Some Pre-Islamic Inscriptions on the Frankincense

Route in Southern Arabia

(PLATES II-X)
On the 12th of January, 1939, Miss Freya Stark read a paper
at the rooms of the Society, upon her last expedition to the
Hadramaut on the trail of the frankincense route of the
Ancients. She spoke as follows :—
SOME PRE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS ON THE FRANKINCENSE
ROUTE IN SOUTHERN ARABIA
In a lecture given in November to the Royal Geographical
Society I traced, briefly, the last part of the Lord Wakefield
Expedition in the Hadramaut, a camel journey from Huraida
to the coast across country that was partly new to European
travellers. Miss Caton-Thompson, in a previous lecture to
the same society, dealt with the archaeological and geological
side of the expedition and had also undertaken to explain
its more general aspects to a meeting of the Royal Central
Asian Society. It might seem that very little new ground was
left to be dealt with to-night. But I thought, when you
had the kindness to ask me to come before you, that I would
like to deal with one aspect of archaeological investigation
which, more than most others, is open to the amateur; this
is the collection of inscriptions.
In the Hadramaut the sides of the innumerable wadis give
any number of tolerably smooth, perpendicular faces, pro-
tected nearly always by an overhang from above. From these
gigantic walls, worn by wind and water, great blocks as large
as houses fall down, and lie in ruin on the scree slopes below.
In their shadow the goatherd and his goats take shelter
through the arid hours of summer, and must have done so
since the first goat and the first goatherd existed in these
ravines. And it is under these overhangs of rock or on the
perpendicular faces along some ancient highway that one
must look for inscriptions either chipped with a sharp tool
or smeared with a paint of dull red ochres ; they will frequently

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 480 SOME PEE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS

be found where a track branches off from the valley towards

the jol, the high plateau above, or at a valley parting of the
ways, such as the Bents found in wadi Ser. Only the most
sheltered markings can have survived on the friable surface
of the wadi sandstone ; but on volcanic rock such as that of
Husn al Ghurab, or limestone such as that of Baihan, the
writing survives in all its clearness; and indeed I should
not wonder if the friability of the sandstone walls of the
wadi Hadramaut had not something to do with the paucity
of inscriptions found there.
The importance of such inscriptions can be gauged when we
consider that practically all we know of early South Arabian
history is based upon them. They have given us our dates
and our king-lists and the succession of the four great empires
of the land, for which otherwise we had no authority other
than vague references in classical writers. One of the great
events of pre-Islamic history, the breaking of the dam at
Marib and the dispersal of the tribes, would not have been
recognized by us as historical at all, and would certainly not
have been dated if it were not for the great Marib inscription.
The early travellers, Arnaud, Glaser, and HaleVy, risked their
lives to collect these things. Theirs must ever be the honoured
names in the study of all South Arabian history. But it is
open to any wayfarer to-day to continue their good work,
to copy and photograph faithfully whatever he may find,
and to bring it home for experts like Professor G. Ryckmans
of Louvain and Mr. J. Walker of the British Museum (who are
kindly disentangling my budget) to deal with at their leisure.
No one has ever yet followed in its entire length the line of
this great trade route, from where it begins at Cana to where
it ends at Petra, and the frankincense from Zufar and the
varied merchandise from India arrived together. But almost
every part of the road has been visited in sections, and
usually by travellers with an eye for antiquarian remains.
Our expedition last winter was not intended to do this
preliminary exploratory work; it had, indeed, already

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 SOME PRE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS 481

been done by various travellers for the wadi Hadramaut

itself. Enough had been found there to suggest the existence
of pre-Islamic settlements near Shibam and Tarim and there
were ruins at Meshed, Sune, and Husn al-'Urr, all visited by
van der Meulen and von Wissmann and others. The name
itself of Husn al-'Urr is a pre-Islamic sign-post as it were,
since the word is pre-Islamic for a fort on a hill—a very
exact description of the place.1 It had been inhabited, at a
later period of its history and certainly in A.H. 655/A.D. 1296,
by Arabs and—according to an MS. in Hureidha—was
destroyed in A.H. 657/A.D. 1298.2
Some rough inscriptions on a rock were reported to us in
the neighbourhood of Qusum, but we did not visit them.
Two very meagre ones were found by Miss Caton-Thompson
at Saiiin and Shibam respectively, the latter with an outline
of a camel; and I found a few pre-Islamic letters smeared
with red ochre and rather effaced under a huge isolated
boulder north of the track that runs from Hureidha to the
ravine of Samu'a ; it is nearly opposite the take-off of a track
up the 'aqaba, the zig-zag pathway to the jo], a very favourite
place for such markings.
The actual choosing of Hureidha as a site for excavation
had to be done before the arrival of our expedition and
therefore without the advantage of Miss Caton-Thompson's
experience, and I was chiefly influenced by the existence
on my former visit of an inscription there—copied in The
Southern Gates of Arabia and now buried under the new
mosque floor. This, together with the geographic probabilities
of the place and Von Wissmann's description of the ruin
area, and the conditions of security necessary for excavation,
made it appear to be the most suitable site in the wadi.
Of the fifty or more inscribed slabs unearthed during
Miss Caton-Thompson's excavation of the temple to the
Moon God in this district, I will not speak as she herself
1
Cf. G. Ryckmans, Sep. d'fipigrafie Simitique., 2633, 6-7.
2
MS. History by Ibn Hamid, only copy known is in Huraida.
JRAS. JULY 1939. 32

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is dealing with them. From my own point of view, interested

as I was chiefly in the tracing of the ancient trade route, the
remarkable point about the temple of Hureidha was its poverty
and smallness : it could not have been a station on the
great trade route, whose towns and temples must have been
at least as important as their modern counterparts are now.
This impression, first born in Hureidha, grows stronger as
one travels up the wadi 'Amd towards the coast.
The only rock inscriptions we found anywhere in 'Amd
were some very rough ones at the entrance to a big cave
which Miss Caton-Thompson had no time to excavate:
she did not think the writings worth photographing, but I
give one of them—taken in a bad afternoon light—because
it is the best and indeed only one of its kind found near
Hureidha ; it probably refers to the enlargement of the
cave beside it, and is interesting because of the unusual
character of the scripts.
When the excavations there were at an end, and the South
Arabian spring was beginning to feel warm, my two colleagues
returned by motor to the port of Mukalla, while I took a
more westerly camel track across the jol, so as to look for
any remaining traces of the trade route that might lie on the
way between 'Amd and the sea. This journey I have already
described to the Royal Geographical Society, and I now
propose to travel over it again with a more special reference
to the pre-Islamic traces found as I went along, and the
inferences I think one may provisionally draw from them,
in the interval that must elapse before the country and its
history become thoroughly known and investigated.
In the wadi 'Amd itself above Hureidha I found no pre-
Islamic writings, though this of course does not mean that
there were none. It does however mean that they are not
common. The only pre-Islamic traces I could see in this
beautiful wadi, whose life is still the old-fashioned life of the
Hadramaut, governed by the tribe of the Ja'da—the only
traces here were two tombs of " walis", super-humanly

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 SOME PEE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS 483

long and not oriented in the Muslim way, which the people
attribute to their ancestors before Islam. One of these is in
wadi Rukhaima, on the northern side of the main wadi a
two hours' ride from Hureidha, and the other at Nu'air, in
the main wadi an hour north of 'Amd. Here too, and at the
little town of Naf hiiin father north, there are great cisterns
for the storage of water, of ancient or more probably medieval
workmanship ; there are signs of old work in dykes and dams
here and there, but the ancient and modern irrigation systems
appear to be so closely similar that, when the actual centres
of cultivation have not changed, it is difficult to tell where
one ends and the other begins.
The most curious thing in wadi 'Amd are long lines of
heaped stones symmetrically laid along the scree slopes that
enclose the valley. They usually end in a round heap like
a cairn, either at top or bottom of the line. They do not
necessarily run parallel to each other, but they are always in
the direction of the slope, regardless of how it faces. The
only theory the bedawin have about them is that they may
be ancient breastworks made for shooting; but they did
not appear to lie in very strategic positions. They certainly
deserve a careful examination, and the best and most
numerous are in the region of 'Aneq, the chief town of middle
'Amd.
The wadi 'Amd is remarkable for its careful cultivation
in the upper reaches, as contrasted with the comparative
barrenness round Hureidha. Its poverty in inscriptions or
other pre-Islamic traces strengthened my belief, already
formed in Hureidha, that this could not be the main line of the
ancient traffic to the sea ; but I was surprised and disappointed
at finding nothing at all, and was much relieved when, on the
second day after leaving 'Amd, emerging from wadi Shi'be
by a route a little west of that travelled by the van der
Meulen party—the only other travellers in this region1—
1
It is possible that Adolf von Wrede came down to 'Amd somewhere
in this neighbourhood in 1843, but this part of his journey is not fully
authenticated.

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I came at last upon some pre-Islamic letters roughly scratched

in the limestone of a great boulder that lay in the middle of
the track. It was a spectacular place, for the track, ascending
in zig-zags up an almost perpendicular face, here plunges
into a cleft made by a huge buttress, slightly detached from
the cliff behind it; it forms a tunnel in whose dim twilight
one can just see the writing on the smooth, century-polished
surface of the stone. In this position, sheltered by the roof
and the overhang of rock, the boulders of a causeway, care-
fully laid and worn quite smooth by the passing of many
feet, still remain to prove the existence of a track which the
letters show to have been pre-Islamic. Their position in semi-
darkness made a photograph impossible ; they were only
rough jottings, scratched at all angles, probably by resting
packmen—and Professor Eyckmans has been able to make
little of them beyond the fact that they seem to be proper
names. In proving the existence of a road, however, they did
good service.
The 'aqaba Khurja, where these letters and causeway are,
leads to the jol that divides the wadis 'Amd and Hajr and
Du'an, a high and waterless divide irrigated only by the visit
of summer rains. In the shallow valley-heads where these
collect, there runs a series of fortified villages, or sometimes
mere solitary towers, roughly following the north-south line
of the route to the sea from 'Amd to Hajr. That these villages
are medieval if not older is shown by the careful workman-
ship of their big ponds, lined with stones in a manner foreign
to the bedawin of more recent times.
We kept to the west of the main line of villages and of the
track of my predecessors, in order to look at a pre-Islamic
ruin reported at a place called Suwaidat. The flat-topped
elliptical mound on which it stands is 51° 2", i.e. roughly
north-east, from Hajlain.
On the top of the mound, built without foundations on the
hard limestone, is a small ruin 18 ft. by 18 ft. 8 in., of
dressed stone roofed with stone slabs (3 ft. 10 in. by 2 ft. 4 | in.

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by 4 | in.). The stones were well laid together and the mortar
used between them was invisible unless one looked for it.
The whole was divided into three equal parts by two partitions
running north and south. There was a door in the south,
and possibly one in the north wall also, but this side was more
or less buried in its own blocks. The door posts had grooves
cut in them, 5 inches wide and less than 1 inch deep. At
the far side of the mound, north, are three cairns, roughly
heaped stones about 5 feet high, with a hollow in the centre.
I came to the conclusion that this ruin, too small altogether
for a house, was probably a funeral monument, for two graves
had been laid bare by rains in the western slope of the mound
just below. They were very different graves from those of
Hureidha, and the first of their kind seen in the Hadramaut or
—as far as I know—in South Arabia ; they were built into
the hillside, of roughly dressed stone and mortar ; they con-
tained only one body each, and had been closed, the bedawin
told me, with stone slabs running in grooved stones. Bits
of these were lying about broken and in disorder, and from
their shape suggested that the door must have closed down
from above, a fact which the bedawin confirmed. They had
found, in the most northerly grave, two rings with pre-
Islamic lettering (one I knew to be in the possession of
Mrs. Ingrams at Mukalla), cowrie shells, a cornelian, a jar,
and bones; in the more southerly grave, which still had a
corner of masonry intact, they could remember no particular
objects. They had only recently, within the last year, looted
these graves and by so doing destroyed their archaeological
value. An inscription remained, half-buried and much
dilapidated, and too shallow to photograph well: I copied
it, and Professor Ryckmans has been able to discover that it
is in the Hadrami dialect and refers to a man who caused
this tomb, in which he was to be buried, to be restored or
renewed. It proves the existence of pre-Islamic habitation
in this region between 'Amd and- the sea ; and I think it is
more than likely that other tombs may be buried in the

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slope of the same mound ; the fact of restoring a grave there

suggests that it was some sort of a cemetery, and the two
discovered already are not of sufficient importance to warrant
a funeral monument to themselves, if that is what the ruin
above was indeed intended for.
This j ol between 'Amd and Hajr is strewn in many places
with flint flakes and tools, some of which I collected for
Miss Caton-Thompson, who verified them as being palaeolithic.
The country, possibly much more fertile in a wetter age, must
have been inhabited from very early times. On the 8th day
of our journey we left this high and flinty land and descended
to the oasis of Yeb'eth, which is on the upper waters that
drain to Hajr, and is a basin of cultivated fields with fortified
villages beside them.
If this had been on the ancient main route, it would
certainly have been a place of some importance, being the
last take-off as it were before the high journey of the steppe ;
but I could hear of nothing in the oasis of any antiquity and
felt ever more convinced that the route we had been following
was, then as now, a subsidiary and not a main way to the sea.
As soon as we had left Yeb'eth behind us, travelling south-
west over a new and unknown expanse of j ol, I began to hear
of inscriptions here and there in all directions, with increasing
frequency as one approached the great Meifa'a wadi. They
appeared to be rough inscriptions, drawings smeared with
red ochres on the faces of overhanging rocks, and as it meant
a day's delay or more to visit every one of them and I was
—owing to a bout of fever—behind my time already, I visited
only those in wadi Rahbe, making a detour of five hours
through the heat of the day while most of the caravan were
resting.
These inscriptions of wadi Rahbe were worth the trouble of
discovering, for they were far more extensive than anything we
had seen in the Hadramaut before. Their text is unimportant—
indeed, if it were not for their position, on a cliff face in
a completely unknown locality, Professor Ryckmans tells me

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that he might easily have considered them to be fakes !

They contain hardly any known words or names, and may
possibly belong to a non-Semitic language, or be " magic
texts "—a supposition favoured by the frequent recurrence
of the same letters arranged with no apparent sequence, so that
one cannot imagine them to make words. They fall into the
category of the graffiti found by Mr. Bertram Thomas in
eastern South Arabia. Their interest is in the pictures. The
first series, which is under an overhanging wall of cliff about
twenty-five minutes below the Kalab-Lijlij track to the left,
shows, besides the familiar outlines of ibex, two camels with
riders (one holding a rein), a figure of a man with either
a turban or a top-knot of hair as they wear now, and three
outlines of oxen. These are particularly noticeable because,
unlike the modern South Arabian animal, they have no
hump. In the Dair al-Bahri reliefs (15th century B.C.) the
oxen represented as belonging to the frankincense land, the
Land of Punt, are also without humps x; a fact which has
been used as an argument to suggest that Punt was in Arabia
rather than in Africa. The introduction of humped cattle
into Arabia is, I believe, quite recent.
The second group of graffiti is a two hours' ride down the
wadi eastward, twenty minutes beyond the solitary tower of
Ghititek, which—with one other tower a day's ride away—
is its only habitation. These graffiti are under the slanting
roof of a huge boulder south of the track, and contain two
very primitive drawings of houses, interesting because
they show towers, evidently, then as now, used on an other-
wise one-storied building. The high sky-scraper style of
architecture chiefly belongs to the wadis in the Hadramaut,
and not to the solitary fortresses of the j ol, and this distinction
may well have existed back into pre-Islamic times.
Travelling ever in a south-westerly direction, we were now
crossing the watershed to Meifa'a and coming to the region
where dark metamorphic rock meets the tawny and white
1
See Periplua of the Erythraean Sea, ed. by Schoff, 1912.

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limestone and sandstone which had surrounded us through

the winter. This was all very barren country : pools of water,
worn into the limestone, remain through the summer in
most of the ravines, but there were only three actual wells
on the track between Yeb'eth and 'Azzan, and hardly any
cultivation. On approaching 'Azzan we rode down the bed
of wadi Salmun, a perennial stream, with green stretches of
millet and lucerne on either side of it, and the pleasant shade
of trees. The villages scattered about this wadi Salmun—
called Ghail on this particular stretch—belong to the
Al Badiyan and the Al Boraish alternately.
'Azzan is the fortified key position which holds the valley ;
it is no more than a small cluster of fortresses where the
Sultans and their bodyguard live. The trading town is
Hauta, a little to the north, which I was prevented from
visiting by the fact that the Sultans were terrified of their
own fanatical population. An hour's ride or little more down
the valley, lies the greatest pre-Islamic ruin of the Hadramaut,
the fortress of Naqb al-Hajr, which must in ancient times
have held the same position that 'Azzan holds to-day astride
the (then) rich commercial highway.
No one with a geographic turn of mind can fail to pick this
out as the most likely line for the main trade route to have
followed.
Anything farther west (country which I did not visit) must
be excluded since it would not fulfil the essential condition
of leading up to Shabwa. But the Meifa'a road is still, the
Arabs told me, used as the quickest way to Shabwa from the
coast; it runs through potentially fertile country, owing to
the fact that water is found close below the surface of the
ground all along Meifa'a ; and its upper valleys open out
to the populous districts of Habban, Nisab, and Yeshbum.
The way up by the wadi Amaqin to the wadi Jardan and
Shabwa has not yet been travelled (political reasons prevented
the journey this year)—but there is every reason to surmise
that it was the Gorda of Ptolemy (the local pronunciation is

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still Gardan rather than Jardan); this appears on his map

as the link between Shabwa (Sabbatha), and Meifa'a, whose
name, unchanged, is cut in pre-Islamic letters on the wall
of the southern gate of the great fortress. Many of these
pre-Islamic names have come down unaltered; wadi Kasr
is known in an inscriptionx; Mr. Perowne's inscription
mentions Baihan ; Qana', cut in the rock of Husn al-Ghurab,
commemorates the harbour of Cana.
The pre-Islamic inscription had been copied, but had not
been photographed; I had some difficulty in doing so, for
the bedawin of the whole district gathered over a radius of
miles and surrounded me with a crowd of two or three hundred
men, all engaged in the effort to extract blackmail in a good-
tempered but very exhausting way.
The fortress is very large ; the outer wall, built of dressed
blocks with shallow square buttresses, encloses several acres
of ground and is cut off from a rise on the east by an
artificial fosse. There are two gateways, one north and one
south, the remains of a well within the southern gateway,
and ruins of buildings showing a variety of periods. From
its scattered potsherds, the place has evidently also been
inhabited in Islamic times. It is indeed a naturally strategic
point, gently dominating the Meifa'a valley, here known as
the Wad: this curious name interested me because of a
sentence in the Qur'an,2 which mentions the Wad as the
habitation of the pre-Islamic sons of Thamud. The vowelling
of Arabic makes it impossible to tell whether the proper
name Wad or the generic name of wadi is intended, but my
learned friends in Hureidha assured me that it should be taken
as a proper name, and that such a place existed, they did not
quite know where. The fact that I found it in the neighbour-
hood of the great fortress, suggests that this was considered
to have been the Thamudian capital by the contemporaries
of Muhammad.

1 2
Conte Rossini, Crestomathia. Surat al-Fajr;

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Count Landberg's expedition in 1896 was travelling for

inscriptions, but the usual difficulties with the bedawin
harassed them in 'Azzan,1 and they were not able to scour
the country far from the Sultan's palace. It is, however,
surprising that they were not (as far as I know), taken to the
graffiti in the river bed at the place called Saiq, a mile or so
above 'Azzan, where the stream, eating its way between
perpendicular walls, has provided surfaces for the scratching
out of pictures and words.
There is here a great variety, the words being partly pre-
and partly post-Islamic, and the drawings more varied and
animated than those of Eahbe. Here there is, for the first time,
the picture of a horse, saddled and bridled. There is a camel
evidently used for fighting, for two riders stand on its neck
balancing what looks like a spear and bow and arrow. There
is a man fighting a creature which Professor Ryckmans
prudently calls " an animal with claws", and I suspect
to be a lion ; he is ramming a spear into its mouth and holds
a rather vague shield in his other hand. There is no
inscription of any importance among these graffiti, but
names, greetings, and such like exclamatory messages which
marching troops might scratch on their way. The word
Thamud is there, the name of a man, a people, or a divinity.
And there are wasms and monograms, ranging from archaic
to recent pre-Islamic and to Arabic. It was impossible to get
a comprehensive photograph, for the writings are on a curving
wall, and the ledge which accedes to them is too narrow to
allow for reasonable distance; the cutting of the drawings
also, though it varies in style, is too shallow to give much
relief; and here too I was troubled by a woman who stood
in the river bed below, shouting abuse and inciting the men
around me to stop my labours by force.
In the middle of the wadi bed, a ten minutes' walk below

1
C. Graf Landberg, Die Sudarabische Expedition, 1899, and Die
Expedition nach Sild-Arabien.

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'Azzan, lies another rock with inscriptions, almost entirely

Arabic.
I was in 'Azzan for five days and spent two of them riding
up to the plateau of Kadiir to the west of wadi Habban.
The ruins on this plateau had been reported to Captain Miles
on his spirited journey in 1870, when he had them on his left
hand. I heard about them with the usual exaggerations from
the people in 'Azzan, who had never been there.
The place, a naturally impregnable area of plateau and
high valleys, with trees and water, and surrounded by cliffs
almost everywhere perpendicular, must have been a very
ancient refuge. Palaeolithic flint flakes lay strewn about it in
great numbers, and the flat smooth slabs of limestone, polished
by weather, had been used here and there for the chipping
out of ibex in rough outline. The ruins themselves were
disappointing, and might from their appearance belong to
almost any age ; they had once been a straggling village along
the lip of a ravine towards the centre of the plateau, and were
roughly built of stone. Round the edge of the plateau, where
the cliffs fell away to the wadi Habban, a wall had strengthened
the defences ; it was built of smallish blocks filled in with
smaller stones, with a base of about 8 feet narrowing to the
top, which was ruinous, so that one could not tell the original
height. A rough track led us up from the village of Lamater,
westward a three hours' ride by camel to the base of the
cliff and a further one hour and three-quarters to the top.
Here it passed through what must once have been a gateway,
showing better building and bigger blocks than the remaining
wall—possibly older work. The bedawin assured me that
these defences make the whole circuit of the plateau, whose
great cliffs stand like a bastion between 'Azzan and Habban.
At the bottom of the cliff, north of the track and plainly
visible from the top, a pre-Islamic inscription is scratched on
a smooth face of rock, giving names of clans. The tribe of the
Beni Himyar own this region and look upon it jealously as
private to themselves; I had some difficulty in forcing my

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way up, and indeed a small fight took place among the tribes-
men themselves who were not unanimous in welcoming me ;
but as soon as we were actually away among their cherished
uplands, and only a dozen or so of the bedawin with us, their
natural hospitality reasserted itself, the perennial and most
exhausting topic of blackmail was forgotten, and they were
delighted to have someone who enjoyed their clear waters,
green trees, and the spacious and lovely views.
As soon as we returned to where the villagers could get at
us on the following day, my troubles began again. These
men came up in relays of tens and dozens at a time, and all
had to be spoken to, and it was quite vital to keep the inter-
course on a level of cheerful and friendly banter, though—
after twenty-two hours on a camel in two days—I was almost
too tired to think. I had trouble also with my own sayyid—
a holy man at any rate by birth—who wished me to run away.
This is a mistake at the best of times, but idiotic when one
is unable to do so faster than one's pursuers. We were arguing
the point, when someone mentioned an inscription at a bend
of the wadi Kakhaila, the name given to the Habban valley
on the stretch immediately north of 'Azzan. The inscription
is above a small ledge about twenty feet up on the right bank,
where the valley turns a sharp corner first west and then
north. It is 4 feet high and 3 ft. 6 in. wide, and the top illegible
from weathering, being very shallow, cut in gritty sandstone.
This is an unknown inscription and is dated in the 560th
year of the Sabsean era, about A.D. 445. It begins with a list
of names of people who have united to repair and build or
terrace up their low-lying valley lands from top to bottom with
gypsum and mortar by the help of God (monotheistic Sabaean
inscriptions grow frequent in the early 5th century A.D.)
and the help of their lords, the lords of Raidan, and the tribes,
auxiliaries, hunters, guards, etc.
This is the first time that the formula " lords of Raidan "
is found. Raidan appears about the year 115 B.C. as a title
of the Sabsean kings, gained by conquest over their

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 SOME PRE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS 493

Katabanian neighbours. The name of Raidan has been

taken to derive from a fortress so called near Zafar, close to
the modern Yarim in Yaman. But Glaser x had already heard
vaguely of a Raidan in the region of Baihan, and Captain the
Hon. R. A. B. Hamilton told me, when I was in Aden, that
a hill of the name is a conspicuous landmark in the wadi
Baihan, and is in the neighbourhood of the mound of Nuqub,
which, from its size and the numerous antiquities discovered
in its vicinity, appears to be the chief ancient site of the wadi.
It is, I think, probable that the title " lords of Raidan "
referred to this region rather than to that of Yarim.
An inscription of far greater interest than anything found
by me was discovered in Baihan by Mr. Stewart Perowne,
who will give you a short account of it later. That district,
where the Katabanian capital of Tamna' must be situated,
and particularly the way up to it from 'Azzan, has not yet
been properly looked at, and the surmise that this was the
commercial highway, the pivot therefore of empire in the
south, yet remains to be proved ; but the inscriptions collected
by Mr. Perowne, and in a lesser degree that in wadi
Rakhaila, are first steps in the process.
Leaving the north with regret, I now turned to follow the
southern and last portion of the frankincense road to the
coast, down the wide and shallow natural highway of Meifa'a.
I found no trace of anything ancient in this wilderness of
gravel and sand dunes ; the bed of the stream, and the wind-
blown sands that shift about it, have probably changed the
whole geography several times over since Sabsean merchants
travelled by this way. It was also impossible to loiter, for
the route was by no means safe, and the Sultan's caravan in
which I travelled hurried through the middle and worst bit
by night, so as not to be seen.

1
See Glaser's map arranged by A. Grohmann in Rhodokanalcis,
Altsabaische Texte, Sitzungsber. Ak. Wiss. Wien Philos. Hist. Kl., 205
band, 2 Abh., 1927, end of vol.

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 494 SOME PEE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS

The little harbour of Bal Haf, three square towers on a

headland of extinct volcanoes, also showed no trace of ancient
habitation. There is no water, which by itself eliminates it
from among the possible sites for the harbour and terminus
of the road at Cana.
The day after reaching Bal Haf, I rode along the coast,
examining the inlets as I came to them—an inspection not
I believe made before, since earlier travellers mostly came
by sea. Nowhere was there any water until we reached the
bay of Bir 'Ali, where there are wells, and where on the sea-
jutting crater now called Husn al-Ghurab a quantity of
ancient ruins, walls, houses (inhabited by Arabs in medieval
times), four great cisterns, and two inscriptions prove the
existence of a pre-Islamic fort. Captain Miles saw the ruins
of a town between the crater and the modern Bir 'Ali; even
in 1870 they were half-buried, and I could see nothing of them
in the few hours at my disposal. It is probable that the town
followed the usual lay-out of these places, a fortified citadel
on the height and the merchants' and citizens' houses below
near the shore. Count Landberg, on his visit in 1896, says
that there were no houses of importance in the ruins of the
lower town. He copied the two inscriptions ; I did not know
this at the time, and laboriously did so over again. He did
not, however, photograph the larger one, and the small
alterations which appear from the print and fix the text
definitely made this expedition worth while. This larger
inscription mentions two of the tribes whose names already
appeared in that of wadi Rakhaila, eighty years earlier.
The inscriptions are of course well known, but they are
interesting enough in themselves to be repeated. The
larger one suggests that the land of Himyar was in this
region, and one may observe that the mountains south of
'Azzan are still called Jebel Himyar, though the maps have
wrongly marked them as Hamra; and that the present
Himyarites are the people who gave me so mixed a reception
for Kadiir.

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 SOME PRE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS 495

The second and shorter inscription says that the keeper

or commandant of Qana' (Cana) has written his name on the
rock of Mawiyat, a proof—as Landberg has already suggested
—that the two places are not identical, but close together.
Landberg suggests a site farther east, at Mijdaha, as the
probable place for the town as opposed to the fortress;
but I think this is not likely, since caravans from Meifa'a
would not go farther east out of their way more than they
were obliged to do by the necessity for water. The likely
place for the town, which was an important source of revenue
with customs, etc., would be under the walls of the fortress,
though no doubt there were residential oases in any locality
near by that had water. Ptolemy's map gives several little
subsidiary coast-towns, and boats might land at different
places according to the season of the year and the monsoon.
I must conclude this paper by saying that such erudition
as it contains is not my own, but the result of Professor
Ryckmans' kind research, for which I am most truly grateful.
All I did was to collect the material, and all I hope to have
shown to-night is that even the most unlettered traveller
may be occupied usefully and amusingly in gathering data,
which the acumen of the learned can later put to use. The
text of the inscriptions is being published by Professor
Ryckmans in the Museon.
On the conclusion of Miss Stark's lecture Mr. Stewart
Perowne made the following remarks:—
The ancient site known as Beihan lies at an altitude of
over 3,000 feet about a mile north-east of the village and
landing-ground of Nuqub in the wadi Baihan.
The wadi Baihan runs north-east from the highlands,
about 7,000 feet above sea-level, that separate Aden from
the Empty Quarter. Baihan is about 140 miles from Aden,
and guards the mouth of the wadi, which is at that point
about 2 miles wide. The floor of the wadi is flat and sandy,
and is watered not only by the annual torrents but by a
number of wells. Compared with the bronze-coloured moun-

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 496 SOME PRE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS

tains that flank it, and the sands of the Empty Quarter, into
which it flows, the wadi Baihan is a fertile locality.
It was this fertility combined with its position at the
junction of the route to Aden with the main incense route
that gave it its importance in antiquity. For important
it appears to have been. The site of the ancient city lies on
a little eminence by the side of the wadi. The line of the walls,
roughly oval, with the longest axis running parallel with
the bed of the stream, is clearly discernible from the air,
though owing to the encroachment of the dunes only sections
can be examined on the ground. The dimensions of the city
are about 500 yards by 400,1 think. Unfortunately I was only
able to make a hurried survey, in the course of official duties,
and had the misfortune to collapse with a fever in the middle
of it. But, by the courtesy and help of the Royal Air Force,
some excellent photographs were obtained, both from the
air and on the ground. I here express my deep gratitude to
Air Commodore McLaughry, at that time A.O.C., Aden,
to Wing Commander Barrett, commanding No. 8 Squadron
who readily granted my request for a survey, and to Flying
Officer E. R. Curry, an expert amateur photographer, who
took the ground photographs.
I have copies of these photographs with me. They show the
lay-out of the city, and also the locality, including the hill
whence the stone was quarried. It is about three-quarters of
a mile distant on the southern side of the wadi. The size of
the stones in some of the buildings indicates a high degree
of engineering skill in those who planned and executed the
work.
As to its date, I can say nothing. There are visible a number
of inscriptions in the Katabanian script. Most of these have
been known from copies, though not all from photographs,
for some time. I was fortunate in securing photographs of a
number of inscriptions and in finding three inscriptions
hitherto unrecorded.
Professor Ryckmans has kindly supplied me with trans-

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 SOME PEE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS 497

lations. Two of them mention the name Baihan, an interesting

point. One, imperfect, records the imposition of a tax on
the land of Kataban, in the second year of a person called
Hawf'atat. This inscription is mutilated. Like several others
it lies in the southern gateway, an apparently makeshift
affair, built after the decay of the city. The second inscription
is nearly perfect, and now reposes, upside down, in the wall
of a house belonging to the ruling family of the locality, who
are very friendly people. It reads, in translation :—
" Shahr Gaylan, son of Abshibam, King of Qataban, has
built and renewed, with the help of Athar Nawfan and of the
irrigation deities, the temple of Baihan, and its substructure
and its altar of burnt sacrifice and its superstructure, from
the foundation to the summit, when the 'Athar and the
irrigation deities assured to the Shahr Gaylan the defeat of
Hadhramaut and 'Amrun. And he established this temple
Baihan and its substructure in the favour and help which
Athar Nawfan shall accord. By 'Athar and by 'Amm and by
Aubay and by Dat-santim and by Dat zahran."
The third inscription consists of two words only, carved on
a stone which also is built into a dwelling house, too high
up to be photographed. It reads: " WAD 'AB
IRRIGATION "
This is interesting for two reasons : (a) because of the mention
of irrigation, which occurs in the other inscription, and (b)
because the name Wad 'Ab occurs in an inscription at
'Imadyia, another Katabanian site, of which I have
photographs.
In the 'Imadyia context it is, in the opinion of Professor
Ryckmans, a magic text, such as Miss Stark has already
found in the wadi Rahbe.
At 'Imadyia, however, the words are beautifully carved
in high relief on finely-dressed granite blocks.
King Shahr Gaylan is known from other inscriptions.
One of the remnants still visible may be the substructure
of the temple. It shows up well in the photographs.
JKAS. JULY 1939 33

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 498 SOME PEE-ISLAMIC INSCRIPTIONS

I can tell you little more. I acquired on the spot and placed
in the Aden museum a beautiful alabaster ointment box
and part of an altar—a spout or gargoyle, in the form of a bull's
head. A similar altar top is among the objects recovered from
Huraidha by Miss Caton-Thompson, recently exhibited at
the Fitzwilliam Museum. I acquired part of a similar altar
top at 'Imadyia. Time does not permit of my saying anything
of it to-day, but I have some pictures of 'Imadyia also, in
case anyone would care to see them.
It is hoped that a competent archaeologist will visit both
sites in a few months' time, with a view to gathering more
information. Perhaps later an expedition may be able to visit
the two sites, to carry out proper excavations. It seems
possible that both might yield interesting information con-
cerning a land and a people of which our knowledge is, I am
told, still imperfect.

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 JRAS. 1939. PLATE III.

INSCRIPTION BY CAVE-ENTRANCE : HURAIDA.

GRAFFITI OF OXEN : WADI RAHBE.

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 JRAS. 1939. PLATE IV.

WESTEBN HALF.

EASTERN HALF.
THE LARGE INSOEIPTION AT HUSN AL-GHUEAB.

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 JRAS. 1939. PLATE V.

EUIN AT SUWAIDAT.

RUIN AT SUWAIDAT.

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 JRAS. 1939

MAN AND LION (?) FIGHTING. FROM SAIQ IN W. MAIFA'A.

GRAFFITI W. DRAWINGS OF HOUSES IN WADI RAHBE.

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 JRAS. 1939. PLATE VII.

COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE INSCRIPTION IN WADI RAKHAILA.

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 NOTE THE SADDLED HORSE BELOW.
COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH OF INSCRIPTIONS AT SAIQ, W. MAIFA'A.

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 CO

T H E GEEAT INSCRIPTION OF NAQB AL-HAJR.

SJi
iA
V&^ t
k-7

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 JRAS. 1939.
PLATE X.

THE LINES OF HEAPED STONES AT 'ANEQ.

GRAFFITI OF SAIQ IN W. MAWA'A. FIGHTERS STANDING ON CAMEL'S

NECK ON LEFT CENTRE.
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 t'6if "<? Supvj

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