Caravan-Serai Tours - Yemen - Handbook

Handbook

History

On May 22, 1990, Yemen was unified and a draft constitution was approved in May of 1991. This was the latest historical event in the long history of this fascinating country located on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

Sana'a, the capital, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Throughout the Yemen, Stone Age people left evidence of their occupation from 400,000BC. Bronze Age people from 2000BC had developed many agricultural settlements throughout the area. Foremost of these was near Marib where a huge dam was built to irrigate the terraced fields found here. The Marib Dam is considered the greatest technical structure of antiquity. You may see some of the ruins of this structure which collapsed around 600AD and which is nearby to a new dam serving the same purpose today.

The Yemenis consider themselves the original Arabs from whom all the other Arabs are descended. Indeed there seems to be evidence of this.

In ancient Yemen, also called Southern Arabia, there were five principal kingdoms: the Saba, Hadramawt, Ausan, Qataban and Main. Saba was the oldest, most important and most powerful. Saba in Hebrew is "Sheba". Thus the fabled Queen of Sheba came from Saba. Queens in Arabia were common, and both the Bible and Quran refer to the Queen of Sheba.

These people controlled the spice trade between India and Gaza in Palestine. They grew trees which produced frankincense and myrrh, resins used for perfuming and preserving in the temples and homes of the Middle East, Greece and Rome. The Egyptians used these resins to mummify their remains. The frankincense trade route which went through Yemen is one of the oldest international trade routes in the world and the longest at 3400km. Much of early Yemeni history is involved in the control of trade of these substances both along the southern coast and overland along the Red Sea.

Early Yemenis built the first high rise buildings (the tallest was eight stories high) made entirely of mud. See them in Shibam of the Hadramawt, the old part of Sana'a, and Yemeni villages. Many are still in use today.

Yemenis were noted horsemen. In 628AD, some notables joined the Prophet Mohammad and became the forefront of the army which first unified the Arabian Peninsula, and then spread Islam from Spain to China.

Jews have always lived in Yemen and are thought to have spread to present day Ethiopia. Pre-Islamic, Nestorian Christians had settled here too.

Yemen enjoyed a period known as the Middle Ages. This began with Islam and lasted until the Turkish occupation in the mid-1500's. Architecture, crafts, science and painting flourished. The first university was founded in the 800's. In 879AD, the first Zaidi Imam al-Hadi Yahya entered Sada in the north and established a dynasty which lasted until the 1962 revolution. Political unity was established by Saladin's brother in 1173AD when he conquered and made Yemen a sovereign state within the Ayyubid Empire. The high point of this period was under the Rasulids (1228-1454) who ruled from Taiz and Zabid and were patrons of the arts and sciences. They invented the astrolabe.

In 1513, the Portuguese tried to conquer Aden and by 1839 the British did occupy th is southern port city. The Turks occupied North Yemen in 1538. This stand-off seems to have begun the division between North and South Yemen. The division between the coastal South and the mountainous North continued until the Turks were forced to relinquish control over the north in 1918 after WWI. Yemen was recognized as an independent state in 1923.

By the 1950's the south was trying to end British Protectorate rule. Independence came in 1967 and in 1970 the communistic People's Democratic Republic of Yemen was created. In the meantime, in the north in 1948, the first Yemeni revolution resulted in the murder of the then Imam Yahya. Sept. 16, 1962 saw another revolution which created the Yemen Arab Republic.

And so we come full circle to the 1990's when North and South Arabia were again united.