Arabian religion
- Key People:
- Hishām ibn al-Kalbī
- Related Topics:
- Anbay
- Nikrah
- Ḥawkam
- Dhu-Samawi
- Shams
Arabian religion, polytheistic beliefs and practices that existed in Arabia before the rise of Islam in the 7th century ce. Arabia is here understood in the broad sense of the term to include the confines of the Syrian Desert. The religion of Palmyra, which belongs to the Aramaic sphere, is excluded from this account. The monotheistic religions that had already spread in Arabia before the arrival of Islam are also mentioned briefly. For historical background, see history of Arabia: Pre-Islamic Arabia, to the 7th century ce.
Nature and significance
In the polytheistic religions of Arabia most of the gods were originally associated with heavenly bodies, to which were ascribed powers of fecundity, protection, or revenge against enemies. Aside from a few deities common to various populations, the pantheons show a marked local particularism. But many religious practices were in general use. The study of these practices is instructive in view of their similarities with those of the biblical world and also with those of the world of Islam, for, while firmly repudiating the idolatry of the pre-Islamic period, which it calls the “Age of Ignorance” (Jāhiliyyah), Islam has nevertheless taken over, in a refined form, some of its practices.
Sources of modern knowledge
Knowledge of pre-Islamic Arabia rests mainly on original archaeological and epigraphic data from the region itself. Countless pre-Islamic sites are scattered over the whole Arabian Peninsula: ancient lines of circles of raised stones, cairns, graveyards, and so on. In addition there are more recent constructions such as fortified towns and ruins of temples and irrigation systems. Many rock faces are covered with incised drawings. The oldest drawings, barely visible under a dark patina, date back to several millennia bce and provide evidence, for instance, of an ancient cult for the bull and the ostrich. These ancient drawings also depict peculiar ritual scenes that refer to a still obscure mythology. More explicit and much later (at least no earlier than the end of the 2nd millennium bce) are tens of thousands of alphabetic rock graffiti in ancient Arabian dialects, written in related local South Semitic alphabets. These graffiti were clustered predominantly along the natural routes followed by nomads and caravaneers, as well as less numerous monumental inscriptions from the sites formerly occupied by a sedentary population.
The written graffiti are short inscriptions scratched on the rock. The author gives his name and his patronymic and/or his tribal affiliation and genealogy. Short messages, such as a description of an incident, a sad evocation of a dead relative, or an invocation to a god, may follow. Thanks to their considerable number, such texts, which may be rather insignificant in themselves, provide valuable information on the gods and their attributes and on their worshippers.
The monumental inscriptions are much more elaborate and meaningful, both because they belong to the complex institutions of a sedentary culture and because they appear in an archaeological context. They are carefully engraved, so that the state of evolution of the script allows them to be dated approximately, even when no explicit date is given. They are utilitarian in character and are usually concerned with the construction of buildings, the dedication of objects to a god, or arrangements relating to irrigation. They may also describe military campaigns. So far only traces of a true religious literature have been recovered. But several specimens of a hitherto unknown type of document, excavated since 1970 in Yemen, contradict the unilateral character of the inscriptions. These are records from private archives (personal letters, contracts, and so on), finely engraved in a cursive writing on small wooden sticks. Iconographic documents such as statues and reliefs, seals, and coins also reveal aspects of the religion.
Yet another source is the Islamic tradition. Next to pre-Islamic poetry, an originally oral corpus belatedly put into writing during the Islamic period, it includes the Qurʾān, the sacred book of the Muslims transmitted by the Prophet Muhammad, which takes a stand against idolatry. Historical pre-Islamic traditions were transmitted by early Muslim annalists and geographers. More-specific data on the ancient folklore and religion appear, for instance, in “The Book of the Idols” (Kitāb al-aṣnām), by the Iraqi genealogist Ibn al-Kalbī (8th–9th century ce), and in “The Crown” (al-Iklīl), by the Yemeni encyclopaedist and geographer al-Hamdānī (9th–10th century ce), which describes the pre-Islamic antiquities of Yemen.
External sources are scanty: Arabia has remained little known to its neighbours. From the 9th to the 7th century bce Assyrian kings report their campaigns against North Arabian kings (or queens) and tribes and occasionally name their gods. The annals of Sargon for the year 718 bce and those of his son Sennacherib name two successive sovereigns of Sabaʾ who sent them a “tribute” of aromatics. The Book of Kings of the Bible describes the legendary visit in Jerusalem of the Queen of Sheba, bringing presents of gold and frankincense, during the reign of Solomon (10th century bce). In the middle of the 6th century bce the Neo-Babylonian king Nabu-naʾid (Nabonidus) conquered the oasis of Taymāʾ in the Hejaz (al-Ḥijāz). He boasts of having settled populations from Babylonia there and in neighbouring oases such as Dedān, Khaybar, and Yathrib (Medina), which are known to have been inhabited since ancient times by Jewish populations. It is quite probable that Jews of the Babylonian Exile were among those forced settlers and initiated at that time the Jewish presence in Arabia.
Some classical authors, from Herodotus (5th century bce) to Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century ce), provide information on the religion of the Arabs and on the geography of the Arabian Peninsula. Several Byzantine authors report conflicts between Jews and Christians in Yemen in the 6th century ce.
For many subsequent centuries Arabia remained practically closed to European penetration. Important discoveries of monuments and inscriptions occurred only from about the middle of the 19th century. It was only after World War II, and indeed mostly since the late 1970s, that major archaeological surveys and excavations began in various parts of the peninsula.
The historical setting
South Arabia
From the middle of the 2nd millennium bce a sedentary agrarian civilization developed in Yemen in the oases along the edge of the desert. The people of this civilization had gradually mastered techniques enabling them to accumulate water from seasonal mountain rivers and distribute it into extensive irrigation systems. At the end of the 8th century appeared the oldest monumental inscriptions so far recorded, displayed on the walls of buildings. A total of about 8,000 such texts, whole or fragmentary, which correspond to 13 centuries of South Arabian history, have been discovered.
The texts from the 6th century bce mention the main South Arabian kingdoms, which were spaced out from the northwest to the southeast in the oases along the edge of the desert. There were, successively, Maʿīn, the kingdom of the Minaeans; Sabaʾ, the most important, with its capital, Maʾrib; Qatabān and Awsān (both located in the area of former Aden Territory [Yemen]); and finally Ḥaḍramawt (the eastern part of the former Aden Protectorate), extending inland from and along the coast of the Gulf of Aden toward Oman; its capital was Shabwa. The coastal area of Ḥaḍramawt was the nearly exclusive biotope of the wild tree from which was extracted the best kind of frankincense, which was the most precious aromatic in the Middle East used for the cult of the gods and of the dead. Along with other aromatics, frankincense was carried inland northwestward on the caravan route through Yemen to a place north of Yemen, where the route bifurcated, running through the oases of the Hejaz (on the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula) toward Egypt and Syria, and through Qaryat al-Faʾw on the caravan route to central Arabia toward the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. Minaean merchants, established in Dedān in the Hejaz and in Qaryat al-Faʾw, were in control of that trade. During the following centuries, Sabaʾ struggled with Qatabān for hegemony. About the beginning of the Common Era the rise of overseas trade between Egypt and India disrupted the political and economic balance in South Arabia and resulted in a period of general conflict. At the end of the 3rd century ce, Sabaʾ, which had meanwhile conquered Maʿīn, Qatabān, and finally Ḥaḍramawt, was in turn conquered, with the whole of South Arabia, by Ḥimyar, a little kingdom that had risen in the southwestern corner of Yemen. This political unification hastened the decay of the overly diversified polytheistic beliefs. After about 350 ce monotheistic invocations to Raḥmānān, “the Merciful” (an epithet of Aramaic origin used for God by both Jews and Christians), or to the “Lord of Heaven and Earth,” take the place of former polytheistic formulas and dedications. These early monotheistic texts probably emanated from Jewish immigrants from the oases of the Hejaz, although Christianity had already been introduced in South Arabia by Byzantine and Syrian missionaries.
About 523 ce Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar (nicknamed Dhū Nuwās by the Muslim tradition), a Himyarite king of Jewish faith, persecuted and killed numerous miaphysite Christians in Najrān, on the northern frontier of Yemen. He also killed Byzantine merchants elsewhere in his kingdom. Outraged by the massacre and pressed by the Christian world to intervene, the negus (king) of Ethiopia gathered a fleet and landed with troops in Yemen. Having killed the Himyarite king in battle, the negus appointed an indigenous Christian as his viceroy and sailed back home. Somewhat later Abraha, a former Ethiopian general, took power. The Islamic tradition credits him with a fruitless military expedition with elephants (alluded to in the title, “The Elephant,” of chapter 105 of the Qurʾān), directed in 570 against Mecca and its polytheistic shrine. About the end of the 6th century the famous Maʾrib dam finally collapsed after several major dam bursts. This was a symptom rather than the cause of the long decline of the South Arabian culture, which had led to the emigration northward of several Yemeni tribes. About 572 South Arabia came under Persian occupation. This lasted until 628, when the local satrap in charge embraced Islam, thus opening his province to the new faith and to the Islamic culture.
North and central Arabia
There are various populations to consider, differing in their languages and systems of writing, in their pantheons, and above all in their ways of life. Sedentary populations of merchants and farmers were settled in towns and oases, which were centres of developed civil and religious institutions. In sharp contrast with them were the breeders of sheep and goats—semi-nomads living in precarious shelters in the vicinity of sedentary settlements—and true nomads: camel breeders and caravanners, capable of crossing the desert, moving with their herds over great distances toward seasonal pastures, and living under tents. Their places of worship were rocky high places; portable idols followed the peregrinations of the tribe.
Among the oases or towns of which the local gods are known appears in the first place the oasis of Dūmat al-Jandal, halfway between the Sinai and Babylon; the Assyrian king Esarhaddon names its gods (see below). In the North Arabian oasis of Taymāʾ, stelae written in Aramaic and dated to the 5th century bce name the local deities. In the 5th century bce the oasis of Dedān (al-ʿUlā) was the capital of a short-lived Dedānite kingdom; then, from the 4th century to the 1st century bce, it was the capital of the kingdom of Liḥyān, which for nearly two centuries was home to a colony of Minaean tradesmen from South Arabia.
Dedān and the neighbouring site of al-Ḥijr (Ḥegrāʾ) were occupied from the north in about 25 bce by the Nabataean kingdom. The Nabataeans were originally a nomadic tribe from the land of Madiān in the northern Hejaz who settled in North Arabia, the Negev, and southern Jordan as far north as the Dead Sea, from which they extracted bitumen. Their capital, Petra, north of the Gulf of Aqaba, is historically attested from the beginning of the 4th century bce. In spite of their Arab origin, they used an Aramaic dialect as their written language. At the time of their greatest wealth and power, under Aretas IV (8 bce–40 ce), their territory extended from al-Ḥijr in the south, northward past Petra, along the northern route east of the Jordan River as far as the Ḥawrān region south of Damascus. The Nabataean territory—except for its southern part—was incorporated into the Roman Provincia Arabia in 106 ce. The last dated Nabataean text dates from 356 ce.
The so-called “Thamūdic” graffiti are named after Thamūd, one of several Arabian tribes named in the Assyrian annals. Thamūdaeans are named about 169 ce in a Greek inscription on a Nabataean temple in the northeastern Hejaz, and in a 5th-century Byzantine source, as members of a cameleer corps on the northeastern Egyptian frontier. The Muslim tradition wrongly ascribes to the Thamūd the Nabataean tombs carved in the rock in al-Ḥijr. The name “Thamūdic” was first given to a type of alphabetic graffiti found in the region of Taymāʾ, because what may be mentions of the tribal name Thamūd occur in some of these texts. Later the name was incorrectly applied to various types of graffiti found throughout Arabia, dating from the 4th century bce to the 3rd or 4th century ce.
The Ṣafaitic graffiti (1st century bce to 4th century ce) are so called because they belong to a type first discovered in 1857 in the basaltic desert of Ṣafāʾ, southwest of Damascus. Many thousands of such texts, scattered over an area including eastern Syria and Jordan and northern and northeastern Saudi Arabia, have so far been collected and in part published.
From the disruption of the Arabian sphere in the 3rd and 4th centuries, owing in part to the penetration of Christianity and to the emigration of south and central Arabian tribes toward Syria and lower Iraq, emerged during the 4th and 5th centuries some buffer states, vassals of the Byzantine and Persian empires and of the Himyarite kingdom. The Ghassānids were settled in Syria, the Lakhmids in al-Ḥīrah on the Euphrates, and the Kindites in central Arabia. In the 5th and 6th centuries they were closely involved in the hostilities between Byzantium and Persia.
