The British Museum

The sites of Ancient South Arabia.

The biblical Queen of Sheba, famous for presenting King Solomon with a caravan of precious stones and spices in Jerusalem, is thought to have come from Saba, a powerful incense-trading kingdom located in present-day Yemen. Saba was one of a number of kingdoms, including Qataban, Hadramawt and Ma'in, which developed around the margins of the South Arabian desert in the early first millennium BC. These kingdoms were located on overland trade routes that lead from the incense regions of Southern Arabia to the markets of the Near East and the Mediterranean. The kingdoms earned considerable profit by taxing, servicing and protecting the camel caravans, and they waged war against each other over control of the routes. The Sabaean kingdom, with its capital at Marib, controlled the South Arabian incense trade from c. 700 to 500 BC. The wealth that the trade generated helped to fund large-scale architectural building projects that required huge teams of quarry workers, stonemasons and sculptors. The architecture at Marib was the most spectacular of its time and included the Awwam temple (locally known as the Mahram Bilqis or the Temple of the Queen of Sheba), the Bar'an temple and the Great Dam, which is mentioned in the Qu'ran.

Images of the architecture at Marib and the capitals of other South Arabian kingdoms can be viewed in this interactive map. You can follow the caravan route from the port of Qana, near the incense producing regions, to Shabwa, the capital of the Hadramawt, and then travel around the edge of the desert to the cities of Timna and Marib, the capitals of Qataban and Saba, and finally visit Ma'in, kingdom of spice merchants. In reality this was only the beginning of a lengthy northward journey, which finished in the spice markets of Mesopotamia, the Levant or the Mediterranean.