Free The Great Arab Conquests by Hugh Kennedy

enemy.
     
     
    While much of Arabia is desert, the peninsula also includes some surprisingly varied landscapes. In the highlands of Yemen in the south-western corner, and parts of Oman in the south-east, high mountains attract enough rainfall to allow permanent agriculture. Here the people lived, as they still do today, in stone-built villages perched on crags, cultivating crops on terraces on the steeply sloping hillsides. The people of the villages were grouped into tribes, like the Arabs of the desert, but they were not nomads. It is impossible to know what proportion of the Arabs who joined the armies of the conquests came from these settled communities. In modern times, the population of small Yemen is almost certainly higher than the whole of vast Saudi Arabia, and we can be certain that many of the conquerors, especially those who went to Egypt, North Africa and Spain, came from groups who were not Bedouin at all but whose families had cultivated their small but fertile fields for generations.
     
    The people of the settled south had a very different political tradition from that of the Bedouin of the rest of the peninsula. From the beginning of the first millenium BC, there had been established, lasting kingdoms in this area, and temples built with solid stone masonry, great square monolithic columns, palaces and fortresses, and a monumental script had been developed to record the doings of founders and restorers. 5 This was a society in which taxes were collected and administrators appointed. In the heyday of the great incense trade in the last centuries BC, a whole string of merchant cities existed along the edge of the Yemeni desert, caravan cities through which the precious perfumes, frankincense and myrrh were transported by trains of camels from the rugged southern coast, where the small scraggy trees that produced the precious resins grew, towards Mediterranean ports like Gaza, where the markets were. This was also a society that could organize massive civil-engineering projects like the great dam at Marib. Here, on the sandy margins of the Empty Quarter, the rainwater from the Yemeni highlands was collected and harvested, distributed through an artificial oasis to provide drinking water and to irrigate crops.
     
    By the end of the sixth century, when Muhammad began his preaching, the glory days of the south Arabian kingdoms were well in the past. By the first century AD, the incense trade had shifted as improved navigation and understanding of the monsoons meant that the maritime route up the Red Sea became the main commercial thoroughfare. The last of the ancient kingdoms, Himyar, was based not on the old trade routes of the interior but on the towns and villages of highland Yemen. By the late sixth century, Himyar itself was in decay and the great Marib dam had been breached, never to be repaired again, the oasis abandoned to wandering Bedouin. The last dated inscription in the old south Arabian script was set up in 559. With the end of the kingdom of Himyar came foreign rule, first by the Ethiopians from the 530s and then by Persians. Some men could still read the old monumental inscriptions, folk memories remained of old kingdoms, and the final breach in the late sixth century of the Marib dam was recognized as a turning point in the history of the area.
     
    There were scattered towns in other parts of the Arabian peninsula and networks of markets and traders. In the hilly areas of the Hijaz in western Arabia there were small commercial and agricultural towns, including Medina and Mecca, and it was the inhabitants of these small Hijazi towns who were the elite of the early Muslim empire. There were settled communities, too, in the great date-growing areas of Yamāma on the Gulf coast. Most of these towns and markets were mainly used for the exchange of the wool and leather of the pastoralists, and for the grain, olive oil and wine that were the main luxuries. From about AD 500, however, a new economic