have continued down to the early 6th century, when the Kindite hegemony collapsed, partly as a consequence of tribal wars and partly perhaps as a result of the emergent power of the Meccan Quraysh at that time. The last Kindah king, the famous poet Imruʾ al-Qays ibn Ḥujr, became a fugitive.

Al-Ḥīrah

Al-Ḥīrah was similarly a Bedouin tribal kingdom, the kings of which are commonly designated the Lakhmids. According to tradition, the founder of the dynasty was ʿAmr, whose son Imruʾ al-Qays ibn ʿAmr died in 328 ce and was entombed at Al-Nimārah in the Syrian desert. His funerary inscription is written in an extremely difficult type of script. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the inscription, and a lively controversy has arisen over its precise implications. One thing that is certain is that Imruʾ al-Qays claimed the title “king of all the Bedouin” and claimed to have campaigned successfully over the entire north and centre of the peninsula, as far as the border of Najrān. In Muslim sources it is said that he was given by the Sasanian king Shāpūr II a “governorship” over the Bedouin of northeast Arabia, being charged with the task of restraining their incursions into Sasanian territory. Later kings of the dynasty settled themselves definitively in that area, at Al-Ḥīrah (near modern Kufah). They remained influential throughout the 6th century, and only in 602 was the last Lakhmid king, Nuʿmān ibn al-Mundhir, put to death by the Sasanian king Khosrow II (Parvīz) and the kingdom swept away. In the 6th century Al-Ḥīrah was a considerable centre of Nestorian Christianity.

Ghasn

The dynasty of the Ghassānids, though often called kings, were in fact Byzantine phylarchs (native rulers of subject frontier states). They had their headquarters well within the Byzantine Empire, a little east of the Sea of Galilee at Jābiyyah in the Jawlān (Golan) area, but they controlled large areas of northwestern Arabia, as far south as Yathrib, serving as a counterpoise to the Sasanian-oriented Lakhmids in the northeast. The Ghassānids were miaphysite Christians and played an important part in the religious conflicts of the Byzantine church. Their influence spanned the 6th century ce, and their most prominent member, al-Ḥārith ibn Jabalah (Greek: Aretas), flourished in mid-century. The last three phylarchs fell out with Orthodox Byzantium because of their miaphysite creed; in 614 the power of Ghassān was destroyed by a Persian invasion.

Quraysh

According to Muslim tradition, Mecca had at one time been in the hands of Jurhum, a people living on the central west coast recorded in Greco-Latin sources as Gorrhamites. But sometime about 500 ce (“five generations before the Prophet Muhammad”) Quṣayy ibn Kilāb, called al-Mujammiʿ (“The Unifier”), is credited with having brought together scattered groups of Bedouin and installed them in Mecca. They took over a role that had long before been played by Minaeans and Nabataeans, controlling the west coast trade routes; they sent annual caravans to Syria and Yemen. Authority in Quraysh was not royal but was vested in a mercantile aristocracy, not unlike the Venetian republic. Their trading contracts ensured them considerable influence, and, when in the opening years of the 7th century the collapse of the Ḥimyarites, Lakhmids, and Ghassānids had left a power vacuum in the peninsula, Quraysh remained the only effective influence. There is, however, little doubt that the ancient traditions of Yemenite civilization contributed substantially to the consolidation of the Islamic empire.