And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart. And Solomon told her all her questions: there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not. And King Solomon gave unto the Queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty. So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants.
(I Kings 10 v.1-13)
She came up out of the desert, perfumed and oiled with the spices of her land, draped in pearls and precious gems, carried by a dozen muscular men who put her down gently as a feather. Although she bowed to grant him his due, in his kingdom, he took her hand and bowed his head in return, as she was also a great ruler, not just of a fine city but also of the whole of the legendary Saba to the south, spanning desert, water, and vast fields. They say the gardens flourished there, behind great walls with strange carvings that spoke of the reign of even older, mightier kings, of plagues, and of uprisings crushed like the flower of their incense trees.
Fast Facts
- Named for: Arabic, either yamn, “blessed” or ymn, “to the right of Mecca.
- Capital: Sanaa
- Long/Lat: 15.2 N/44.1 E, 8900 miles or 19 hours east of Castro Valley
- Population: 32.7 million or 48 CVs
- Size: 176,000 sq mi or 1000 CVs
- Avg temp in April: 79 F/26 C
- Median household income: $12-15,000
- Ethnicity: 93% Arab/2% Somali
- Main industries: Oil, sorghum, qat. The region is too unstable to harvest much frankincense or myrrh, though Yemen remains a key source.
Yemen is another “only” country in Arabia–the only “Y”–just as Oman and Qatar were the only “O” and “Q.” Is there something about this place that gives rise to unique names, or is it just the language?
The entire strip across the Mediterranean and north of the Arabian Sea into the Fertile Crescent was chock full o’ ancient history. Humans emerged from just to the southwest, from the Great Rift of Ethiopia and Kenya. Maybe they came up through Egypt, but just as likely they crossed the seas and deserts to find more arable land near those giant rivers. The most enterprising of travelers went further north to the Tigris and Euphrates, to plant crops where they could yield more food, support more people, build ziggurats, conquer their neighbors, and discover writing and mathematics. But the hardier early humans may have simply put down roots around the peninsula where crops could grow. They could build a little, certainly enough to build a kingdom known as Saba, or Sheba, thousands of years ago.
Sheba was famous for its frankincense and myrrh, those “perfumes of Arabia” that Lady Macbeth is probably referring to when she says they will not “sweeten” her hands that had committed murder. This ancient kingdom would have traded widely, being one that crossed waters. The Sabans likely traded their perfumes for pearls and royal purple with the Qataris and bargained with the Omanis. Kingdoms and empires came and went. On the maps, the borders and the colors change.
There is some scholarly dispute about whether Sheba of the Bible and Saba were the same. Some mark the biblical queen to be of Ethiopia and Egypt, while others note the logical similarity of Saba and Sheba as names. The queen has been described as Black in recent decades. Evidence for this is limited, yet evidence is also limited on whether was white, yellow, brown, or any other color. The people from the region mixed across the seas. She was not, however, European and pale, as the stained glass in northern cathedrals and murals by Renaissance painters depicted her.
The Queen of Sheba was a widely depicted figure. Like King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes, many people wanted to tell stories about her. While they are only the handful of lines in the Bible, there is more in the Jewish writings Targum Shen and also in the Quran. Solomon can sometimes speak to animals. In the Quran, she is called Bilqis and claim she tricked by Solomon because she thinks the polished floors are water. In a later, much longer Ethiopian version of her tale, she is called Makeda, and Solomon fools her with a bowl of water; after drinking from it, she is compelled to lie with him. It is part of Ethiopia’s national origin story, even though it was a thousand years after she might have lived, more a myth than a history. Maybe written down from older tales, where a queen was named Makeda but the wise king was not specifically Solomon from Jerusalem. Those parchments were blurry, recopied by the religious scholars for centuries.
The Bible doesn’t refer to any of this business of rings, bowls of water, or polished floors. But there is the Song of Solomon, and many argue that those love poems, written apparently by Solomon may have been aimed at the Queen whose questions he answered. Did she ask him how bees work (per a medieval tapestry) or about astronomy (the book of Michael) or about the planets? Or, did she ask him, perhaps, why he would suggest cutting a baby in half? Why his father was beloved of the Lord despite committing adultery, murder, and having his rebellious son killed? Did she ask if Solomon was traumatized by his father’s actions, his brother’s betrayal?
Some years before the days of Solomon (940-970 B.C.E.) and some years after, the land of Saba constructed an engineering marvel. This was the Mar’ib dam, beginning at 13 feet by rising to over 40 feet high during the Himyarites, around 115 B.C.E., near the time of Julius Caesar. For a time, the population flourished with irrigated crops. But strife between the borders eventually caused the destruction of the dam.
A new dam was built in the 1980s, 125 ft, and for a time brought prosperity back to the country of Yemen. By then, it had belonged to Islam, to the Ottomans, partly to Britain. The dam was destroyed in an airstrike, one of many casualties in a civil war between Shiite Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government of Yemen.
Yemen, the tip of the iceberg at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula, is now a poor country. It has constant food security issues, just like its neighbors in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Kenya. It has oil, but the rise and fall of prices make it more insecure than ever. War torn Yemen is desperate for clean drinking water and unable to produce the famous perfumes due to infrastructure destroyed and its underlying instability. It was the very birthplace of Arabic, but now Yemen is a shadow of its former Sabean self, nothing like the Sheba of the painters’ imaginations.
She might have asked him: How can we make peace that lasts?