I introduce us, what this podcast is meant to become, and our subject matter: Arab history.
Link to article about early Arabic scripts
Images
I was also testing my map-making skills with this one, and given the results I think I’ll only rely on them when no other alternatives exist.
Note how mountainous its western side is compared to the rest of it.
Glossary
- Himyar: the kingdom of the Himyarites in Yemen. It is said to have been founded around a hundred years before the birth of Christ, and so was between 600-650 years old by the time its independence came to an end. By then its official religion was Judaism, and Yemen’s great dam of Ma’rib – fabled to have been build before 1500 BC – gave the country enough water to support a settled population.
- Ghassanids: the tribal confederacy employed by the Byzantines to guard their borders along the Syrian and Arabian deserts. The confederacy gets its name from its chief tribe, the sons of Ghassan. They were semi-nomadic, and had a capital of sorts in a settlement on the edge of the desert named Bosra.
- Lakhmids: the tribal confederacy employed by the Sassanids to guard their borders along the Syrian and Arabian deserts. They also get their name from their chief tribe, the sons of Lakhm, and had a capital in the town of Hira, on the western bank of the Euphrates.
- Thul Nuwas: this is the name the classical Arabic sources used for this podcast give the final king of Himyar. Being transcriptions of early oral histories themselves, the accounts reflect a limited folk-knowledge of most of the world outside tribal Arabia. For example, the names for Himyarite kings are almost always nicknames: preceding Thul Nuwas (literally: “the one with the sidelocks”) was Thul Shanatir (literally: “the one with the earrings”. This is but one of the many unfortunate limitations of oral histories.
- Abraha: an Aksumite general who becomes in charge of Yemen at some point, probably around 575 AD.
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