Antiquities of South Arabia


Kitāb al-Iklīl fully known as the Kitāb al-Iklīl min akhbār al-Yaman wa-ansāb Ḥimyar, known in English as the Antiquities of South Arabia, is a book on the pre-Islamic Arabian history of Yemen and the Himyarite Kingdom by the 10th-century grammarian, chemist and historian Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani.
The Antiquities of South Arabia celebrates South Arabian and Yemeni identity, in a time after the Abbasid Caliphate had withdrawn from the region and political turmoil was rife.

Content

The work was originally written in ten volumes, only four of which exist to this day, although a portion of the sixth volume was discovered and published in 2020.
The contents of the lost volumes were noted in other surviving works. The topics covered by the ten volumes are as follows:
  • Volume 1: Genealogies of tribes of South Arabia
  • Volume 2: Genealogies of tribes of South Arabia
  • * Special focus on the family of king Sheba, the mythical Sabaean ancestor.
  • * Contains the poem, al-Risala al-Damighah, sometimes separately published with commentary.
  • Volume 3: Merits and deeds of people who lived in South Arabia
  • Volumes 4–6: History of the Kingdom of Himyar, from its inception until the rise of Islam
  • Volume 7: False reports on the history of South Arabia
  • Volume 8: Monuments, burials and their inscriptions, and poetry from South Arabia
  • * Discussions on the poetry of Dhu Jadan and Abu Karib.
  • Volume 9: Proverbs and aphorisms from Himyar
  • Volume 10: Genealogies of tribes of South Arabia
  • * Focuses on the history of the people of Hamdan, the hometown of the author.

In scholarship

Of the ten volumes of Kitāb al-Iklīl published in the 10th century, only the first, second, eighth and tenth volumes survived intact to the present day.
In 1881, parts of the work were translated into German by David Heinrich Müller.
The historian Nabih Amin Faris compiled the four surviving volumes into an annotated work, al-Juz' al-Thamin, published in 1940 by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Oriental Texts collection.
An abridged version of the texts has been made available under a Creative Commons license for reading in some online libraries.

English translations

No complete English translation has been made of the Antiquities, and the following only translate parts of it.
  • Faris, Nabih A. – The Antiquities of South Arabia. Princeton, 1938.
  • Müller, David Heinrich – Die Bürgen und Schlösser Südarabiens, Vols. 1–2. Vienna, 1879.
  • Müller, David Heinrich – Ṣifa: al-Hamdânî’s Geographie der arabischen Halbinsel. Leiden, 1884-1891.
  • Toll, Christopher – Die Beide Edelmetallen Gold und Silber. Uppsala, 1968.