PRICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE BOOK “THE ANCIENT YEMEN”, EDITION GEUTHNER/CEFREPA

Mounir Arbach, research director at CNRS, is an epigraphist and historian of South Arabia before Islam. Affiliated to the French Research Center of the Arabian Peninsula in Kuwait, he was on mission to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, where he has led the Franco-Omani Epigraphic Prospecting Mission since 2021. For around thirty years, he has carried out long stays and numerous field missions in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and currently in Oman. Author/co-author and co-editor of around fifteen scientific works, he has also published more than a hundred articles appearing in international scientific and popular journals.

For this book published during his residency in Oman as a representative of CEFREPA’s activities, he received the prestigious price from the “Académie des sciences d’outre-mer”.

The military conquests carried out by the kingdom of Sabaʾ at the beginning of the 7th century BC caused the gradual disappearance of city-states in South Arabia through their integration into larger kingdoms. Those of the Jawf region were annexed by the kingdoms of Sabaʾ and Maʿīn; those southern highlands are now in the orbit of Qatabān and Ḥaḍramawt, in the sixth century BC.

From this period of formation of the city-states and kingdoms of South Arabia was born the idea of ​​this book, a true inventory of research on the history of ancient Yemen between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. It offers a historical reconstruction based on a relative chronology of events and reigns, in the light of the latest discoveries and on solid data, mainly epigraphic and archaeological.

Cradle of a flourishing civilization, Yemen was endowed from the beginning of the 1st millennium BC of a specific political, religious and social system. During this period of formation and constitution of South Arabian city-states and kingdoms, South Arabia was marked by the presence of multiple political entities composed of cities/tribes, the most documented of which are from the region of Jawf – Nashshān, Kamna, Haram, Inbbaʾ, Qarnā. They shared, in addition to a common language, Minaic, a religious iconography of Mesopotamian inspiration unique in Arabia. Each of them had its monarchical institution, its own pantheon and its social organization.