Film
The Political Landscape of Arabia
500 – 630 CE
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Around the year 500, five powers ruled the Arabian Peninsula: the dam-fed kingship of Himyar in the south, and four kingdoms bound to the empires beyond it, ruling the tribes on behalf of Persia and Rome. Within a century and a half, every one of them was gone.
This film traces how that happened: the fall of Himyar, the client kings of the north, the Persian east, and the corridor of the Hijaz that answered to none of them. Geography set the stage. Political decisions determined the ending.
Sources
- Christian Julien Robin, studies on Himyar, Kinda, and South Arabian epigraphy
- Greg Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity
- Robert G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam
- G. W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam
- Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Al-Hira: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext
- Jawad Ali, al-Mufassal fi Tarikh al-Arab qabl al-Islam
- With the work of the Yemeni epigraphic school
Primary sources
- The Namara epitaph, 328 CE
- The Ma'sal inscriptions of Himyar
- CIH 541, Abraha's dam inscription at Marib, 548 CE
- Ry 506, the Murayghan inscription, 552 CE
- The inscription of Shapur I at Ka'ba-ye Zartosht
- Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars
- Later Arabic historical tradition, cited as tradition throughout
Image sources
Images from Wikimedia Commons, including works by site excavators, under Creative Commons and public-domain licences. Full per-image credits appear at the end of the film.