ARABIA, PRE-ISLAM

The term “Arabia” has been variously applied in both modern

and ancient times to refer to a vast territory stretching from

the borders of the Fertile Crescent in northern Syria to the tip

of the Arabian Peninsula and from the borders of the Euphrates

to the fertile regions of the Transjordan. For the ancients,

this vague term, “Arabia,” referred to the dwelling places of

the varieties of South Semitic speakers lumped together

under the term “Arab.” For speakers of Hebrew and Aramaic,

the term Arab (_arab) carried the semantic notion of the desert

or the wilderness (_arabah), since the Arabs they encountered

were primarily the nomadic and seminomadic desert dwellers

engaged in long-distance commerce, animal husbandry, or

supplying cavalry troops to imperial armies. The result is that

ancient textual references to Arabia and its inhabitants, the

Arabs, are both inconsistent and imprecise in terms of geographic

boundaries, ethnic identity, and language use. The

meager textual evidence available to us shows us that many of

the northern Arabs used Aramaic and Hebrew as well as

varieties of Arabic in pre-Islamic times. After the rise of

Islam, however, the Arabic of northwest Arabia, the region of

the Hijaz, became the dominant language of the Arabs, and it,

along with its cognate dialects, formed the Arabic known today.

Arabia, Pre-Islam

52 I s l am and the Mus l im Wor ld

___ ___

___ __ ___

______

_____

Aksum

(Ethiopia)

Berytus

Al-Mausil

Al-Bas∫ra

Al-˚Uqayr

Busra

Ma˚a\n Sakaka

Nineveh

Ctesiphon

Wa\sit

Suh∫ar

˚Adan

Mukha

Ma^rib

Al-Fa\w

Mecca

Al-Dafena

Yathrib¶Medina

Fadak

San˚a&
Al-Ja\r

Khaybar

Al-Hijr

Tabuk

Masqat ∫_

Fajr

Tayma&

0 200 400 mi.

0 200 400 km

Religion of

Pre-Islamic Arabia

Modern border

Christianity

Judaism

Makkan religion

Zoroastrianism

Location of Christianity, Judaism, the Makkan religion and

Zoroastrianism in pre-Islamic Arabia. XNR PRODUCTIONS/GALE

The geography and natural ecology of the Arabian peninsula

has affected both the culture and the history of Arabia. It

is bounded in the north by a desert of soft sand, the Nafud, as

well as a desert in the south, the Rub_ al-Khali, the so-called

Empty Quarter. Both the Red Sea on the west and the Gulf

on the east are barriers to entry with few natural ports. There
are no permanent water-courses in Arabia and only scattered

oases in the interior. The ancient geographers used the term

natura maligna for Arabia, and even when using Arabia Felix,

“Happy Arabia,” for the south, they intended some irony. Its

average rainfall is less than three inches per year, and much of

that falls within a period of just four or five days. Because of

the forbidding landscape and the harsh climate, for much of

Arabia’s history, it resisted successful invasion. Such harsh

conditions, however, have provided refuge for those fleeing

persecution and those seeking the economic opportunities of

long-distance trading. Trade was assisted because Arabia was

the home of the domestication of the West Asiatic camel, the

dromedary, and the invention, around the beginning of the

first millennium C.E., of the North Arabian camel saddle,

which enabled camels to be used for cavalry warfare as well as

for transporting trade goods.

History

Historical knowledge of Arabia goes back to the Greek

historian Herodotus, to a few Akkadian texts, and to the

Bible, but sound historical records only come from the period

of Roman domination of the eastern Mediterranean. Much

legendary material has influenced the writings of the early

history of Arabia, particularly the biblical legends, which hold

that the Amelikites were the first “Arabs.” This legend is

adopted by Arabs themselves, who link themselves to the

Israelite soldiers who annihilated the Amelikites and settled

in the Hijaz in their stead. R. Dozy and D. S. Margoliouth

elaborated a secularized version of the biblical legends to

make Arabia the Semitic prototypical home and Arabic the

prototypical Semitic language. Associated with this theory is

the so-called desiccation theory of Arabia, which holds that

Arabia was lush and verdant in prehistorical times, only

becoming dry later, driving out the Semitic inhabitants into

the Mediterranean basin. While modern geological exploration

of Arabia has substantiated a shift in climate in the

peninsula from more wet toward dry, there is no evidence to

substantiate any of the theories that Arabia was the original

home of the Semites or that all Semitic languages derive

from Arabic.

According to a report that combines inscriptional evidence

and legend, Arabia was the temporary capital of

Nabonidus (556–539 B.C.E.), the last ruler of Babylon. In the

third year of his reign, he invaded the Hijaz as far as Yathrib

(Medina), and dominated the famous Arabian caravan cities

in the northwest quadrant. Some scholars see his motives as

economic, while others dismiss the historicity of the whole

event as part of a Jewish midrashic invention.

Inhabitants

Among the important pre-Islamic peoples of Northwest

Arabia were the Nabataeans, who, by the time of the arrival of

Roman imperial presence in the eastern Mediterranean,

dominated the region’s trade from around Damascus to the

Hijaz. They had been pastoral nomads who had settled in

their heartland around Petra. The Nabataeans plied their

trade through the areas of Transjordan, across the Wadi

_Arabah to Gaza and al-_Arish (Rhinocolura). There is also

evidence that they used the interior route of the Wadi Sirhan

to carry goods to Bostra for distribution to Damascus and

beyond. Nabataean wealth and influence attracted the Romans

into an unsuccessful invasion of Arabia in 26 B.C.E. under

the leadership of Caesar Augustus’s Egyptian prefect,

Aelius Gallus. The Nabataeans were able to resist Roman

domination until 106 C.E., when Arabia Nabataea became a

Roman province. In later history, the name “Nabataean”

became identified with irrigation and agriculture, because the

Nabataeans are credited with the development of hydraulic

technology in the region. In modern Arabic, “Nabataean”

(nabati) refers to vernacular poetry in the ancient style.

Most modern historians regard the Nabataeans as Arabs,

but the picture is more complex and illustrative of the problems

of ethnic identification in the pre-Islamic period. The

Nabataeans were philhellenes, using Greek art and culture,

Arabia, Pre-Islam

I s l a m and the Muslim World 53

and Aretas III issued coins with Greek legends after 82 B.C.E.
They used a form of Arabic as their language for trade within

the Arabian peninsula, writing it down in a modified Aramaic

script that influenced the development of the North Arabian

alphabetic script. They acted as a culture-bridge between the

Arabian interior and the Roman Hellenized Mediterranean,

and, depending on who was reporting, they could present a

different face to different peoples, Greek, Aramaic, or Arabic.

Jews had been inhabitants of Arabia from biblical times,

but the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. sent

larger numbers into Arabia. Around this time the apostle Paul

spent time in Arabia after his conversion to Christianity,

possibly to recruit converts, as did another Pharisee, Rabbi

Akiba, who went to Arabia to obtain support for Simon Bar

Kochba in the Second Roman War in 132 C.E. Some Jews

formed independent communities in Arabia, such as the small

enclaves of priests, who kept themselves isolated to avoid

ritual contamination so that they would be ready under

Levitical strictures to resume their duties if the Temple

should be rebuilt. Most, however, seem to have joined existing

communities comprised of Jews and non-Jews along the

trade routes stretching from the Hijaz to Yemen. The most

prominent of these settlements was the city of Yathrib,

known in both Aramaic and Arabic as Medina.

Roman Arabia

By 106 C.E., the Romans dominated most of the former

territories of the Nabataeans and the adjacent Syrian cities of

Gerasa and Philadelphia (modern Jarash and Amman in

Jordan), creating a province through the formal annexation of

the Nabataean kingdom under the Roman emperor Trajan.

This province, known as Provincia Arabia, was bounded by

the western coast of the Sinai Peninsula, the present Syrian-

Lebanese border to a line south of Damascus, and the eastern

coast of the Red Sea as far as Egra (Mada_in Salih in the Hijaz).

Gaza prospered as a major seaport and outlet for the province’s

commerce. This trade continued under Roman domination,

and the borders were fortified by semipermeable lines

of fortifications and client states. Under the Romans, Bostra

(Bozrah; now Busra ash-Sham) in the north became the

capital around a legionary camp. Petra remained a religious

center until the penetration of Christianity in the area. The

construction of a highway, the Via Traiana Nova, linking

Damascus, via Bostra, Gerasa, Philadelphia, and Petra, to

Aelana on the Gulf of Aqaba, set the border of Arabia (Limes

Arabicus) along the lines of an ancient biblical route. Paved by

Claudius Severus, the first governor of Provincia Arabia in

about 114 C.E., it improved communication and established a

modicum of control over the influx of pastoral nomads into

settled territory. More importantly, the road insured the

increase in prosperity of the cities along the route.

At the end of the third century, the Roman emperor

Diocletian divided Arabia into a northern province, enlarged

Treasury, Petra, Jordan; built by the Nabataeans between the

third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E. The Nabataeans were a

wealthy, important tribe of the pre-Islamic era who had been

nomadic and then settled around Petra. Their culture bridged

Arabic and Hellenic cultures, incorporating elements of both. THE

ART ARCHIVE

by the Palestinian regions of Auranitis and Trachonitis, with

Bostra as the capital, and a southern province, with Petra as

capital. The southern province, united to Palestine by the

emperor Constantine I “the Great,” became known as

Palaestina Salutaris (or Tertia) when detached again in 357

and 358 C.E. The cities of both provinces enjoyed a marked

revival of prosperity in the fifth and sixth centuries and fell

into decay only after the Arab conquest after 632 C.E.

During the period in which the Judaean Desert finds were

deposited in the caves, the area containing the discovery sites

remained off the main conduits of trade and communication,

and it is their remoteness that, for the most part, provided

their value as retreats from the demands of the central settled

world. The practice of using the Judaean Desert caves as

genizot, religious treasuries, continued from the time of the

Roman Wars through as late as the eleventh century C.E. The

presence of Byzantine Greek and Arabic texts indicates that

the local populations both knew of the existence of the caves

and made use of them as depositories for important documents.

This fact has had important implications in discussions

about the presence of copies of the “Damascus Covenant”

found in the Cairo Genizah. None of the texts found at the

Judaean Desert discovery sites mentions Provincia Arabia or

other geographic terms associated with Arabia. The texts,

particularly the texts from the Byzantine and Islamic periods,

indicate that the inhabitants of the region, who deposited the

finds, were well connected not only with Palestine but also

with Egypt and the larger world of the Mediterranean.

Arabia, Pre-Islam

54 I s l am and the Mus l im Wor ld

Southern Arabia

The southern portion of Arabia, known generically as the

Yemen, had ancient connections with Africa, India, and the

Far East, as well as the Mediterranean. It was culturally and

linguistically connected with the Horn of Africa. Among the

theories of the Arabian origin of the Semites, some have cited

the presence of speakers of a Semitic language unlike Arabic

in Yemeni highlands. Additionally, the relationship between

South Arabian and Ethiopic languages points to continuous

contacts between the two areas. Attempts, however, to devise

a comprehensive ethnographic categorization of the inhabitants

of Arabia have so far failed. This is in part due to

problems with categorization itself (what is a Semite, for

example) and in part due to the paucity of evidence. Relying

on Arabian histories and indigenous theories of ethnography

are problematic, because all were written after the rise of

Islam, which advances the religious notions of the family

relationship among all Arabs and promotes the elaboration of

the explanation of that relationship through genealogy. The

so-called Table of Nations from Genesis 10 was invoked by

early Islamic scholars, and the figures of Joktan, Hazarmaveth,

and Sheba are identified with Qahtan, Hadramawt, and the

Sabaeans.

An increasing amount of archaeological and inscriptional

evidence support the meager and legendary historical material

surrounding the histories and influence of at least four

major kingdoms in southern Arabia, the Sabaeans, or kingdom

of Sheba; the Minaeans; the kingdom of Qataban; and

the kingdom of Hadramawt. These kingdoms were supported

by a combination of trade and agriculture. Elaborate

aqueducts, dams, and terracing helped sustain these kingdoms

as well as giving evidence of their ability to marshal

considerable resources for their construction and maintenance.

We do not know the reasons for the demise of these

kingdoms. The Qur_an (34:15–16) attributes the breaking of

the dam at Ma_rib in the kingdom of the Sabaeans as divine

retribution for their sins. Secular theories attribute the demise

of organized agriculture in the southern region to the

combined factors of the repeated breaking of dams and

waterworks and the rise of the influence of Ethiopia in

southern Arabia.

It is probably from the time of the breaking of the Ma_rib

dam that some southern Arabian tribes migrated north,

intermixing with the Arabs of the Hijaz in many places,

including the city of Yathrib/Medina. This migration may

also be linked with increasing economic opportunities in the

northern part of Arabia resulting from the domestication of

the camel, the invention of the North Arabian camel saddle,

and the increasing use of camel cavalry forces in the armies of

the Roman and Persian empires.

Premodern Arabia possessed little arable land, but southern

Arabia was the habitat for frankincense and myrrh, the

aromatic resins from conifers found in Arabia and the Horn

of Africa. Because southern Arabia was the home of those

much-sought-after aromatics and the trans-shipment point

for Asian and African trade goods, including slaves, it was a

much-desired location for colonies and extensions of empires.

These products were sought as luxury trade-goods

from as early as Old Kingdom Egypt, when this was known as

the land of Punt. They were used for funerary and liturgical

ceremonies, often in large quantities. The use of frankincense

is attested in the biblical offerings mentioned in Leviticus

2:14–16 and 24:7, and also in the Talmud as a medicine and a

painkiller. In Christian liturgy, incense was an important part

of the celebration of the mass. Trade in aromatics, gold, and

luxury items from Africa and India made the west coast of

Arabia the conduit to the Mediterranean and linked southern

Arabia with the settled areas of Syria.

Knowledge of Persian interest in Arabia begins with

Darius I (r. 521–485 B.C.E.). He sent an exploratory expedition

from India to the Red Sea, probably to increase trade.

Greek interest was stimulated first by Alexander the Great

and Nearchus of Crete, but Alexander died in 328 B.C.E.,

just before executing plans to conquer the peninsula. This

interest prompted the Greek naturalist and philosopher

Theophrastus (c. 372–287 B.C.E.) to describe South Arabia,

providing one of the earliest historical accounts. The Ptolemies

of Egypt, successors to Alexander’s rule, pursued ambitions in

the Red Sea. The Syrian Seleucids promoted the use of the

northern routes to India, probably in an attempt to diminish

Egyptian and Arab domination of eastern luxury goods. The

establishment of the Parthian state in the mid-third century

B.C.E. weakened the Seleucids, but Antiochus III was still

strong enough to conduct an expedition in 204 and 205

against Gerrha on the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf.

In the second and first centuries B.C.E., major changes took

place in the economy and power of the southern kingdoms of

Arabia. The Mediterranean world learned the secret of the

use of the monsoon trade winds to navigate to India, and

mountain tribes began invading the settled kingdoms. By the

end of the first century B.C.E., the Sabaean kingdom was under

the rule of the tribe of Hamdan, and the kingdoms of Ma_in

and Qataban were destroyed. Roman attempts to conquer

Arabia Felix failed, but Rome’s influence was extended first

through the Nabataeans and later through Egyptian and

Ethiopic Christianity.

Sometime around 50 C.E., an anonymous author wrote the

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an account in Greek of the

ethnography and trade in the Red Sea. In the middle of the

second century C.E., the geographer Claudius Ptolemy (fl.

127–151 C.E.) wrote a detailed description of Arabia from the

perspective of Roman interests in the region. While some

scholars identify some sites mentioned by Ptolemy with

modern Arabian cities, like Macoraba as Mecca and Yathrippa

as Yathrib/Medina, others discount this identification and

claim that knowledge of ancient Arabia cannot be derived

Arabia, Pre-Islam

I s l a m and the Muslim World 55

from from the Greco-Roman sources. In the case of the

identification of Yathrippa as Yathrib, there is inscriptional

support, however, from a Minaean inscription, where Ythrib

is found. The general picture from these sources is that an

active culture of trade and agriculture linked Arabia with

Africa, South Asia, and the East Mediterranean world.

Arabia Between Two Empires

By the middle of the third century C.E., religious and political

competition between the Roman empire and the new Persian

Sassanian empire had intensified with Arabia as one of the

centers of the conflict. Both sides were intent on political and

economic domination through conversion. For the Romans,

that meant Christianity, and sometime around 213 C.E.,

Origen visited Arabia, probably at Petra, to bring that area

into religious and political orthodoxy. In 244 C.E., M. Julius

Philippus, known as Philip the Arab, acceded to the Roman

imperial throne, and there is strong evidence that he was a

Christian. His predecessor, Gordianus III, had defeated the

second Sassanian emperor, Shapur I (r. 241–272 C.E.), and,

although he concluded a peace with the Persians, continued

attempts to control Arabia. The Persians, whose official

religion was the nonproselytizing Zoroastrianism, used

Nestorian Christian and Jewish missionaries as their agents

in Arabia.

Knowledge of Arabian history from the fourth through

the beginning of the sixth centuries is meager because of the

lack of written sources. In part, this is due to the decline of the

urban centers in Arabia. While Arabia was no less strategically

important to the two empires during this period, the

creation of the buffer-states of the Lakhmids on the Sassanian

side and the Ghassanids on the Roman/Byzantine side provided

both empires indirect means of controlling the flow of

goods and traffic into the settled areas. Because the buffer

states were a main source of camel cavalry, some scholars have

noted a process of Bedouinization corresponding to the

decline of urban areas in this period as it became more

profitable to raise and sell camels. The Ghassanids and the

Lakhmids mirrored their sponsor-states by engaging in warfare,

even when Rome and Persia were ostensibly at peace.

In the sixth century C.E., conflicts again arose, this time

through the agency of the Persian-sponsored Jewish state in

the Yemen under Yusuf Dhu Nuwas and Byzantium’s

Monophysite ally, the kingdom of Aksum. When Dhu Nuwas

attempted to return Najran to his control, he met resistance

from armed Christian missionaries, whom he defeated. With

Byzantine naval support, the Aksumites invaded Arabia, defeated

Dhu Nuwas, and established an Abyssinian-ruled client

state. Its ruler, Abraha, rebuilt the Ma_rib dam erected a

cathedral in San_a_, and attempted to conquer Mecca. His

defeat, traditionally in 570 C.E. and recorded in Qur_an 105,

coupled with an invasion of the Yemen by the Sassanian ruler

Khusraw I Anushirwan (r. 531–579 C.E.), drove the Abyssinians

from Arabia. The southern portion of Arabia remained under

Persian control until the rise of Islam.

Religions
Shortly before the birth of Muhammad in 570 C.E., Mecca and

its environs in the Hijaz rose to historical prominence. In

part, this view is in retrospect from the vantage of knowing

that Islam came from there, but it is also in part because the

dominant Meccan tribe seems to have been able to amass

some political and economic hold over the region. The tribe

of Qureish, whose name possibly means “dugong,” was likely

a group of Arabs involved in the Red Sea trade and moved

inland with the decline of Roman authority in that sea. Their

rule was both economic and theocratic. Their major shrine

was the Ka_ba at Mecca, one of several such Ka_ba in Arabia at

the time. They managed to import the worship of many local

Arabian deities to Mecca, so that polytheism under the

Qureish became a kind of federal cult.

It is difficult to speak with any precision about the native

polytheism of the Arabs, because almost all of what is known

comes through hostile Islamic sources. Allah was worshipped

as a creator deity and a “high god,” but the everyday cult

seems to have been dominated by several astral deities,

ancestors, and chthonic spirits, such as the jinn. Animal

sacrifices seem to have been used to propitiate the more than

three hundred deities mentioned by early Muslim historians.

Circumambulation of the Ka_ba and other cultic objects was

also a usual practice, often during “sacred” months of pilgrimage

to religious sites. Little is known of the theological

or moral nature of pre-Islamic polytheism in Arabia, and the

Muslim critique of the pre-Islamic period portrays it as

devoid of all redeeming features. From the scanty evidence

available, the cult promoted loyalty to family, clan, and tribe,

a sentiment that Arabs carried over into the Islamic period as

Islam was characterized as a “super-tribe” uniting all Arabs

under one common genealogy.

While Christianity was present from an early period in

Arabia, and there is evidence of the political connections and

dimensions of Arabian Christians to their coreligionists in the

surrounding countries, little is known of Arabian Christian

beliefs and practices except through Islamic sources. Qur_anic

evidence indicates that, while the full range of Gospel narratives

is not represented, the Qur_an represents particularly

the Gospel of Luke quite accurately and with close readings.

Recent scholarship in this area is challenging the earlier

notions that the Qur_an portrayed only a heterodox

form of Christianity and is pointing to a more mainstream

pre-Islamic Christianity, albeit divided among the various

Christological heresies of the day.

As seen from the above survey of Arabian history, religion

among the pre-Islamic Arabs was closely tied to the political

ambitions of several foreign powers that wished to dominate

Arabia. At the time of the rise of Islam, converting to one of

Arabia, Pre-Islam
56 I s l am and the Mus l im Wor ld

The ruins of the Mar_ib Dam, created circa the sixth century B.C.E. in Mar_ib, Yemen, by the Sabaens,
one of four major kingdoms of southern

Arabia to predate Islam. Aqueducts and dams were an important part of the Sabaeans’s infrastructure
and rise to power. Secular historians

have postulated that the decline of pre-Islamic kingdoms may have had to do with the breakdown of
their dams and aqueducts; the Qu_ran

attributes the destruction of the Mar_ib Dam to divine punishment of the Sabaeans’s sins. The Balaq
mountains are in the background.

© ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS

the varieties of Judaism or Christianity in Arabia meant

choosing not only a religion but also a political and social

agenda dominated by a foreign power.

Literary Legacy

One of the major legacies of pre-Islamic Arabian culture to

later Arab and Islamic culture was the development of the

poetic and formal language often termed “classical” Arabic.

In the century or century and a half before the birth of

Muhammad in 570 C.E., the Arab tribes in the Hijaz developed

a literary form of Arabic that stood alongside the various

dialects. This was a composite, formal language with a highly

inflected grammatical system. It also had a flexible system for

generating new vocabulary based on extensive use of the

Arabic verbal root system that allowed for easy adoption of

new terms and concepts within the language itself. It was also

open to the adoption of terms from the surrounding languages

of Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Ethiopic, among others.

As a “meta-language” it undoubtedly reflected the growing

political expansion of the Qureish and their economic unification

of the Hijaz, but it also seems to have grown from the

common experiences of local religious practices, Bedouin

travel songs, and the panegyrics of the courts of the Arab

dynasties along the borders of the Roman and Persian empires.

There is also speculation that this language was used for

formal prose in treaties, formal agreements, and in writing

Jewish and Christian scripture, but, as mentioned above,

there is little evidence of biblical translations into Arabic in

the pre-Islamic period. Instead, there is more evidence that

Jews and Christians had their own “dialects” of Arabic, with

added vocabulary from the Jewish and Christian languages of

the eastern Mediterranean. These dialects likely served as the

conduits for much of the foreign religious vocabulary that

found its way into Arabic.

The poetry that has survived from the pre-Islamic period

was transmitted orally and only transcribed in the Islamic

period. It was composed by a poet to be preserved and recited

by a reciter, a rawi, who may also have been a poet or an

apprentice. In this poetry, each poetic line had independent

meaning, and the entire poem was comprised of thematic

sections, which concentrated on travel, love, praise, and so

on. The most famous of these “odes,” termed qasidas, are

Arabia, Pre-Islam
I s l a m and the Muslim World 57

known as the Mu_allaqat, or “suspended odes.” Various stories

are given to explain the name, but the writers of these

poems became known as the masters of Arabic poetic composition,

and their style of poetry so influential that later Islamic

poetry in Persian and other Islamic languages as well as

Arabic survived until modern times.

The style of poetry known as saj_, rhymed prose, was

another influential poetic form, apparently used by seers and

holy men for prognosticative pronouncements. This form of

poetic language is found in many places in the Qur_an, giving

rise to the accusation that Muhammad was a poet or mantic

seer.