Studenda Mira

After the last post , I poked around the library a bit to see if I could find more substantive information on Yemen's Akhdam and their traditional association with the region's 6th C. Aksumite conquerors. I found "Akhdam tribe in servitude," a 1976 Geographical article by James Horgen. His version of the "commonly held myth about their ancestry...heard from both illiterate tribesmen and learned scholars" goes something like this: After 570, Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an, the Jewish Himyarite aristocrat who'd successfully entreatied Sassanid Persia to deliver his people from Aksumite Christian dominion, was installed as Persia's vassal. He killed the surviving Aksumite fighters, save for a few who were kept as a ceremonial guard for his processions. Ceremonial or not, the Aksumites still carried spears. They played along with the pomp for a while, but one day, they turned those spears on Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an and assassinated him. This prompted the...

A New York Times travel article inspired me last March to write about the late antique history of Yemen , which saw the Abyssinian Christian empire of Aksum (located in what's now Ethiopia) displace Yemen's Jewish rulers, only to be overcome by Sassanian Persia and, finally, the first Islamic caliphate. Today, the Times's Robert Worth writes about the plight of the Akhdam , a hereditary Yemeni underclass whose origin dates at least to medieval times. What caught my attention was the popular Yemeni conception of their background: They are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam. I think that sort of folk wisdom is too often dismissed out of hand. One has to be careful, of course, because the solutions offered by such sources can be very convenient, and one only has to consider the many competing folk origins of Ireland's Traveler people to see how q...

Old City Sana'a Photo by eesti . On the heels of the last post, I was entranced by this lush travel article in the New York Times (free registration required) about the Yemeni island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa. It's not difficult to imagine traders on that Alexandria-India run porting here for one last pit stop before the big push across the Arabian Sea: Socotra is significantly inhabited, and has been for some 2,000 years. More than 40,000 people now live there: many in Hadibu, the island’s main town, the rest scattered in small stone villages, working as fishermen and semi-nomadic Bedouin herders. Nature and culture are longstanding neighbors. I especially liked this bit: Lying on the rocky ground, with the scent of frankincense fresh in memory, I felt as though I had stumbled into a chapter of the Old Testament. Well before dawn I woke to the sound of the family patriarch’s voice warbling a long, mournful prayer. He finished after a few minutes, and the ni...