Arabian religion

▪ ancient religion

Introduction

      beliefs of Arabia comprising the polytheistic beliefs and practices that existed before the rise of Islām in the 7th century AD. 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 Islām are also mentioned briefly. For historical background, see AD (Arabia, history of).

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 Islām, for, while firmly repudiating the idolatry of the pre-Islāmic period, which it calls the “Age of Ignorance” ( jāhilīyah), Islām has nevertheless taken over, in a refined form, some of its practices.

Sources of modern knowledge

      Knowledge of pre-Islāmic Arabia rests mainly on original archaeological (archaeology) and epigraphic (epigraphy) data from the region itself. Countless pre-Islāmic 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 BC and provide evidence, for instance, of an ancient cult for the bull and the ostrich. These ancient drawings also depict queer 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 BC) are tens of thousands of alphabetic rock graffiti in ancient Arabian dialects, written in related local 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 worshipers.

      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 Muslim tradition. Next to the pre-Islāmic poetry, belatedly put into writing, it comprises the Qurʾān, the sacred book of the Muslims transmitted by its Prophet Muḥammad, which takes a stand against idolatry. Historical traditions have been 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 AD), and in “The Crown” (Al-Iklīl), by the Yemeni encyclopaedist and geographer al-Hamdānī (Hamdānī, al-) (9th–10th century AD), which describes the pre-Islāmic antiquities of Yemen.

      External sources are scanty: Arabia has remained little known to its neighbours. From the 9th to the 7th century BC 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 BC 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 a queen of Sheba, bringing presents of gold and frankincense, during the reign of Solomon (10th century BC). In the middle of the 6th century BC 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 (Jew) 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 BC) to Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century AD), 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 AD.

      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 BC 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 BC 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, Mārib; 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 AD, 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 AD 350 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 (Jew) immigrants from the oases of the Hejaz, although Christianity had already been introduced in South Arabia by Byzantine and Syrian missionaries.

      About AD 523 Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar (nicknamed Dhū Nuwās by the Muslim tradition), a Ḥimyarite king of Jewish faith, persecuted and killed numerous monophysite 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 of Ethiopia gathered a fleet and landed with troops in Yemen. Having killed the Ḥimyarite 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 Muslim 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 Mārib 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 Islām, thus opening his province to the new faith and to the Islāmic 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 caravaneers, 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 BC name the local deities. In the 5th century BC, the oasis of Dedān (al-ʿUlā) was the capital of a short-lived Dedānite kingdom; then, from the 4th century to the 1st century BC, 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 BC 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 BC. In spite of their Arab origin, they used an Aramaic (Aramaic language) dialect as their written language. At the time of their greatest wealth and power, under Aretas IV (8 BC–40 AD), 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 AD 106. The last dated Nabataean text dates from AD 356.

      The so-called “Thamūdic” graffiti are named after Thamūd, one of several Arabian tribes named in the Assyrian annals. Thamūdaeans are named about AD 169 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 BC to the 3rd or 4th century AD.

      The Ṣafaitic graffiti (1st century BC to the 4th century AD) 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 Ḥimyarite 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.

Pre-Islāmic deities

South Arabia

      The astral basis of the South Arabian pantheon emerges from such divine names as Shams (“Sun”) and Rubʿ (“Moon-Quarter”). The epithets “Mother of ʿAthtar,” “Mother of [the] goddesses,” “Daughters of [the god] Il” allude to still-obscure theogonic myths.

      The name of the Venus god ʿAthtar corresponds to that of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar (Venus). Hawbas, a goddess, was his consort (but seems to have been locally a masculine deity). As head of the South Arabian pantheon, ʿAthtar had superseded the ancient supreme Semitic god Il or El, whose name survives nearly exclusively in theophoric names. ʿAthtar was a god of the thunderstorm, dispensing natural irrigation in the form of rain. When qualified as Sharīqān, “the Eastern One” (possibly a reference to Venus as the Morning Star), he was invoked as an avenger against enemies.

      Next to ʿAthtar, who was worshiped throughout South Arabia, each kingdom had its own national god, of whom the nation called itself the “progeny” (wld). In Sabaʾ the national god was Almaqah (or Ilmuqah), a protector of artificial irrigation, lord of the temple of the Sabaean federation of tribes, near the capital Maʾrib. Until recently Almaqah was considered to be a moon god, under the influence of a now generally rejected conception of a South Arabian pantheon consisting of an exclusive triad: Father Moon, Mother Sun (the word “sun” is feminine in Arabic), and Son Venus. Recent studies underline that the symbols of the bull's head and the vine motif that are associated with him are solar and Dionysiac attributes and are more consistent with a sun god, a male consort of the sun goddess. In Maʿīn the national god Wadd (“Love”) originated from North Arabia and probably was a moon god: the magic formula Wdʾb, “Wadd is [my?] father,” written on amulets and buildings, is often accompanied by a crescent Moon with the small disk of Venus. In Ḥaḍramawt the national god Syn was also a sun god: the current identification with the Mesopotamian moon god Sin (Suen) raises phonetic objections, and the symbolic animal of Syn, shown on coins, was the eagle, a solar animal. In Qatabān the national god ʿAmm, “paternal uncle,” may have been a moon god. The sun goddess Shams was the national deity of the kingdom of Ḥimyar. She appears also, in a minor role, in Sabaʾ. Other aspects of Shams are certainly concealed in some of the many and still obscure South Arabian female divine epithets.

      Among various lesser or local deities, the nature and even the sex of many of whom remain unknown, the better-documented are listed here. In Qatabān, Anbay and Ḥawkam are invoked together as (the gods) “of command and decision(?).” The name Anbay is related to that of the Babylonian god Nabu, while Ḥawkam derives from the root meaning “to be wise.” They probably represent twin aspects (as Evening and Morning Star?) of Babylonian Nabu-Mercury, the god of fate and science and the spokesman of the gods. In Ḥaḍramawt, Ḥawl was probably a moon god; his name apparently alludes to the lunar cycle. Some tribes worshiped their own “patron” (shym). Taʾlab was the patron of Sumʿay, a Sabaean federation of tribes. In Maʿīn, Nikraḥ was a healer patron; his shrine, located on a hillock in the middle of a large enclave marked by pillars, was an asylum for dying people and women in childbirth.

      Among other North or central Arabian gods worshiped in South Arabia, Dhū-Samāwī (“the Heavenly One”), was presented by Bedouin tribes with votive statuettes of camels to ensure the well-being of their herds. Kāhil, the national god of the central Arabian kingdom of Qaḥṭān in Qaryat al-Faʾw, was assimilated there to Dhū-Samāwī. He was also known in South Arabia. Conversely, the Sabaean god ʿAthtar Sharīqān appears in Qarya under the Arabic transcription ʿAthar [sic] a(sh)-Sharīq.

      The South Arabian deities are usually evoked by a symbol, as, for instance, a bull's head, snake, or thunderbolt. Seldom (and later) do they appear in human form, inspired by late Hellenistic iconography: for example, seated Demeter with cornucopia, Dionysus-Sabazios, and the Dioscuri.

North Arabia

      North Arabian gods are named for the first time in the annals of the 7th-century BC Assyrian king Esarhaddon, in which he reports having returned to the oasis of Adumatu (Dūmat al-Jandal) the idols previously confiscated as war booty by his father, Sennacherib. Among the gods named by Esarhaddon are ʿAtarsamāin, ʿAtarqurumā, Nukhay, and Ruldayu. Herodotus wrote that the Arabs worshiped as sole deities Alilat, whom he identifies with both Urania and Aphrodite, and Orotalt, identified with Dionysus. Both accounts concur: Ruldayu and Orotalt are phonetic transcriptions of the same name, Ruḍā, a sun god often named in the Thamūdic inscriptions and in Ṣafaitic (in Ṣafaitic, Ruḍā eventually becomes a goddess). In the Nabataean kingdom the counterpart of Dionysus was the great god nicknamed dū-Sharā (Dusares), “the one of Sharā” from the name of the mountain overlooking Petra. This epithet replaced the secret name (probably Ruḍā) of that god, a rival to Shayʿ al-Qawm, “the Shepherd of the People,” he “who drinks no wine, who builds no home,” the patron of the nomads, represented as Lycurgus and also worshiped by the Liḥyānites. Nukhay, perhaps a solar god, was worshiped by the Thamūdaeans and Ṣafaites.

      Al-Ilāt (Lāt, al-) or Allāt (“the Goddess”), was known to all pantheons. She is a daughter or a consort, depending on the region, of al-Lāh or Allāh (“the God”), Lord of the Kaʿbah in Mecca; he is also named in Thamūdic texts. Al-Ilāt formed a trio with the goddesses al-ʿUzzā (“the Powerful”) and Manāt (or Manawat, “Destiny”). Among the Nabataeans al-ʿUzzā was assimilated to Venus and Aphrodite and was the consort of Kutbāʾ or al-Aktab (“the Scribe”; Mercury); among the Thamudaeans, however, she was assimilated to ʿAttarsamay (or ʿAttarsam). Manāt was depicted as Nemesis in the Nabataean iconography. The three goddesses were called the “Daughters of Allāh” in pre-Islāmic Mecca, and they are mentioned in the Qurʾān (53: 19–22). In South Arabia they are called the “Daughters of Il,” and al-Ilāt and al-ʿUzzā are mentioned in Sabaean inscriptions.

      In Taymāʾ, in the northern Hejaz, Aramaic inscriptions of the 2nd half of the 5th century BC mention the gods Ṣalm, Ashimāʾ, and Shingalāʾ. Only the first name can be identified with the figure of a bull's head with a solar disk between the horns represented in the inscriptions. Ṣalm is also named in some Thamūdic graffiti with similar drawings, found in a rock sanctuary near Taymāʾ.

      The secret name of the Liḥyānite god nicknamed dhū-Ghābat, “the One of the thicket,” is unknown. Other Liḥyānite gods were han-Aktab, “the Scribe,” and Baʿalshamīn, “the Lord of Heavens,” and ʿAglibōn, a fertility bull god, both of whom were borrowed from Palmyra.

Sanctuaries, cultic objects, and religious practices and institutions

      The sanctuaries, sometimes carved in the rock on high places, consisted of a ḥaram, a sacred open-air enclosure, accessible only to unarmed and ritually clean people in ritual clothes. There the baetyl (baetylus), a “raised stone,” or a statue of the god, was worshiped. The Nabataeans originally represented their gods as baetyls on a podium, but later they gave them a human appearance.

      Of the Nabataean high places that are carved from the rock, the best-known overlooks the site of Petra. On a summit measuring roughly 215 by 65 feet (65 by 20 metres) are carved a large triclinium for ritual meals, a podium with baetyls, a sacrificial altar, and a basin. The stone-built temples of the Nabataeans and South Arabians were more elaborate structures, consisting of a rectangular walled enclosure, near one end of which was a stone canopy or a closed cella or both, which contained the altar for sacrifices or the idol of the god. Other rooms and a cistern might be added. The Kaʿbah in Mecca, which became the sacred shrine of the Muslims, has a similar structure: it is a closed cella (which was full of idols in pre-Islāmic times) in a walled enclosure, with a well. A baetyl, the Black Stone, is inserted in the wall of the Kaʿbah; it is veiled by a cloth cover (the kiswah), reminiscent of the leather cover of the Ark of the Covenant. Numerous South Arabian temples have been surveyed. The temple of Almaqah in Mārib (Maʾrib) had an unusual shape, that of an ellipse with a major axis about 345 feet long, with a strong wall about 28 feet high, built of fine limestone ashlars. A small temple, in front of which were eight standing pillars, comprises a gallery supported by pillars around a rectangular court; it served as a peristyle to the main temple, in the wall of which it was inserted.

      To the gods were offered, on appropriate altars, sacrifices (sacrifice) of slaughtered animals, libations and fumigations of aromatics, votive objects, or persons dedicated to serve in the temple. A ritual slaughter of enemies in gratitude for a military victory is mentioned at the rock sanctuary of the sun goddess of Ḥimyar. Normally the dedicator of a sacrifice performed the slaughtering of the animal.

      In addition to the northwestern Arabian Kāhin, “soothsayer,” several kinds of priests (priesthood) and temple officials appear in Liḥyānite, Nabataean, and South Arabian inscriptions, but their respective functions are not clear. North Arabian queens and ancient Qatabānian rulers bore priestly titles. In Sabaʾ, some priests (rshw) of ʿAthtar, recruited on a hereditary basis from three clans, took office in turn for seven years as eponyms (kabir) in charge of the collection of the tithe and of the rites aimed at obtaining rain.

      The priests interpreted the oracles (oracle), which, throughout Arabia, were mostly obtained by cleromancy (istiqsām): the answer (positive, negative, expectative, and so on) to a question asked of the god was obtained by drawing lots from a batch of marked arrows or sticks. Many Sabaean texts mention the oracles, but only one inscription mentions arrows in connection with them. A bunch of sticks possibly used for that purpose was found in 1987 in a Sabaean temple. Among the many other forms of divination known from pre-Islāmic Arabia, only oneiromancy, or divination by means of dreams (possibly after incubation in the temple), is well attested in Sabaean texts.

      Throughout pre-Islāmic Arabia, “truces of God” allowed people to attend in security the yearly pilgrimages (pilgrimage) to important shrines. The rites included purification and the wearing of ritual clothing, sexual abstinence, abstention from shedding blood, and circuits performed (ṭawāf, dawār) around the sacred object; they were concluded by the slaughter of animals, which were eaten in collective feasts. Today such practices still form the core of the Islāmic pilgrimage to Mecca. The classical, Nabataean, Liḥyānite, and Sabaean sources mention pilgrimages.

      In South Arabia pilgrims were entertained in the temples on the proceeds of the tithe. The sanctuary of Jabal al-Lawdh, in al-Jawf (Jawf, Al-) of northern Yemen, consisted of two temples: the first, at the foot of the mountain, was connected to another one near the summit, some 3,000 feet higher up, by a 3.7-mile processional way. Open courtyards contained many rows of low masonry benches, more than 30 feet long, which were probably used for the ritual meals mentioned in the texts found at the site. Among the Nabataeans, sacral brotherhoods (mrzḥ; “thiasoi”) held ritual meals in the temples or in burial rooms of the dead.

      The sovereigns of Sabaʾ performed a rite called “hunting the game of ʿAthtar and the game of Kurūm.” The gazelle was the symbol animal of ʿAthtar, and Kurūm is now known to be a hypostasis or a consort of ʿAthtar (this explains the name ʿAtarqurumā of an idol in Dūmat al-Jandal, mentioned above). This rite was aimed at obtaining rain, and that is also the aim of a formal tribal ibex hunting still performed today in Ḥaḍramawt. Istisqāʾ, a collective rogation for rain with magical rites, in times of acute drought, is mentioned by the Muslim tradition and in two Sabaean (Sabaʾ) texts. The rite is still part of the Islāmic ritual.

      South Arabian texts confessing offenses against ritual cleanliness (purification rite), along with data from classical sources and the Muslim tradition on pre-Islāmic customs, contribute to outline an ancient Arabian code of ritual cleanliness similar to that of the Leviticus and of Muslim jurisprudence, although some Islāmologists, unaware of the pre-Islāmic Arabian epigraphic material, have attributed the Muslim code on ritual cleanliness (ṭahārah) to a Jewish influence on early Islām in Medina.

      The dead were buried under a mound of stones or in burial chambers carved from the rock. The Ṣafaite Bedouin used to add a stone, possibly bearing a written expression of grief, to the heap marking the grave of a friend or relative. Some excavated heaps have yielded dozens of such texts. An ancient Arab custom was to tie the mount of a dead warrior to the tomb of its master and leave it to die there. There is probably no relationship between this custom and the discovery, in 1985 in Ḥaḍramawt, of tombs of ritually beheaded kneeling camels. Collective burial chambers were carved in the rock underground or from cliffs in various parts of Arabia. Liḥyānite, Nabataean, and South Arabian inscriptions may mark the entrance, name the occupants and their respective share of ownership, and threaten any intruder or usurper. Surgically prepared mummies were discovered for the first time in 1983 in North Yemen, in burial chambers carved in a cliff. In the Nabataean capital, Petra, and in Madāʾin Ṣaliḥ, the necropolis of their city of Al-Ḥijr, in the Hejaz, many dozens of rock burial chambers show a great variety of elaborate facades carved in high relief in the red sandstone.

Jacques Ryckmans

Additional Reading

A short survey of the history of ancient Arabia is given by A.K. Irvine, “The Arabs and Ethiopians,” in D.J. Wiseman (ed.), Peoples of Old Testament Times (1973), pp. 287–311. South Arabia is covered by Walter W. Müller, “Outline of the History of Ancient Southern Arabia,” in Werner Daum (ed.), Yemen: 3000 Years of Art and Civilisation in Arabia Felix (1987), pp. 49–54. J. Wellhausen (comp.), Reste altarabischen Heidentums, 2nd ed. (1897), contains most of the Muslim data on the pagan folklore and religion. The epigraphic material is extensively used in the following studies, which are still valuable: G. Ryckmans, “Les Religions arabes préislamiques,” in Histoire générale des religions, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 201–228 (1960); and Maria Höfner, “Die vorislamischen Religionen Arabiens,” in Hartmut Gese, Maria Höfner, and Kurt Rudolph, Die Religionen Altsyriens, Altarabiens und der Mandäer, pp. 233–402 (1970). A short but excellent survey of the ancient Arabian religion is given by A. Caquot, “Les Religions des Sémites occidentaux,” in Henri-Charles Puech (ed.), Histoire des Religions, vol. 1 (1970), pp. 307–358, with North and South Arabia especially the focus of pp. 340–355. Several important works are by J. Starcky: “Pétra et la Nabatène,” in Louis Pirot et al., Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplément, vol. 7 (1966), cols. 886–1017, with cols. 985–1017 focusing especially on religion, and a very short but more recent contribution, “La religion des Nabatéens,” in Inoubliable Petra: Le Royaume nabatéen aux confins du désert (1980), pp. 66–70, an exhibition catalog. Two concise but up-to-date studies on ancient South Arabian religions may be found in Joseph Chelhod et al., L'Arabie du Sud: Histoire et civilisation, vol. 1, Le peuple yéménite et ses racines (1984), both by A.F.L. Beeston: “The Religions of Pre-Islamic Yemen,” pp. 259–269, and “Judaism and Christianity in Pre-Islamic Yemen,” pp. 271–278. Another such study is J. Ryckmans, “The Old South Arabian Religion,” in the work on Yemen ed. by Daum cited above, pp. 107–110.Jacques Ryckmans

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