What the world has known about the ancient kingdom of Sheba largely comes from a very sketchy Bible account of a trip made by the Queen of Sheba to see Israel’s King Solomon 900 years before Christ. The passage is notable for the queen’s personal, enthralled testimony to Solomon’s legendary wisdom and accomplishments.
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Now a couple of University of Chicago archeologists are discovering that Sheba’s predecessors in southern Arabia had themselves achieved an impressive degree of civilization, urbanization and intellectual accomplishment far earlier than scholars previously had thought.
In a larger sense, the findings are a dramatic illustration of early man’s remarkable ingenuity even in a relatively impoverished and isolated land.
Working in a place little visited by archeologists, the highlands of present-day Yemen, Tony Wilkinson and McGuire Gibson have uncovered 5,000-year-old villages. Those long ago villagers cut fields out of the steep hillsides, one of the earliest examples in the world of terraced agriculture.
Two 4,000-year-old walled and gated towns dug up by the scientists have now become the earliest known urban settlements in southern Arabia.
The highland predecessors to Sheba, Gibson said, spawned civil engineers who, without contact with the outside world, learned hydrology, irrigation and dam building on their own. They developed technology that turned a place with a marginally poor climate into a thriving agricultural region.
Mesopotamia and Egypt, as rich river cultures, had made similar leaps into urban complexity much earlier, predating what happened in Yemen by 1,500 and 600 years, respectively.
Yet the significance of what happened in Yemen, Gibson said, was that urbanism could occur in a much poorer area too.
“These towns came into being,” Gibson said, “because they found ways to produce enough to support larger populations and more complex social organizations.”
The two scientists, who work out of the university’s Oriental Institute, describe their Yemeni findings in the current issue of the scientific journal Arabian Archeology and Epigraphy.
By the time the Queen of Sheba of Bible fame supposedly ruled that corner of Arabia, her minions cultivated trees bearing frankincense on desert fringes in irrigated fields fed by highland waters.
Biblical scholars believe the queen made the 1,200-mile camel journey to King Solomon’s court in Jerusalem about 900 B.C. as a public relations gesture to assure access to his ports.
For centuries the people of Sheba ran lucrative camel caravans, shuttling frankincense, myrrh, gems, precious metals and spices through the Arabian peninsula to the Middle East and beyond. They were the trade conduit between the Indian subcontinent and evolving Mediterranean empires, including Solomon’s Israel, pharaonic Egypt and Rome.
Previously, archeologists working in Yemen mostly worked in the low, arid interior desert fringes at sites containing remnants of the incense trade towns. Dating to 1000 B.C., traditionally those towns were believed to be the oldest in the region, including Marib, Sheba’s capital.
But Gibson and Wilkinson suspected there might be more in Yemen than the old incense trade towns. Three years ago, they decided to look in places nobody had looked before.
“We went for the jugular, not the place that was fashionable and sensible to work,” Wilkinson said. “We went where it was moist, 6,500 feet into the mountains, where we suspected there would have been the earliest evidence of agriculture.”
Their discovery of the terraced farms, irrigation systems and mountain towns vastly alters the picture of the region’s early history.
The two ancient towns they found sit atop high, easily defended plateaus 50 miles south of San`a, Yemen’s capital.
Covering about 12 acres, the towns, Al-Sibal and Hamat al-Qa, were built 4,500 and 4,250 years ago, respectively. Each boasts a “dense layout of buildings, streets, perhaps a citadel and gates,” Wilkinson said.
Unlike the amorphous, hutlike stone structures in earlier villages, the town buildings have definite architectural designs of squared corners and rectangular shapes.
Archeologists and historians have long been aware of huge dams and irrigation systems around the old incense trade towns in the lower desert regions. Discovery of even older dams and terraced fields in the highland systems may now explain how those lowland systems came to be.
It began with the terraced farming, a low-tech system by which farm families build retaining walls to create level fields along hillsides, he said. The terraced fields collect rainwater as it flows down the hills, also helping to stop soil erosion.
Through the centuries, the ancient Yemeni farmers gradually improved on the system by building long, low dams to collect rainwater and direct it toward valley fields. Around the time of Christ, civil engineers were directing construction of huge dams of cut stone to retain flood water, channeling it through sluices carved through bedrock.
The problem of the big dams and the great irrigation channels they fed, Gibson said, was that they all eventually collapsed.
The last big dam systems in the region disappeared several hundred years after Christ, Gibson said. Ironically, the older, low-tech system of terraced fields and small dams, easily built and rebuilt by a few people, remains a prevalent form of agriculture in Yemen today.
“Five guys can build a terraced field in two weeks,” Gibson said. “A big dam, carrying water three miles down to fields below, is a huge investment in labor and money, and eventually it fails.
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“Sometimes it looks like the more you try to advance technology and the more your society depends on it, the more you make yourself vulnerable.”
What so far isn’t present in the archeological record, Gibson said, are written accounts of the region’s evolution. Archeologists don’t know how the tribes who built the first terraced fields evolved into kingdoms that built the big dams.
Nobody, for that matter, knows who the Queen of Sheba of biblical lore really was or how big or powerful her kingdom might have been.
The Bible accounts of her, as well, say very little about her, where she came from and why she went to see King Solomon.
Through the centuries poets and historians with romantic notions have suggested she and Solomon were lovers. Some even imply that the queen returned to Sheba bearing a child sired by Solomon.
More skeptical scholars think the queen visited Solomon to bribe him with gifts so that he would not threaten her kingdom militarily and would let her traders continue to use his Mediterranean ports.
The Bible, in the first book of Kings, does directly quote the Queen of Sheba as she met Solomon:
“The report I heard in my own country about your achievements and your wisdom is true. But I did not believe what they said until I came and saw with my own eyes.
“Indeed, not even half the greatness of your wisdom was told me; you have far exceeded the report I heard. How happy your men must be! How happy your officials, who continually stand before you and hear your wisdom!”
Though they may have been master dam builders in ancient Sheba, they obviously were masters in the art of flattery too.