Episode 111: Pre-Islamic Arabia

Episode 111: Pre-Islamic Arabia

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 111: Pre-Islamic Arabia. In this program, we will discuss the history of the Arabian Peninsula prior to the year 570 CE, the year most commonly given for the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. And I’d like to start this episode, and this whole season of the podcast, with a quote.

هَل غادَرَ الشُعَراءُ مِن مُتَرَدَّمِ         أَم هَل عَرَفتَ الدارَ بَعدَ تَوَهُّمِ
يا دارَ عَبلَةَ بِالجَواءِ تَكَلَّمي          وَعَمي صَباحاً دارَ عَبلَةَ وَاِسلَمي
فَوَقَفتُ فيها ناقَتي وَكَأَنَّها          فَدَنٌ لِأَقضِيَ حاجَةَ المُتَلَوِّمِ
وَتَحُلُّ عَبلَةُ بِالجَواءِ وَأَهلُنا          بِالحَزنِ فَالصَمّانِ فَالمُتَثَلَّمِ
حُيِّيتَ مِن طَلَلٍ تَقادَمَ عَهدُهُ         أَقوى وَأَقفَرَ بَعدَ أُمِّ الهَيثَمِ

Now, have the poets left a rip unsewn? And did you see her old haunts, overgrown?
Oh tell me, ʿAblah’s home! here in Jiwāʾ; good day, peace and good will to ʿAblah’s home
Right there I propped my camel like a fort and scratched the itch to pause before I roam
One time,ʿAblah had settled in Jiwāʾ and we in Hazn, Sammān, Mutathallam.
Long live you scars of sand, left long ago; vacant after ʿAblah, Mother of Haytham.¹

These lines come from one of the most famous odes of the pre-Islamic period, a poem probably written in the 500s CE. They are melancholy lines. The qasida, or early Arabic ode, is often charged with reminiscence and nostalgia – a yearning for times irrecoverably lost, and a sense that just as the desert swallows old camps, the many generations of humanity lie buried beneath the sands of time. While this ancient ode’s lines about the ephemeral nature of human life express a sentiment not uncommon in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, its first line, هل غادر الشعراءُ من مُتَرَدَّمِ, or “Now, have the poets left a rip unsewn,” or, in another translation, “Have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sewn?” is its most famous. The opening line of this very old poem asks, perhaps, a surprising question. Is there anything else for poetry to write about, or has it all been covered? Has every metaphor, simile, rhyme, assonance, and expression been used? Is there anything left to say?

It’s a startling sentiment for us to discover in a poem written in Arabia in the 500s, this world-weary meditation on how poetry, specifically Arabic poetry, was so old that it had already run its course; indeed that Arabic literature was so rich and full of works that contributing to it felt a little futile. What happened on the massive expanses of the peninsula during antiquity? To those of us outside of Islam, ancient Arabia is often an obscure subject – a blank spot between Rome and Persia, the home of some hardy bygone peoples, to be sure, but little beyond that. To Muslims, Pre-Islamic Arabia has often been neglected as a subject of study for different reasons. Before the Prophet Muhammad, in traditional Islamic historiography, there was al-Jahiliyyah, or the time of ignorance, or wildness, and Jahiliyyah is seldom worth extended consideration. The question we will now try to answer, then, is this. What actually happened on the Arabian Peninsula, prior to the birth of Muhammad in 570 CE? If it was, as tradition has proclaimed, a time of ignorance, then why does one of its most famous poems suggest a massive literary tradition existed during the lives of Muhammad’s grandparents? How did Arabia go from being a scarcely-mentioned hinterland in ancient history, to taking over the most powerful empires in central Eurasia in a single generation? Islam, of course, is the simplest answer to this question. But Islam, and the Qur’an arose within a very ancient and complex culture, a culture that it’s time for us to learn about now.

Over the next 35 or 40 hours of the podcast, we will learn how Islam came to be, and about the lives and times of some of the most overwhelming people in all history – the Prophet Muhammad, his wives Khadija and Aisha, his son-in-law, the beloved and selfless Ali, his friends, the titanic first two Caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar, and more, and we will learn how one generation of Arabs destroyed a transcontinental hegemony that had existed for a thousand years. 35 hours, or a year or so from now, though, we will also come back to the beginning, to this line of Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry – “Have the poets left a single spot for a patch to be sewn?” and we’ll see if we can answer this question. Welcome to Literature and History’s seventh season: Early Islamic History. [music]

Al-Jahiliyya and the Basics of Pre-Islamic Arabia

Before we begin, let me say upfront that throughout this season, I will try my best to pronounce Arabic words and names in Arabic, and when historical words or place names are transliterated very differently into English, I will offer the Arabic version, as well, for those of us familiar with this history in Arabic. I apologize in advance for imperfect pronunciations to come, but I’d rather respectfully try to do a good job and come up short than to not try at all. I do have two native speakers helping me prep, and these speakers will be recording sustained passages of Arabic poetry and the Qur’an, so that you hear those correctly, as you did with ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad’s ode a moment ago. So, let’s get started.

The story of Pre-Islamic Arabia, put very briefly, is that the peninsula spent a thousand years of recorded history as a middle-ground between Mediterranean empires to its north and west, and Persian empires to its east. The peninsula’s Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports, together with caravan routes that crisscrossed it, made it an important commercial region from the Bronze Age onward, channeling goods from Africa and the Indian Ocean northward and eastward to Greek, Roman, and Persian markets. A sparseness of resources in the peninsula’s interior, most obviously water, made agriculture untenable, and many of the peninsula’s inhabitants lived in nomadic tribes or confederations of tribes, resilient and adaptable, but also vulnerable to fluctuations in climate, commerce, feuds, and leadership squabbles. Some coastal regions, however, especially around modern-day Bahrain, around modern-day Sanaa, Yemen, and the Hijaz region of the peninsula’s west coast were home to settled societies, and later kingdoms, centuries before the dawn of Islam. The peninsula, then, especially in the two centuries just prior to Muhammad, was a complex place, its indigenous tribes and kingdoms playing power politics with the larger Roman and Persian civilizations to the north, and its diverse and evolving peoples practicing a variety of vocations and religions.

Telling the story of Pre-Islamic Arabia in just two or so hours – the ancient history of the largest peninsula in the world and the many peoples who lived there over the course of antiquity – telling this story in a podcast episode is a tall order. Nonetheless, it’s an important story to tell. Islamic historiography, as I mentioned a moment ago, has had a contentious relationship with the history of the Arabian Peninsula prior to the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad, perennially labeling it as the time of ignorance, or lawlessness, or Jahiliyyah, sometimes quite contemptuously, and thus not an epoch worth a great deal of interest or reverence. At other times, though, Islamic historians have esteemed Pre-Islamic Arabia as the place that gave rise to the Arabic language, a marvelous body of extant literature, and many of the virtues still valued in Arab culture today. Thus, the Pre-Islamic, or Jahili period, has been alternately condemned and romanticized. This period has also, more recently, come into clearer focus via archaeology and modern scholarship. Over the past few decades, archaeology in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria, and elsewhere, along with cross-disciplinary scholarly work, and translations of ancient Aramaic, Syriac, Pahlavi and Arabic texts have taught us a lot about the Arabian Peninsula before Muhammad – who lived there, who came, and went, what they did, and what they believed.

Let me make a quick note on terminology here. The word Jahiliyyah, in Islamic historiography, is a pejorative one. However, contemporary Anglophone scholarship uses the word “Jahili” as a neutral adjective in order to describe, for instance, Jahili poetry, Jahili literature, or Jahili culture on the peninsula. I will use the terms “Jahili” and “Pre-Islamic” interchangeably in our episodes on Arabian history before Muhammad, as this is the convention in scholarship. Thus, to be overbearingly clear, “Jahili,” going forward, will be synonymous with “pre-Islamic,” although the word Jahiliyyah has disparaging theological implications in Islam. Let’s move on.

One of the cardinal rules of ancient history – one we’ve observed over and over again in our podcast – is that everything is always older, and more connected than we might think. Approaching the Arabian Peninsula when Muhammad was born in about 570, especially if we’re newcomers to Islamic history, we might imagine a large swathe of turf where Arabic speakers occupied a remote and geopolitically isolated territory. Some areas of the peninsula, during Late Antiquity, were indeed remote, their sparse resources supporting small Bedouin populations with limited cultural and commercial connections to the coasts. Other areas of the Peninsula, however, even a thousand years before the Prophet was born, were hubs of commerce and culture.² From the Bronze Age onward, the Hijaz region, in particular – the west coast of the Peninsula, along the Red Sea and back of the Arabian boot, where Muhammad lived and worked, and where Islam was born – was culturally and nautically connected to Ancient Egypt, and then Achaemenid Empire, then the Ptolemaic Empire, and then Rome and the Sasanian Empire, long before the first Caliphate began in 632.

Let’s talk for a moment about historiography and pre-Islamic Arabia – in other words, how we know what we know about the Peninsula prior to the year 600 or so. Our primary focus in this program will be the Arabian Peninsula, along with what’s today Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, during the centuries between about 300 and 600 CE. There are a few different basic ways that we can approach understanding this place and time. The first, and perhaps sturdiest of all, is archaeology. Recent survey work, especially in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, and Jordan, has unearthed many buildings, inscriptions, and occasionally documents that serve as primary evidence of who lived in Arabia, and what they were up to during Late Antiquity. After archaeology, our sources of information on Pre-Islamic Arabia begin to get a little bit fuzzy. On one side, we have a number of contemporary, or near-contemporary source texts, written about Arabs and Arabia by outsiders – outsiders like ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, and a little later, Christians of various denominations who lived in and around the Peninsula between the 300s and 600s. These outsider texts are useful, and we’ll look at many of them in this episode, especially toward the beginning. But hearing what, for example, ancient Romans wrote about the Arabs whom they encountered and with whom they worked on Rome’s eastern frontier, we often see Arabs depicted as foreigners, and barbarians. Outsider accounts of Pre-Islamic Arabia, then, written as early as Herodotus’ Histories in the 400s BCE, should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Other major source texts that we have on Pre-Islamic Arabia have to be taken with a different grain of salt. These are later Islamic histories of ancient Arabia, written during the Middle Ages. Later Muslim historians, working out of cities like Toledo and Baghdad in the 800s, 900s, 1000s, and after, when they wrote about Pre-Islamic Arabia, were chronicling events that happened centuries and centuries before they lived. Some of these later Muslim historians dealt evenhandedly with pre-Islamic world. Others were more sectarian in nature, moralizing about the Peninsula’s impious past, or, somewhat differently, conflating the importance of their tribe or sect by rewriting the past. And a final source we have on Pre-Islamic Arabia is the poetry that survived from the period before, and contemporary with the life of Muhammad, Jahili poetry like we just heard a moment ago. Arabic poetry had evolved to a high artform by the sixth century, when the Prophet Muhammad was born. Although we don’t have bushels of Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and although what we possess has likely been altered, or even forged by later historians of Arabic literature, Jahili poetry is still a useful window into the world in which Islam came to be.

The present program you’re listening to will primarily be about the archaeological sources, and the outsider – in other words Greek, Roman, etc. – sources that we have on Pre-Islamic Arabia, and we will discuss Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry in the next two shows. Understanding Arabia’s place in the geopolitics of the 500s means understanding its relationships with neighboring empires and kingdoms, some of which left behind records of their dealings with Late Antique Arabs. Muhammad’s Mecca, and later Medina, existed at the axis of a tristate, or quadra-state region, where several different imperial powers, but most of all the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, were competing with one another. In this long multi-state conflict, Arabs were increasingly employed as imperial subordinates. Though Arabs had always engaged in commerce, maritime trade, and moreover, moved all around the Ancient Near East, by the 500s, some key Arab leaders had ascended to very high echelons of power with Byzantine and Sasanian partners, and their story is the one with which we will end in this program.

So, again, in the next two programs, we will hear some primary Arabic literature from Pre-Islamic times, and in doing so, let the peninsula tell its own story. But our goals in this first program on the Jahili period are a bit broader, and more international. We need to explore how, when, and why Arabia first became connected with major Eurasian empires. We need to learn how, north of the Peninsula, in the marchland between the Mediterranean west and the Persian east, a unique and evolving culture existed – one where Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and other religious refugees found homes, where generations of Arab tribal leaders transitioned into imperial militiamen and then full-fledged client kings, how the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, and Pahlavi cultures of the north trickled down into the peninsula’s trade hubs and immigrant enclaves, while the Himyarite kingdom in present-day Yemen, and the Aksumite kingdom in present-day Ethiopia also had lasting effects on the culture of the central peninsula.

The story of Pre-Islamic Arabia is a long one. And I want to begin this story in the middle of things – in fact, precisely in the year 117 CE. During this year, the Roman poet Juvenal was working on his satires. The prolific Greek author Plutarch was setting down important works of cultural history, and the genre of the ancient Greek novel had just begun to take off. The ante-Nicene Christian theologians Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna had begun to imagine the epískopos, or bishopric, as a standard Christian office, with great powers and great responsibilities, and early Gnostic writings were already in circulation, writings that important proto-Orthodox Christian authors would define themselves against. As important as all these cultural developments were, though, in the first decades of the second century, something a bit more relevant to the Arabian Peninsula happened, as well. [music]

Arabia Before and Just After Year One

In 117 CE, the Roman Empire under the emperor Trajan reached its all-time greatest size. The Roman empire, as it had for over a century, included the full Mediterranean rim. To the vast basin that Romans called mare nostrum, or “our sea,” along with present day Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, the emperor Trajan had added much of what is today Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. In the twilight of Trajan’s career, he did what no Roman emperor or general had accomplished, pushing armies through the eastern edges of modern-day Iraq, and conquering the populous areas of the Tigris and Euphrates all the way down to Persian Gulf. At this brief juncture of Roman history, the Arabian Peninsula had a Roman garter all the way around the top of its broad boot. At high tide, then, Rome’s eastern fringes swelled all the way to the slopes of the Zagros Mountains of present-day Iran, north to the Armenian Caucasus, and encircled the northern periphery of the Arabian desert.

When the Roman emperor Trajan completed his conquest of so much of Mesopotamia in 117 CE, we might be tempted to imagine Romans having their very first ever encounters with Arabs. Rome, after all, was on the Italian Peninsula, and Arabia two thousand miles away, beyond vast expanses of saltwater, mountains, and desert. However, 117 CE was not the beginning of ancient Eurasian history – not even close. Early Greek sources, although they didn’t have much in the way of hard facts, knew about Arabia – roughly where it was, and that it was a warm place, from which unique trade goods came. The Greek historian Herodotus, back in the 400s BCE, along with later Greek ethnographers, had liberally written fables about the faraway lands south of Mesopotamia, referencing the winged snakes that lived there, and an overall sweet, spicy odor that pervaded the air.³ After Alexander of Macedon’s conquests concluded in 323 BCE, Hellenistic geographers named the western wedge of the Arabian Peninsula Arabia Felix, or “fortunate Arabia” after the abundance of trade goods to be found there, leaving the inland region, uncharted by Greek explorers, called Arabia Deserta.

During the 200s BCE, the Mediterranean became much more closely linked with the Arabian Peninsula. Alexander’s conquests, complete in 323 BCE, had temporarily obliterated the divide between the Mediterranean west and the Persian east, leaving in its wake a number of massive successor kingdoms. The new Ptolemaic empire, a Greco-Egyptian state, brought Greek culture southward along the Nile, and southeast, into the Red Sea. In the early 200s BCE, the Greco-Egyptian monarch Ptolemy II established the port of Berenike on Egypt’s east coast, roughly half-way between the Nile and Yathrib, today, Medina, specifically with the purpose of expediting commerce from Africa and Arabia northward into Egyptian and Mediterranean markets. While the Ptolemaic Empire, that Greco-Egyptian empire left behind after Alexander’s conquests, was Arabia’s next-door neighbor to the west, another of Alexander’s successor kingdoms lay just to its north. The massive Greco-Syrian empire known as the Seleucid Empire, at its apex spanning from Anatolia to what’s today Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan, formed the northern border of the Arabian Peninsula between 312 and 141 BCE. While these two centuries would have seen generations of Arab immigrants coming northward, a famous anecdote about Arab-Seleucid encounters is that the Seleucid king Antiochus III, some time around 200 BCE, went southward to visit the ancient Arabian city of Gerrha, on the central shin of the Arabian boot – today near the city of Dammam – in antiquity, an important port for Indian Ocean trade goods.

Arabia, then, was surrounded by Greek speaking powers for nearly two centuries during the Hellenistic period. And between the mid-200s and mid-100s, Greek geographers mapped out the coastal regions of Arabia most pertinent to the commercial activities of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires – the Hijaz region, Arabian ports along the Gulf of Aden, and those along the Gulf of Oman and Persian Gulf. These ports brought Indian Ocean trade goods into, and clockwise around the Arabian Peninsula, along with exports from Arabia itself. Even by the year 100 BCE, long before the Roman emperor Trajan conquered Mesopotamia, Arabia had seen centuries of transoceanic trade. Vessels from all over the world had docked in its ports, and its arid northern borders with present day Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait had seen centuries of foot traffic pass through.

Ancient Greeks and Romans were often on the move, whether for commercial or military purposes, and so it’s no wonder that they, along with their Persian counterparts, had extensive dealings with the settled and itinerant societies of Arabia. Ancient Greeks and Romans were also prolific writers. And increasingly, as BCE wore into CE, and, Rome established provinces in the east, and inhabitants of the Mediterranean began to set down their impressions of their Arab neighbors in Greek and Latin. [music]

Strabo and Diodorus Siculus on the scenitae

In 63 BCE, the aging Roman republic established the province of Syria. And by 63 BCE, Romans had recorded their impressions of a variety of peoples from the Arabian Peninsula. Never a neutral source on cultural outsiders, Roman texts often describe Arabs as scenitae, or “tent-dwellers.” Early Roman sources also frequently depict Arabs as raiders. The geographer Strabo, in the final century BCE, described “The [Idumeans] and Arabians, all of whom are freebooters, [who] occupy the whole of the mountainous tracts [of Syria]. The robbers have strongholds from which they issue forth. . .The [farmers] live in the plains, and when harassed by the freebooters, they require protection of various kinds.”⁴ Strabo’s older contemporary, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, left behind a similar impression of Arabs, some time in the decades around 50 BCE. Siculus wrote,

Arabs. . .bear the name of Nabataeans and range over a country which is partly desert and partly waterless, though a small section of it is fruitful. And they lead a life of brigandage, and overrunning a large part of the neighbouring territory they pillage it, being difficult to overcome in war. For in the waterless region, as it is called, they have dug wells at convenient intervals and have kept the knowledge of them hidden from the peoples of all other nations, and so they retreat in a body into this region out of danger. For since they themselves know about the places of hidden water and open them up, they have for their use drinking water in abundance; but such other peoples as pursue them, being in want of a watering-place by reason of their ignorance of the wells, in some cases perish because of the lack of water and in other cases regain their native land in safety only with difficulty and after suffering many ills. Consequently the Arabs who inhabit this country, being difficult to overcome in war, remain always unenslaved; furthermore, they never at any time accept a man of another country as their over-lord and continuous to maintain their liberty unimpaired.⁵

These are mostly negative impressions, needless to say. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus saw Arabs as opportunistic marauders who attacked settled populations and then retreated into arid hideouts. Interestingly, Parthian sources, slightly earlier than Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, set down similar statements about Arabs. The Parthian Astronomical Diaries describe frequent Arab attacks of Persian settlements in Mesopotamia in the four decades between 130 and 90 BCE, attacks which culminated in Babylon’s fortifications being damaged, and a tribute payment being given to the raiders.⁶

In summation, then, within Roman, and Greek, and Parthian sources that survive from the final century BCE, Arabs are depicted bandits who chipped away at the fringes of settled society – barbarians ungraced with the blessings of civilization; at best, elusive, proud, and unconquerable; at worst, a brutal, primitive people who made the barren interior of the Arabian Peninsula even more foreboding by their presence there. These impressions of early Arab civilization are hardly complimentary. But, then, Greeks and Romans rarely had kind words toward cultural outsiders, whether these cultural outsiders were Gauls, Celts, Goths, Huns, Berbers, or any other indigenous inhabitants of territories that Rome conquered, or attempted to conquer. Long before Christianity and Islam, the Mediterranean recorded impressions of the Middle East as a strange region, full of strange people, and surely the opposite was the case, as well.

We’ve covered a good bit of history in this program so far, but as we arrive at year one in our brisk journey through Pre-Islamic Arabian history, I want to pause for a moment and make one very simple point about geography. When we think of ancient Arabia and the world around it, especially if we’re newcomers to ancient history, perhaps the most important thing to get in our heads is a trio of regions. The first region is Arabia, or the Arabian Peninsula, today home to seven countries – in order of size, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The next area after the Arabian Peninsula to consider is the Mediterranean, which was, by year one, quite thoroughly ruled by Rome. The third region we need to keep in mind when we study ancient Arabia is the region to the north-northeast of Arabia – in year one, controlled by the Parthian Persian empire. These three regions, an upside-down triangle with Arabia to the south, existed as culturally distinct entities for a thousand years before the birth of Muhammad. There were exceptions. Once, the Achaemenid Persian empire had control of Egypt and Anatolia. Later, the Greco-Syrian Seleucid empire held power as far east as Pakistan. Later still, with the aforementioned conquests of the Roman emperor Trajan, culminating in 117 CE, the Romans had pushed the Parthian Persian empire east of the Tigris. But generally speaking, Arabia, at the bottom of our upside-down triangle, had Greek and Latin powers to its northwest, and Persian powers to its northeast. The way that Arabia negotiated with, traded with, and later fought with these two Eurasian superpowers would eventually determine the course of world history. [music]

Arabs in the Roman-Persian Frontier, Up to 100 CE

North of the Arabian Peninsula in year one lay the frontier between the Roman and Persian Parthian empires. This was an ancient and crucial frontier. Depending on the century, this frontier had already included parts of eastern Turkey, Armenia, eastern and central Syria, northern Iraq, and later, when the Roman empire ballooned to its all-time highest size, almost all of modern-day Iraq. This borderland is a complex geographical region to describe, so as we move forward in this program, let’s call it the Roman-Persian frontier – that vast and diverse swathe of turf that Romans to the west, and Parthians, and later Sasanians to the east, tugged back and forth for over six hundred years.

A lot of the extant Greek and Latin writing that we have about Arabia is due to events that took place on this Roman-Persian frontier – often military events. And what we see in this writing is similar to the accounts of Strabo and Diodorus Siculus we looked at earlier. Greeks and Romans, out in the marchland over the first few centuries CE, met with, worked with, and told stories about Arabs who’d come north from the Arabian Peninsula.

One of these stories was left behind in the Greek writer Plutarch’s book Parallel Lives, a book written around 100 CE. Though written around 100, Plutarch’s account of a Roman-Arab encounter recorded events that had taken place a century and a half before. In Plutarch’s book Parallel Lives, Plutarch describes the defeat of the Roman triumvir and general Crassus at the Battle of Carrhae back in 53 BCE. According to Plutarch, the rich and ambitious Crassus was pressing eastward, leading an unprovoked invasion of the Persian empire for the sake of self-aggrandizement. While directing his army, roughly along the border between modern day Syria and Turkey, Crassus met “an Arab chieftain, Ariamnes by name, a crafty and treacherous man, and one who proved to be, of all the mischiefs which fortune combined for the destruction of the Romans, the greatest and most consummate.”⁷ This duplicitous chieftain, according to Plutarch, tricked Crassus and his army into an exhausting march through barren territory, and eventually, multiple Arab forces converged and defeated Crassus and his troops, after which they tricked Crassus into peace negotiations, and murdered him. Later Roman historians parroted this story.⁸ It may be entirely fictitious, and certainly doesn’t show a very positive attitude toward Arabs, depicting them, as Strabo and Diodorus Siculus had, as wily and dishonest easterners. Elsewhere in Roman literary history prior to Plutarch, in Lucan’s Pharsalia and Virgil’s Aeneid, Arabs also make brief appearances as villainous and exotic easterners. Plutarch’s description of the deceitful Ariamnes, though, in addition to recycling what was evidently a stereotype by 100 CE, also offers us an interesting clue about what ancient Roman chroniclers understood to be Arabian territory.

As of year one, the Roman-Persian frontier, according to the occasional ancient source, seems to have been home to many Arab citizens. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, in the 70s CE, described Edessa (today Homs, Syria) and Carrhae (today Harran, Turkey) as lying within a region he called Arabia, and the Roman historian Tacitus, a generation later, did something similar.⁹ It’s likely that what “Arabia” meant to these Roman sources from the west was a sort of umbrella term for an admixture of nomadic and settled cultures within the Roman-Persian frontier. Archaeology has given sturdier evidence that a people called the Arabs were well north of the Arabian Peninsula by the 100s CE. The city of Hatra, in what is today northern Iraq, has numerous Aramaic inscriptions attesting to the presence of Arabs living there. A theologically and culturally diverse city, wedged between two great empires, Hatra seems to have flourished up until its destruction by Sasanian armies in 240 CE. In summation, then, when we say “Arabia” today, we are describing a region whose cultural heartland is the Arabian Peninsula. To Romans, however, during the early imperial period, “Arabia” seems to have described the peninsula, but also a larger and more complex border region to the north, between the Mediterranean and Persian worlds, as well. [music]

Arabia and the Early Roman Republic

Arabs are often described as scenitae, or tent-dwellers, in early Latin sources. However, archaeological evidence suggests that a settled civilization, made up at least in part by inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, had congregated at Petra, in modern-day Jordan, by the 300s or 200s BCE.¹⁰ This was the Nabataean civilization.¹¹ Nabataean territory, which was close to, or enveloped by Roman’s eastern borderlands over the first and second centuries CE, was a splendidly located trading hub. Trade routes bound northward along the back of the Arabian boot often went right through Nabataean lands, and a settled civilization that could take trade goods from the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea and get them to Jewish, Greek, and Roman merchant ships on the Levantine coast stood to make excellent profits. Long before the Suez Canal, Petra was a thriving waystation between many different markets – Africa to the southwest, the Mediterranean to the northwest, Mesopotamia to the northeast, Arabia to the southeast, and far beyond, the ports along the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Nabataeans were a culturally and ethnically diverse group, but, considering their geographical position, inhabitants with roots in the southern and central Arabian Peninsula almost certainly made their homes there.

Greeks and Romans, then, by year one, had met, traded with, scuffled with, and recorded interactions with Arabs. These interactions, however, had largely taken place in the Roman-Persian frontier, north of the Arabian Peninsula, rather than the peninsula itself. This pattern changed when Rome’s republic fell, and its first emperor ascended to the throne. When the first Roman emperor, Augustus, assumed control of Egypt, he sought to take advantage of Rome’s shiny new province. Conscious of all the commercial opportunities along the Red Sea coast, Augustus sent a military expedition down along the western shore of Arabia. In doing so, the emperor was probably also staging a proxy war with the Parthians. Whichever side held influence over Arabia, after all, would be able to attack their adversary from two directions simultaneously. And while both Parthian and Greco-Roman leadership periodically sent military expeditions into Arabia, the peninsula’s harsh climate made fielding a large army there exceedingly difficult. The Romans, in 24 BCE, seem to have reached the kingdom of Sanaa in modern-day Yemen, but the long overland march there, and a lack of familiarity with the territory, ultimately led to the expedition’s failure.

This failed expedition ended Rome’s expansionist ambitions in Arabia for a long time. But closer to the Mediterranean, the Nabataean borderland – again, headquartered in Petra in modern day Jordan – remained a place of collaboration and cohabitation between Mediterranean and Arabian peoples. Caravan traders needed townspeople there. The need was reciprocal. As in other provinces of the Roman empire, government officials recruited and paid polyglot bureaucrats as liaisons between Roman towns and indigenous peoples farther out, and these go-betweens could be very useful to both sides. The famous treasury at Petra was likely built close to the beginning of the first century CE at the bequest of a Nabataean king with ties to Roman leadership in the region. Nabataea became sufficiently indispensable to the Roman east that in 106 CE, Rome annexed the kingdom, calling its new province Arabia Petraea, or “rocky Arabia,” one of several provinces added to Rome’s far east at the close of the first century. Rome’s military footprint, following this territorial acquisition, included garrisons and auxiliary forces permanently stationed in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, successfully cordoning off Sinai and Egypt from any easy land invasion by the Parthian Empire. Archaeological evidence from the northwestern peninsula suggests that after the second century, Romans were intermittently stationed as far south as the settlement of Hegra – or Al-Hijr, to use its Arabic name, a town less than two hundred miles northwest of Medina. The international heritage of this region is still celebrated today. The city of Jerash, north of Amman in Jordan, was home to a temple of Artemis in Roman times, and the emperor Hadrian had a monumental arch built there around 129 CE. Today, a major cultural festival is held there annually.

Over the 100s CE, Arabia gradually flourished as a patchwork of itinerant groups and settlers. And to the north, Rome and Parthia fought two major wars. During the first of these wars, Rome under Trajan triumphed, reaching its aforementioned largest size in history in the year 117 CE. In the second, in 165, under Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Rome once again defeated the Parthians. And in both cases, the flashpoint of conflict was the leadership of Armenia. While Rome’s second victory in a century might seem to indicate Mediterranean dominance of the old Roman-Persian frontier, the reign of the Roman Emperor Commodus, which began in 180 CE, signaled the end of Rome’s all-time greatest century. When the Roman barracks Emperor Severus came to the throne in 193, he attempted a punitive campaign against Parthian allies in Mesopotamia, some of whom had assisted his foes in a recent Roman civil war. The latest campaign in the great Roman-Persian frontier was not successful – the Romans were rebuffed in what is today northern Iraq, demonstrating that Mesopotamia would continue to be a borderland for some time to come. [music]

Arabia, Rome, and Persia, 200-330 CE

During the first half of the 200s, a seismic shift in regional power took place north of Arabia. Most importantly, the Parthian Persian Empire became the Sasanian Persian Empire in 224 CE. The first two Sasanian Kings, Ardashir I and Shapur I, enjoyed long, successful reigns, and partnered with a Zoroastrian priestly caste, thereby strengthening the political and religious homogeneity of the Persian east. With church and state closely allied, fresh bureaucratic energy devoted to the military and economy, and a spirit of territorial expansionism, the newborn Sasanian Empire sought to assert control over the old Roman-Persian frontier. Meanwhile, Rome was a mess. From 238-284, the Roman empire saw an unending churn of military coups, succession disputes, and civil wars just as northern barbarians began to chop southward over the Danube and westward over the Rhine, harrying the limes Germanicus, or “German frontier” ever more persistently thereafter. No longer in a position to overtake Mesopotamia, Rome’s power over its eastern frontier withered, and from 260-272, Rome fought desperately to retain its territories at the cusp between present day Turkey and Syria.

To the citizens of the Arabian Peninsula, and those who ventured north into the marchland between Rome and Persia, at the dawn of the 300s CE, the intermittent conflict between Romans and Persians must have seemed immortal. Over the first few centuries CE, the two empires slowly annihilated the buffer states that had once separated them – Palmyra, Commagene, and Hatra, for instance. With little middle ground left for proxy wars, two empires, after 300, alternated between military engagements and peace treaties. A temporary treaty was secured in 298 – the Peace of Nisibus, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, but it gave way to a fresh outbreak of fighting in 363, when the Roman Emperor Julian waged an ill-advised offensive against the Sasanians, dying in a battle that same year. For Arabs, the north had hardened into Roman and Sasanian blocs, blocs whose conflicts and intrigues affected everyone in the region.

The Sasanians, once the Sasanian Persian Empire began in 224 CE, were on the warpath. And Sasanian expansionism, from the third century onward, resulted in incursions into the Arabian Peninsula. According to several later Muslim historians, the first Sasanian king Ardashir, on the throne from 224-242, wanted control of some of Arabia’s gulf coast, snatching up territory in what is today Bahrain. Other sources attest to Sasanian conquests in modern-day Qatar, and even Oman.¹² However, archaeological research has not supported these accounts of the early Sasanian empire, and the issue of early Sasanian occupation of eastern Arabia is still debated in today’s scholarship – we’ll talk about the Nasrid, or Lakhmid kingdom in the eastern part of the peninsula a little later in this show. While the Sasanian presence in Arabia around 300 is still uncertain, better evidence for what the peninsula looked like in the late 200s can be found in archaeological sites around the heel of the Arabian boot. The small kingdoms of Saba, Himyar, and Hadramawat, across the Red Sea from the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, gradually transitioned into a unified Himyar, or Himyar in Arabic. The Himyarite Kingdom, ascendant in southern Arabia from about 300 until 525, likely had its capital about 80 miles south of what is today Sanaa, Yemen. This kingdom – again the Himyarite Kingdom – was, for two centuries, a defining presence in southern Arabia and the Hijaz region that would soon be the birthplace of Islam. The Himyarites, seated in the shrubby mountains southwest of the Arabian desert, differentiated themselves from the Arab tribes, whom they considered their subjects. By the middle of the 300s, the Himyarite kingdom was fielding expeditions northward and eastward into the territories of Arab tribes. The most consistently mentioned of these tribes were the Kinda, who seem to have lived a few hundred miles inland, in an arid and remote region of present-day Saudi Arabia north of the border with Yemen.

Around the time that the Roman emperor Constantine died in 337, an Arab monarch named ‘Imru al-Qays seems to have ruled from a base in what is today southern Syria. A tomb and inscription discovered in the village of al-Namara, about 30 miles north of the Syrian border with Jordan, described this ‘Imru al-Qays on a lintel that’s now in the Louvre, in one of the most ancient examples of Arabic writing. The inscription calls ‘Imru al-Qays the “king of all the Arabs,” celebrates the king’s rule over Syria, and tells of his military expedition to the distant south of the Arabian Peninsula, where he confronted a Himyarite King named Shammar, and exercised authority over central Arabian tribespeople – the Ma’add confederation, centered in present-day Riyadh, and the Nizar, to their southwest. The location of ‘Imru al-Qays’ tomb and inscription, likely within fourth-century Roman territory, suggests that he may have been a Roman client king, with obligations to blunt the Himyarite empire’s northward expansionism and pacify the assorted nomads of the inland desert. There is also some evidence, however, that whomever the description refers to may have been a Sasanian ally.¹³

‘Imru al-Qays remains a tantalizing and simultaneously mysterious figure, but his background and allegiances are a fairly complex thing to consider in a podcast episode, so let’s zoom out for a moment and make a general observation. Arabia, by the year 330 CE, was not just hemmed in by two empires, but three. To the northwest was Rome, whose center of gravity was shifting closer toward Arabia, to the city of Constantinople. To the northeast were the Sasanian Persians. To the south, headquartered in what’s today Yemen, was the newly consolidated kingdom of the Himyarites. More powers than these lay close to the Arabian Peninsula, as well – most importantly, the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, and the monarchy in Armenia. In spite of having these empires all around them, even by the year 330, Arabs within the peninsula did not bow to any central leadership. On the contrary, the Arabian interior was an assortment of settled and nomadic societies, themselves home to people with different ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds.

There were, then, in the 300s, still pockets of Arabia largely insulated from the large empires surrounding the peninsula. At the same time, though, in the southwest, and in the northern reaches of Arabia, Arabs of all stamps collaborated with the empires around them in various fashions, much like the Goths and Vandals who had begun settling in Roman territories around the same time. All over the Late Antique world, hybrid leaders, be they formally titled phylarchs, or simply charismatic stopgaps between empire and periphery, and whether their ethnic roots lay in modern day Germany, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Iraq, became middlemen, surrendering perhaps a sliver of native pride, but also opening up new opportunities, technologies, and privileges for their families and clans. The aforementioned ‘Imru al-Qays, whoever he was, might have been one such person – an Arab Alaric, or Stilicho, or Ricimer. ‘Imru al-Qays invites us to remember that, as Roman control over its frontier loosened over the 300s, borderlands were often maintained by a network of personal relationships and informal understandings, just as often as swords, shields, fortresses, and treaties. [music]

Arabs as Auxiliary Imperial Forces, 300-400 CE

‘Imru al-Qays’ inscription, again, found carved on a tomb in southern Syria and dated to the first half of the 300s CE, is the oldest monumental inscription in Arabic – specifically the Nabataean dialect of Arabic – that we have today. Whoever exactly he was, the stone carving recording his exploits demonstrates that Arabic, as a language and writing system, was well established by the time of the Roman emperor Constantine, when Christianity first became a permissible religion in the Roman empire. Romans, over the course of the 300s just as they had before, would continue to venture into the Roman-Persian borderland, and set down observations about what they saw there.

Over the course of the 300s, especially in the History of the Roman soldier and writer Ammianus Marcellinus, Arabs begin to appear more regularly in Roman accounts of the eastern theater. In Ammianus’ history, written during the 380s, Arabs in the east are described as Roman foederati, or confederated mercenary troops. Like other Roman foederati, Arabs brought into the Roman military seem to have been held at arm’s length by their commanders – Ammianus depicts them as shifty barbarians with strange cultural practices. Marcellinus is careful to refer to Arab auxiliaries as “Saracens,” telling us that this name had replaced the old term of scenitae – again “tent-dwellers.” The word “Saracens” was in circulation before Ammianus, showing up in the occasional Greek and Latin text over the first few centuries CE. As you may know, “Saracens” later became a catch-all phrase in Medieval Europe for Muslims, and frequently a condemnatory one. Its etymology is today uncertain, and in early Greek and Roman sources predating Ammianus, “Saracens” seems to have referred, specifically, to a group of Arabs from the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula. We don’t know exactly why Ammianus, in the 380s, reports that “Saracens” was suddenly the appropriate word to use to describe Arabians more generally. The new word may have been a byproduct of Rome’s Arabian province. Those who lived in the Roman province of Arabia were Arabians, and so perhaps a new word – again with uncertain etymology – was required to describe the inhabitants of Arabia more generally, rather than the tiny northwestern territory of the peninsula that Rome controlled.

As Arabs show up increasingly in Rome’s historical and military records, we begin to get a sense of the role that they played along the Roman empire’s eastern front. Arabs were, as a military record book from around 400 suggests, often cavalrymen, astride horses as well as camels, stationed in several strategic locations in modern-day Syria and Israel.¹⁴ Rome’s Arab allies, around this time, being from different tribes and hired by means of various arrangements, seem to have provided reliable military service. However, the frontier with Arabia, and the Syrian province more generally, constituted a large borderland, and different Arab groups from the peninsula, as the 300s gave way to the 400s, also raided outposts along the Roman frontier.

So, let’s switch gears a bit. Thus far in this program, we’ve predominantly considered ancient Arabian history from the outside. Greeks, Romans, and Persians, during the thousand years between 500 BCE and 500 CE, met, fought with, worked with, and lived alongside plenty of people from the Arabian Peninsula. But beneath the sagas of expeditions and military campaigns lay the more granular and everyday matter of migration into and out of the peninsula. Arabia, by the rise of the Himyarite Kingdom around 300, was Arabia because major tribes, itinerant and celebrated in later Islamic history, flourished in its inland regions. But Arabia, 200 years before Muhammad, was also Arabia due to immigrants from elsewhere – traders, slaves, freedmen, and religious refugees. And it is to the latter that we need to turn our attention for a moment – that distinct assortment of often outcast Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Manichaeans who had sifted down into the peninsula by the 400s, laying some of the seeds for what would eventually be Islam. [music]

Jewish and Christian Migrations into the Peninsula, 70-451 CE

In the eight decades between 60 and 140 CE, in large part due to the Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE, and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136, many Jews left the Levant and immigrated eastward. In the Parthian, and later Sasanian empires, the Babylonian Talmud slowly came into being as rabbis along the Tigris and Euphrates worked out how to practice their ancient religion after the destruction of the Second Temple, living alongside Zoroastrian Magi, and later Manichaeans, in present-day Syria and Iraq. And while Jews scattered eastward into the Persian empire, some of them also went southeast, down through the Roman province of Arabia, and into the Arabian Peninsula.

Conflicts between Jerusalem and Rome eventually gave rise to Jewish communities in the town of Hegra, in the northwest of the peninsula, but beyond the borders of Roman territory – at the Tayma Oasis, to its east, in Yathrib, or Medina, and in Khaybar, seventy miles to its north. These Jewish communities in the upper Hijaz, scattered in the northwest of the peninsula, seem to have proliferated extensively after the second century. And fascinatingly, the Himyarite kingdom, that empire seated about 80 miles south of what is today Sanaa, Yemen, and which controlled much of southern Arabia by the year 300, seems to have embraced a form of Judaism around a century later. Around 380, Himyarite inscriptions begin using Aramaic and Hebrew words in the South Arabian script, and the Himyarite nobility began speaking of itself as a collective Israel.¹⁵

This was an extremely important development for the history of Arabia. Whatever exact form of Judaism was being practiced in the Himyarite Kingdom, the kingdom had hegemony over much of the Arabian Peninsula by the mid-400s. While the Himyarites had control over much of the Hijaz, again the central west coast of Arabia, they also ruled over two major tribal areas, probably by means of client kings. The first of these areas was the region of the Kinda, in the southwestern part of modern-day Saudi Arabia, and the Kinda kings are important figures in later Islamic traditions. The second tribal area the Himyarites seem to have controlled was that of the Ma’add in the central eastern region of today’s Saudi Arabia. The Himyarites, by the 400s, also seem to have had sovereignty over a northern Arab coalition called the Mudar. This coalition included the most famous of all Pre-Islamic tribes of ancient Arabia – the Quraysh, which was Muhammad’s tribe.

We don’t know what form of Judaism was being practiced by the Himyarite kingdom at the end of the 300s, and throughout the 400s, or how much the religion had saturated various classes in the Himyarite epicenter of modern-day Yemen. The small Himyarite empire was almost certainly religiously diverse. An important body of citizens in modern-day Yemen, in the 300s, held at least some of the tenets of Judaism – most importantly its monotheism. In outlying areas of the Himyarite empire – those tribal areas ruled over by client kings – people practiced various indigenous polytheistic religions. And while the Himyarite empire practiced a continuum between Judaic monotheism and indigenous Arabian polytheism, as the 300s and 400s wore on, the Himyarite empire based in ancient Yemen also became home to a growing number of Christians.

By the year 400, the religiosity and ethnic identity of Arabs was becoming a source of interest to Christian writers. In hagiographies and histories concerning the east, Arabs, or Saracens, slowly emerge as stock characters – barbarians astride camels, dangerous and volatile but easily converted by a devout monk or saint. Saint Jerome, in his novella about the monk Malchus, described them as “Ishmaelites on horses. . .their bodies half-naked. . .[who] had come not to fight, but to plunder.”¹⁶ The word “Ishmaelites” here refers to the descendants of Abraham’s older, exiled son, whose own sons became chieftains in a territory that stretched from modern day Iraq to Egypt – in the Bible, an etiological tale emphasizing the greater legitimacy of Isaac’s descendants. Whether they were called Saracens, or Ishmaelites, Arabs in pre-Islamic Christian texts are generally formidable strangers nonetheless easily bowled over by displays of Christian miracles. Fifth century hagiographies of the saints Ethymius and Symeon record missionary work and the foundation of monasteries in and around the Roman province of Arabia. And while Christian conversions proceeded in the 400s and after in the northwest of the peninsula, closest to Rome, Christian conversions also proceeded in the Sasanian province of Mazun – around present-day Bahrain.

A moment ago, we learned that Jewish refugees immigrated to the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian empire more generally, following conflicts with the Roman empire in the first and second centuries. Similarly, during the first few centuries CE, modern-day Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia also became home to Christian religious refugees being persecuted by other Christians. The most famous group of these refugees were the Nestorian Christians. Nestorians, initially, were associated with the teachings of the theologian Nestorius, an archbishop in Constantinople from 428 to 431. Nestorius had a distinct Christological model that was deemed heretical at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Christology, as students of Late Antiquity know, is the theological study of the being of Christ – what he was, how he related to the other two points of the Trinity, how his human and divine natures coexisted, and that kind of thing. By the early 400s, Christian theologians had been engaged in Christological debates for centuries, and the debates had become very complicated. Nestorian Christology stated that Christ had been the coexistence of two persons, one human, and one divine, persons who had come together at the moment of his birth, and that therefore, the Virgin Mary hadn’t really given birth to the son of God – rather the cohabitation of Christ’s two natures, a dyoprosopic union, to use the technical theological term, had happened when Jesus had been born.

The Christological debates of Late Antiquity, as we have observed many times before, seem to us as outsiders to be dry and nitpicky, but they had significant long-term consequences that can still be felt today. By the time of the Council of Ephesus in 431, Christianity had already spread eastward to a sufficient extent that what we now call the Church of the East, or the East Syriac Church, had a strong foothold in the Sasanian empire, and the Roman-Persian borderland to its west. Christian people in the Roman and Persian empires inhabited different social and political worlds, so an ecumenical council held all the way over on the shore of the Aegean Sea in 431, to Christians a thousand miles away in Mesopotamia, didn’t have much relevance. Nestorians, then, initially religious refugees who fled to the east during the mid-400s, gradually grew into a new branch of Christianity, whose writings would often be in Syriac, Aramaic, and Arabic rather than Latin or Greek. If Christianity in the east had an early epicenter, it was in the town of al-Hira, just south of modern-day Najaf, Iraq, about 90 miles south of Baghdad. Al-Hira was home to monasteries and was served by eastern bishops, and over the course of the 400s, the clergy there began having fewer and fewer ties to Rome.

Al-Hira illustrates something that had come to fruition in Arabia’s northern neighbors by the year 400. The Romans and the Persians had, at the imperial and institutional levels, embraced monotheism. Zoroastrian kings to the east, and Christian emperors to the west partnered with high-ranking clergymen, flattering themselves by imagining that they were agents of divine will. With church and state unified, religion became an increasing accelerant to social strife, particularly in the form of top-down imperial persecutions. Various Sasanian kings, like Shapur II and Yazdegerd II, instituted harsh policies against Christians. In the west, persecutions of non-Christians unfolded under the Roman emperors Constantine, Theodosius I, and eventually, just prior to the birth of Muhammad, Justinian I. To be clear, some Roman emperors, and some Sasanian kings, were more zealous than others, and periods of religious tolerance certainly punctuated theologically driven persecutions. However, these persecutions were also, from time to time, severe and murderous. Just as Jews had fled present-day Israel in the mid-100s CE, over the 300s, 400s, and 500s, Christian religious refugees and outcasts from doctrinal controversies fled the persecutions of emperors, kings, and rival clergymen in the Roman and Parthian empires, many of them trickling down into various enclaves of Arabia in search of religious freedom. [music]

The Birth of the Arab Client Kingdoms

Arabia, around he year 500, began undergoing some important transformations. Its northwestern neighbor, Rome, had suffered an unprecedented catastrophe. The western half of the empire had collapsed into a patchwork of barbarian-controlled states – most importantly, Visigothic Spain, Ostrogothic Italy, and Merovingian France. The Byzantine empire, however, previously the eastern half of the greater Roman empire, headquartered in Constantinople, was still a formidable force. Arabia’s imperial northern neighbors, now the Byzantines and the Sasanians, continued to have a shifting frontier between them over the course of the 500s. Both, by this period, were adept at hiring local militias, often Arab militias, to defend their interests. Arab militias, however, naturally, sometimes pursued their own agendas. Not always content to play the part of imperial subordinates, Byzantine and Persian foederati periodically carried out raids and attacks in the borderlands of their own volition, with foederati often having more in common with one another than with the two different empires that were paying them. The volatility of these Arab militia groups on the Byzantine-Persian frontier not only made border settlements unsafe. It also exacerbated Byzantine and Sasanian tensions. Due to persistent problems with the phylarchs, or tribal rulers, who helped coordinate their Arab militias, the Byzantine and Sasanian empires gradually poured resources into two different Arab dynasties. The rival empires each wanted a stable Arab kingdom to sponsor, to defend their interests along the borderland. And gradually, two large client kingdoms arose – to the northeast of the peninsula, the Nasrid, or Lakhmid Kingdom, allied with the Sasanian Persians, and to the northwest, the Ghassanid, or Jafnid Kingdom, allied with the Byzantines. These two client kingdoms will be a major part of our story for the remainder of this show, so let’s get this idea in our heads – the Byzantines sponsored the Ghassanid kingdom of Arab auxiliaries, and the Sasanians sponsored the Lakhmid kingdom of Arab auxiliaries.

The Lakhmid Kingdom: Sasanian Allies

The more ancient of these two client kingdoms was the Nasrid, or Lakhmid kingdom, in Arabic, headquartered in the aforementioned town of al-Hira, way up along the middle Euphrates in present-day Iraq, although most of the Lakhmid kingdom lay within the bounds of today’s Saudi Arabia. Born around 300 CE, the Lakhmid kingdom is most often described as a vassal state of the Sasanian empire, though its relationship with the empire was sometimes a contentious one. While Lakhmid kings and their Sasanian patrons periodically came to blows, the Lakhmids still seem to have been a useful buffer for Sasanian influence in the Persian east, insulating Sasanian provincial territories around Bahrain from the large and porous frontier of the Arabian desert – a broad shin guard on the Arabian boot, protecting Persian interests along the Persian Gulf coast.

This Nasrid, or Lakhmid kingdom, born in the early 300s, was likely an effort on the part of the Sasanians to centralize their efforts to delegate leadership in eastern Arabia. Dealing with one client ruler was far easier than dealing with a dozen of them. The Sasanian throne, with its Lakhmid vassals, had one point of contact, and one person into whom they could pour resources, and for a large empire, this efficiency was important. On the flipside, though, a client king on the Persian front doorstep, and one who controlled perhaps a third of present-day Saudi Arabia, had a lot of regional muscle, and could also pose a significant threat to the Sasanians in times of political and military crisis, as Lakhmid kings appear to have done at several junctures.

The Lakhmid client kingdom flourished for several centuries. Around 500 CE, due to Byzantine interests in the politics of the region, we begin to have more substantial records of the client kingdoms of Arabia. The Persian-allied Lakhmids were, by 500, powerful. One of Lakhmid king, Al-Mundhir, often called Alamoundaros to distinguish him from other figures with the same name active during the period, ruled the Lakhmids from 504-554. Alamoundaros, on the heels of a powerful predecessor called al-Numan, led Persian-allied forces from the northeast of the peninsula to the northwest, raiding Byzantine provinces throughout Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and being a menace to the newly elevated Justinian Dynasty, especially in the 520s. The Byzantine historian Procopius vividly describes the danger that the Lakhmid king Alamoundaros posed to Constantinople’s southern front. Procopius writes,

[B]eginning from the boundaries of Aegypt and as far as Mesopotamia [the Sasanian client king Alamoundaros] plundered the whole country, pillaging one place after another, burning the buildings in his track and making captives of the population by the tens of thousands on each raid, most of whom he killed without consideration, while he gave up the others for great sums of money. And he was confronted by no one at all. For he never made his inroad without looking about, but so suddenly did he move and so very opportunely for himself, that, as a rule, he was already off with all the plunder when the generals and the soldiers were beginning to learn what had happened and to gather themselves against him. If, indeed, by chance, they were able to catch him, this barbarian would fall upon his pursuers while still unprepared and not in battle array, and would rout and destroy them with no trouble.¹⁷

Alamoundaros, then, by the 520s, had become a substantial problem for the Byzantine west. But this Sasanian client king’s assaults were only part of a greater conflict between Romans and Persians in the sixth century.

Between 526 and 532, the Byzantine Romans and Sasanian Persians fought what historians call the Iberian War, due to shifting allegiances in the eastern Georgian kingdom of Iberia. Though the Byzantine empire eventually won this war, along with a large tribute of Sasanian gold, no territorial changes ensued. What the conflict proved, perhaps more than anything, was that the Byzantine empire to the west, and the Sasanian empire to the east needed coalitions of allies. And the greatest Sasanian weapon during this war, fought during Muhammad’s grandparents’ generation, were, once again, the Arab Lakhmids, headquartered in present-day Iraq and superintended by King Alamoundaros. The Arab Lakhmids, during the early 500s, had provided tremendous services to their Persian patrons, harrying Byzantine towns in Syria and Mesopotamia, and crossing swords with Byzantine foes throughout the Iberian War. And over the course of this war, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian took note.

The Ghassanid Kingdom: Byzantine Allies

Justinian I, that Byzantine emperor famous for retaking much of the Mediterranean, ruled out of Constantinople from 527-565. And as the Iberian War between the Byzantines and Sasanians raged on, Justinian I made a consequential policy decision in 528 or 529. Following what the Sasanians had done centuries before, Justinian commissioned one phylarch, al-Harith, in Arabic al-Harith ibn Jabalah, to be the overlord of all Byzantine Arab militia forces.¹⁸ Al-Harith, and later his son, al-Mundhir, were given lofty titles that put them on par with Byzantine senators, each working as a magister militum, or supreme military commander, although they were beholden to the Byzantine magister militum working on the eastern front. This promotion brought the Ghassanid kingdom, in Arabic al-Ghassasina, into much more substantial prominence.

The Ghassanid client kings al-Harith and his son al-Mundhir are important for several reasons in Pre-Islamic Arabian history, so let’s get these monarchs in our head for a moment. Al-Harith, who ruled from 529-569, and al-Mundhir, from 569-581, were the Byzantine-Arab kings whose reigns came just before the life of the Prophet Muhammad. They were likely not the first Ghassanid monarchs – medieval Arabic sources list two dozen or so kings before them, give or take. These Islamic texts offer a bit more information as to how the Ghassanid client kings came to power. The historian Ibn Habib in the first half of the 800s, and Ya’qubi, in the second half, together offer a longer narrative about how, a generation before al-Harith, some important scions of the Ghassan tribe forged northward into present-day Jordan and Syria through the territory of another tribe called the Salih. The Salih may have been Byzantine allies at the time, but the branch of the Ghassan tribe who fought them and defeated them was able to forge a partnership with the Byzantine emperor. This emperor may have been Anastasius, whose long and successful rule stretched from 491-518.

That’s some nitty gritty history, so let’s zoom out again, for a moment. The Ghassanid line of kings, likely emerged from an inter-tribal conflict north of the Arabian Peninsula around 500, a conflict fought in part to determine who would be the closest partners with Byzantine leadership. While the Ghassan tribe is an important one in later works of Arab history, this tribe offers a much more general lesson about how Arab tribal leaders from the Peninsula and Ancient Near East competed with one another for connections with Roman and Persian leadership. The head of a tribe could be a brilliant military tactician and charismatic leader, flexing regional muscle around the middle peninsula and using insider knowledge of oases and other natural resources, and partnerships with caravans and merchants to help consolidate his reign. However, the real power lay in the north, where alliances with Byzantine and Sasanian kings offered access to massive coffers of gold, and the backing of imperial armies. Arab tribes, then, during the long period that the Arabian Peninsula spent south of greater Roman and Persian empires, fought one another for imperial sponsorship, and, increasingly during Late Antiquity, fought one another beneath imperial sponsorship in shifting Byzantine and Sasanian power blocs of the ancient borderland.

Al-Harith and his son al-Mundhir, were the most famous Ghassanid client kings collaborating with Byzantine rule in the upper northwestern Arabian Peninsula, including some of present-day Jordan and Syria, and the pair ruled from 529-581. We will come back to them, and their enemy, the Sasanian allied Lakhmid client king Alamoundaros, again active from 504-554, momentarily. For the moment, in our story of Pre-Islamic Arabian history, we need to turn our attention back to the Himyarite Kingdom of modern-day Yemen. Just as Byzantine and Sasanian sponsorships of Arab client kings had a pivotal effect on sixth-century Arabian history, in the south of the peninsula in the early 500s, a religious earthquake was about to unfold that would have a far-reaching impact on later world history. [music]

Aksum and Himyar in the 500s CE

Monotheistic states were all around Arabia by the year 500, including one place only mentioned briefly in this program so far. That place was the Kingdom of Aksum, in Arabic, al-Habusheh. By 500, Aksum was a powerful state, centered in the north of what is today Ethiopia, near the Eritrean border. Ethiopia, as Ethiopian Orthodox believers are well aware, was a very early center of Christianity, perhaps as early as the first century CE.¹⁹ The Kingdom of Aksum was less than 400 miles, as the crow flies, west of the center of the Himyarite kingdom in modern-day Yemen – just across the narrow southern part of the Red Sea. And by about 500, Ethiopian Aksumites had crossed eastward and conquered their Himyarite neighbors. The Himyarites, if you’ll recall from earlier, had practiced some form of Judaism for two centuries. Thus, when Aksumite monarchs from Ethiopia began wielding power in present-day Yemen through means of Christian proxy rulers, a major theological and geopolitical change began to unfold in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Himyarites of what’s today Yemen, practicing Judaism at least at the official level, had formed no lasting alliances with the Christian Byzantine empire, nor with the Zoroastrian Sasanian empire, being an autonomous nub of theologically Jewish territory, surrounded by either seawater, or particularly arid stretches of Arabian desert. When Aksumite Christian leaders were installed there, however, Himyar’s allegiances seem to have begun to align westward, toward the Christian Byzantines. Between 510 and 520, Muhammad’s grandparents’ generation might have expected the west coast of the peninsula, from the Ghassanid north to the Himyarite south, to imminently turn Christian, and the Red Sea to become a Christian lake. The Christianization of Himyar, however, encountered a ferocious backlash.

One of the early leaders that Aksumites installed – around 521 or 522, was called Yusuf or Joseph. Joseph, presumably a devout Jew with the backing of similarly minded believers, began a brutal campaign against Aksumite Christian’s Zafar, the Himyarite capital. Then, obviously intending to keep Himyar Jewish, Joseph fortified the small empire’s coast against more Aksumite invasions, and he began a bloody campaign against Christian believers to the north. The oasis of Najran, just north of the current Saudi-Yemeni border, was in 522 home to a sizable Christian community. By 522, there were already likely tensions between the Christians of Najran and the old Jewish leadership that had traditionally ruled in Himyar. Surviving inscriptions from Najran are in early Arabic, rather than the south Arabian form of writing associated with Himyar, and Najran’s Christians may have felt they had more in common with central Arab tribes like the Kinda, and the distant Byzantine and Sasanian empires, than the Jewish kingdom to their south.²⁰ Whatever led up to the Himyarite King Joseph’s campaign against the Christians of Najran, historical accounts describe it as a massacre.

A royal inscription by Joseph’s deputy first describes the Jewish king’s destruction of Christian churches and murder of Aksumite Christians in the Himyarite capital of Zafar. The inscription then describes how Joseph executed 12,500 Najrani Christians over a 13-month campaign. There are a number of sources on Joseph’s bloodthirsty campaign besides this inscription – Syriac Christianity had a long memory of the tragedy. A Syriac Christian chronicle described how after the massacre, Joseph sent emissaries to the Sasanian Nasrid client king, Alamoundaros, perhaps expecting the Sasanian allies to help him resist the Christianization of the Arabian bootheel. Nothing came of the effort. Aksumite Christian forces, perhaps aided by the Byzantine naval forces, charged into Himyar and reinstituted Aksumite Christian rule there, after which followed persecutions of the kingdom’s Jews.

In the aftermath of these awful events, in 523, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I dispatched an ambassador to the king of Aksum, and its new Christian monarchical appointee in Himyar. I should add that in 523, Justinian I was not quite emperor yet, but he was serving his uncle Justin I as the commander of the Byzantine empire’s eastern army. Though not quite emperor, Justinian was thinking big, perhaps dreaming of his future westward conquest of the Mediterranean. The sources conflict on exactly how Justinian was able to take advantage of the Christianization of Himyar.²¹ However it went down, Justinian sought to gain as much Byzantine leverage in the Arabian Peninsula as he could, certainly by hailing the Himyarites and Aksumites as Christian allies, likely also trying to extract commercial and military promises from the two kingdoms, and at the same time, using the southern peninsula’s leadership transition to also form new alliances with the powerful Kinda and Ma’add tribal confederacies in central Arabia.

The Iberian War of 526-32: Byzantines and Sasanians Use their Arab Client Kingdoms

However successful Justinian’s embassies were to the Christian Aksumites and their Himyarite subordinates, what is certain is that by the year 529, Justinian I was on the Byzantine throne, he had neutral to positive relations with the Arabian southwest, he had elevated the Ghassanid King of al-Hira as the overseer of all Arab foederati in the Arabian northwest, and he was ready to use his powerful Arab subordinates to bring decisive security to the volatile Sasanian border.

The aforementioned Iberian War flared up again when the aging Sasanian King Kavadh I sent an army up to what is today Raqqa in north-central Syria in early 531. In the first engagement between Ghassanids and Lakhmids, Persian-sponsored forces defeated their Byzantine-sponsored adversaries, adding insult to injury by demanding ransom payments for captured Romans. While all of this was bad news for Justinian I, the Byzantine emperor also had some good news. His nemesis, the Sasanian emperor Kavadh I, died of an illness, and Kavadh’s son Khosrow I, one of the most celebrated of all Persian kings, ascended to the throne in the autumn of 531. Khosrow, needing to consolidate his power and having no time to carry out a war with the Byzantines, signed a treaty that both empires called the Perpetual Peace in 532, also gifting Constantinople with 11,000 pounds of gold.

What happened next is fascinating. As students of Roman history know, Justinian and his general Belisarius spent the 530s achieving some astounding military victories in the Mediterranean, taking back a giant slice of the Rome’s old African provinces from Vandal kings, and then attacking the Italian peninsula, at that point, ruled by Ostrogothic kings. To Persian Khosrow, Rome’s military aggressions to the west signaled both an appetite for conquest and an ample capacity to carry it out, and so Khosrow sought to find a way to make the so-called Eternal Peace not really that eternal. He did so by asking advice from his Lakhmid client king Alamoundaros. Alamoundaros told Khosrow that he would make a false claim that the Byzantine Ghassanid client king, al-Harith had violated a territorial agreement in a remote part of the frontier desert near Palmyra, Syria, or Tedmor in Arabic. Alamoundaros’ counterpart al-Harith tried to quash the false report, but he was unsuccessful, and it fell upon Justinian to try and settle the dispute. Justinian’s efforts, whether because he was busy in the west, because his appointees were incompetent, or because he didn’t take the dispute seriously, were unsuccessful, and the Persian King Khosrow invaded Byzantine territories proper in the year 540.

Khosrow attacked a fortress in antiquity known as Sergiopolis, today Resafa, Syria, a seat of al-Harith’s power, and an important regional hub for Arab Christianity in the sixth century, which was likely a reason the Sasanian emperor had it in his crosshairs. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful, and although the Byzantines and Sasanians signed another peace treaty to halt military actions in Syria and Mesopotamia in 545, their Arab client kings didn’t quite follow the rules. In the pages of the Byzantine historian Procopius, we get the sense that over the 540s, the Ghassanid and Lakhmid client kings were often pursuing their own agendas.²² Procopius reports that the Ghassanid king al-Harith secreted away huge amounts of plunder during the war with the Sasanians, and then, that after the Byzantine-Sasanian peace agreement was renewed, al-Harith and Alamoundaros’ forces fought one another in a campaign having nothing to do with their imperial sponsors.

Al-Harith remained a staying force in the Byzantine east for a long time, being Justinian’s regional partner up until the emperor’s death in 565. We’ve talked plenty about the mechanics of empires and client kings so far in this program, and how Arab client kings generally did the military bidding of their imperial sponsors. Later in al-Harith’s career, as he became more involved with church politics, he demonstrated that a client king could be a useful theological intermediary, as well as a military buffer, between an emperor and his outlying subjects. Arab Christians in Syria, Mesopotamia, and the peninsula were often Monophysites, their theology not in accord with the orthodox Chalcedonian Christianity practiced in Constantinople. Through direct interaction with Justinian and his wife Theodora, along with high-ranking church officials in Constantinople, al-Harith worked to make sure that Monophysite bishops were being shipped out to eastern congregations. Al-Harith also sponsored the creation of a Christian church complex in modern-day Jordan, and intervened tactfully in a theological controversy in a way that secured Arab Monophysite Christians from the predations of their Chalcedonian counterparts in Constantinople, thus helping to keep the Ghassanid-Byzantine alliance insulated from theological rifts.

Let’s zoom out for a bit once again, and summarize what we’ve learned about the Ghassanids, Arab client kings to the Byzantines, and the Lakhmids, Arab client kings to the Sasanians. Two generations before Muhammad, the Arab leaders of the northern peninsula had become central to Ancient Near Eastern history. The client kings Al-Harith and Alamoundaros had the Byzantine and Sasanian emperors on speed dial. They corresponded with, and collaborated with the highest levels of their respective imperial sponsors, sometimes acting independently and without any oversight from their patrons. Religion, particularly the Ghassanids’ Monophysite Christianity, had become a flashpoint of conflict in the region. And as students of Islamic history know, the continuous grinding of forces along the Byzantine-Persian borderland over the course of the next century – the whipsawing of armies back and forth across Syria and Mesopotamia – would be instrumental to the success of the first northward offensives of Muslim armies a century later. [music]

The Himyarites Under New Leadership

Sixth century history moved very quickly in the Ancient Near East, especially down in the Himyarite Kingdom in present-day Yemen. We last left the Himyarites under the control of the Ethiopian Aksumite kingdom, likely practicing an early form of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. While the Himyarite kingdom would remain Christian for a while to come, it still underwent a leadership change some time in the 530s or 540s. A king named Abraha had usurped the throne from Himyar’s previous Aksumite appointee. Abraha abandoned the use of Ethiopian Ge’ez, and made royal inscriptions using Himyar’s older South Arabian Sabaic language. His vision of Himyar’s Christian future was more Syriac than Tewahedo; in other words, more in line with Christian developments in the Arabian Peninsula than across the Red Sea in East Africa.

The most famous anecdote about the Himyarite Christian king Abraha has to do with a certain campaign Abraha made northward to Mecca, some time around 560. From Arab-Islamic sources, the most important of which is Surat al-Feel in the Qur’an, we have a story about Abraha charging northward along the Arabian west coast with the intention of destroying pilgrimage sites there, and thus pushing Arab pilgrims southward to a major new Christian church Abraha had constructed in what’s today Sanaa, Yemen. The campaign, preceded by a single elephant, drawing near to Mecca, went awry when the elephant in question knelt every time it faced Mecca, though it was perfectly happy to return to Himyar, and nothing came of the expedition. Whether or not a Himyarite elephant actually knelt to Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammad was about to be born, the possibility that a Himyarite army went up against the city and then retreated is still important to consider. Mecca was home to the Kaaba at this juncture, and the theologically hybrid worship site would have been a target for a Christian Himyarite king looking to flex his muscle. The fact that Mecca, then under control of Muhammad’s own Quraysh tribe, was able to rebuff advances from a Himyarite army around 560 indicates that indigenous Arab tribes still had plenty of power in the central peninsula.

The Arabian Peninsula, then, by 560, was a more complicated place than ever. Byzantine and Persian emperors had client kings, who themselves had delegated tribal leaders to act in their interests, while the Himyarite kingdom’s leadership transitions changed the political alignment of the southern peninsula. Enclaves of Syriac Christianity like Najran were scattered across Arabia, as were Jewish communities, and the Sasanian coastal province surrounding Bahrain would have been studded with Zoroastrian congregations, as well. The final decade or two of Arabian history leading up to the birth of the Prophet Muhammad was increasingly tumultuous, and, conveniently for us, increasingly well documented by those alive to witness it. [music]

Byzantine and Sasanian Proxy Wars of the 560s

In the year 554, the Lakhmid king Alamoundaros, who had represented Sasanian interests in Mesopotamia and Syria for an astonishing 50 years, was killed. A Christian hagiography of the period, the Life of Simeon the Stylite, describes Alamoundaros as a vaunting pagan tyrant, and offers an account of how Simeon prayed for, and foretold the death of this heathen villain before Alamoundaros’ death actually came to pass. However much fiction is laced through this hagiography, the Nasrid client king was out of the picture in 554, and an elderly Justinian, together with his Sasanian counterpart Khosrow, agreed to another peace treaty in 561 or 562, which also mandated peace between their Arab client forces. These client forces were now more instrumental than ever in maintaining the status quo in the Byzantine-Persian borderland. The Byzantine historian Menander, at work during the 580s and 90s, describes the Byzantine Ghassanid allies as symmachoi, or roughly equals, to their imperial backers, rather than subordinates. Justinian, who died in 565, and al-Harith, who died in 569, had shared a productive relationship for three and a half decades, while al-Harith’s counterpart Alamoundaros had served the Sasanians for even longer. For the Byzantines, it was only natural that al-Harith’s son, al-Mundhir, would assume his father’s duties and manage the Byzantine empire’s Syrian frontier as the new Ghassanid client king. Al-Mundhir, in Arabic al-Mundhir ibn al-Harith served under the new Byzantine emperor Justin II, and his partnership with the Greek-speaking empire would not go as smoothly as his father’s had. Although Byzantines and Persians had renewed their peace agreement by 562, Persian Arab auxiliaries attacked their Byzantine Arab auxiliaries in 569, breaking the terms of the agreement. The new Ghassanid king al-Mundhir defeated the Lakhmid aggressors, and asked the new Byzantine emperor Justin II for money to cover expenses. Justin II appears to have been furious, perhaps even launching a plot to assassinate al-Mundhir, though the sources are shaky on the subject.²³ At the least, the new Byzantine emperor, whose empire was badly overextended to the west, wanted peace and quiet on the Syrian front, and would not have looked kindly on Arab subordinates who seemed inclined to pursue vendettas against one another. Whatever happened, the new Ghassanid client king became estranged from Byzantine command for about five years.

The Himyarites Under New Leadership, Again

Some time in the early 570s, the increasingly volatile Himyarite kingdom of present-day Yemen had yet another political earthquake. The Christianization of the kingdom in the early 500s had made it an increasing source of interest in the unending strife between the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Whoever controlled Himyar had a foothold in the south of the peninsula, and a major hub of maritime trade. Whatever the cause was, Persian forces invaded and conquered the Himyarite kingdom, again in the early 570s, during the first years of Justin II’s reign, and around this time, the Byzantines and Sasanians became locked in a full-scale war again.

The war that flared up, which historians call the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 572-591, would have a common subject of discussion during Muhammad’s childhood, although its epicenter was up where modern-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey come together, 1,110 miles away from Mecca. Six years into it, the Byzantine emperor Justin II, having had a frantic and unlucky 13-year tenure on the Byzantine throne, died. He was succeeded by the emperor Tiberius II, who ruled from 578-82, and Maurice, who reigned from 582-602. Tiberius first summoned the Ghassinid client king al-Mundhir to Constantinople in the year 580, in all likelihood wanting to let bygones be bygones and renew the Byzantine alliance with their powerful Arab allies. Al-Mundhir showed up and agreed to help. But the Ghassanid client king al-Mundhir also sought to secure religious protection for Arab Christian Monophysites, as he was in a position to bargain. There had been a recent controversy surrounding a Monophysite appointee to the bishopric of Antioch, and al-Mundhir wanted to keep Syria and its surroundings safe for Christians of his own sect. Having evidently got what he wanted, al-Mundhir agreed to help the Byzantines militarily, joining the Byzantine general, and soon-to-be-emperor Maurice, in an eastward campaign into Persian territory in the year 581. The campaign’s results were mixed, and did not yield the decisive success that the Byzantines had hoped for.

Byzantine historians of Maurice’s campaigns were hostile toward al-Mundhir, blaming the Arab Monophysite client king for the soon-to-be emperor’s failure. Their hostility was due to the old Greco-Roman suspicion of barbarian outsiders, but more pressingly, due to an increasing intolerance of Monophysite Christianity. This intolerance eventually resulted in a plot – a plot by the Chalcedonian Orthodox elite of Constantinople to get rid of al-Mundhir. After he was summoned on false pretenses, the client king was, along with his wife and children, imprisoned. His Byzantine captors, however, did not manage to secure al-Mundhir’s eldest son, who began raiding Byzantine territories in modern-day Syria and Jordan, understandably turning against the fickle empire that his family had now served for two generations. The raids did not restore al-Mundhir to power. Sources become scanter toward the end of al-Mundhir’s life, but it seems he was exiled to Sicily, and permitted to return home when the emperor Maurice died in 602. The Byzantine empire, during the final two decades of the 500s, continued to commission Arab militias to help them on the Persian front, but they no longer put all their eggs in one Arab basket. The era of the Byzantine-Ghassanid alliance, which had fruitfully served both sides for more than half a century, ended in 582. [music]

The Last Lakhmid King

While the Byzantine-Ghassanid alliance sputtered out in 582, due, more than anything else, to religious prejudices, the Persian-Lakhmid alliance persisted for two decades longer. It did so under al-Numan, the final client king whom we will discuss in this program, on the Lakhmid throne between 582 and 602. The client king al-Numan served a bumpy sequence of Sasanian kings. Ruling from the storied city of al-Hira, again just south of modern-day Najaf, Iraq, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, al-Numan weathered a Sasanian civil war between 590 and 591, during the second half of his reign, serving the Sasanian emperor Khosrow II.

The Lakhmid client king al-Numan, along with his predecessor Alamoundaros, were vilified in Christian traditions as pagan persecutors of the pious in the Byzantine-Persian frontier for much of the sixth century. Syriac Christian sources, in particular, describe these final two Lakhmid monarchs as quite nasty people out for Christian blood, and contrasting them with the Christian Ghassanids. There are some major problems with this stereotype, though. The first is that the Arab Lakhmids were ultimately taking orders from the Persian empire. The second is that when the Arab Lakhmids conducted raids of their own accord, they went for where the Byzantine riches were, regardless of who had them. The third is that there were plenty of Christian Lakhmids, including their final king, al-Numan, who converted to the religion in 594. A number of authors wrote about his conversion. Al-Numan seems to have reverted to his pagan faith for a period, and then returned to Christianity.²⁴

So, in summation, it’s a mistake to assume that the Byzantines, and their Arab client auxiliaries were Christian, whereas the Persians, and their Arab auxiliaries were not. Religion, together with linguistic and ethnic differences, was an occasional ingredient in the Byzantine-Persian conflicts during Muhammad’s lifetime, but the empires, and certainly the frontier between them, were too diverse, and Christianity and Zoroastrianism both had too many subdivisions within them, for the long conflict to be understood as a holy war on either side. Al-Numan, who converted, then reverted, then converted back to Nestorian Christianity, is a case study of the borderland’s complex religiosity just before the dawn of Islam.

The Lakhmid king al-Numan, famously, fell out of favor with King Khosrow II in the first years of the 600s. His decline may have been due to the client king’s conversion to Christianity. Although Christian bishoprics seeded the Persian empire, as well, Christianity’s roots lay in the west, and not the east. But Khosrow II had a Christian wife, and so having a Christian subordinate to carry out his wishes in an increasingly Christian territory may have felt no different than delegating an Arab to rule over Arabs. The Muslim historian al-Tabari, three centuries after al-Numan’s death, wrote that the client king al-Numan had made the mistake of killing his patron’s most prized court poet, a story oddly specific enough to perhaps carry some grain of truth. There are other narratives about al-Numan’s demise, but however it happened, al-Numan fell out of favor, and he was executed in 602 or some time just after.

Summing Up: Ghassanids, Lakhmids, and Arabia’s Future

Now, we have covered plenty of ground in this program, and we’ve paid a great deal of attention to the Byzantine Ghassanid dynasty to the west, and the Sasanian Lakhmid dynasty to the east. Let’s draw some conclusions. The first has to do with the later history of Arabia – the years between the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 and the end of the Rashidun caliphate in 661. If you know anything about the history of Islam, you know that the first Caliphate led a military expansion more explosive than any that had taken place since those of Alexander of Macedon almost a thousand years earlier. Between 632 and 661, Muslim armies conquered the Sasanian empire, and nearly took over the Byzantine empire, too. A traditional explanation for their success, in Islamic historiography, is that Islam united the disparate tribal groups of Arabia and charged them with a divine manifest destiny to spread the faith. And it would be silly to ignore the galvanizing effect that the elegant and appealing ideology had in forming the first Islamic empire. But before Muhammad was born, something else was happening, and had already been happening in Arabia – something that had happened in Roman Dalmatia, Moesia, Dacia, and Pannonia. A group of outsiders, on the imperial periphery, had for several generations absorbed imperial technology and been exposed to the governance and bureaucracy of a giant state system. These outsiders already had an ancient and indigenous culture, and when that culture splashed together with the imperial one, the outsiders were slowly able to become more united and formidable than their squabbling imperial patrons. The famous military successes of the Rashidun caliphate, then, had roots in the obscurer centuries of Arab mercenaries working up in present-day Syria and Iraq, for Rome and Persia, and later, fighting on behalf of the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms.

And the second conclusion we can draw from this episode has to do with those very kingdoms. The Byzantine and Persian empires, over the course of the 500s, were mighty, robust states. Had they not been, their powerful Ghassanid or Lakhmid subordinates might have gone the way of the Visigoths or Merovingians, rallying Arab tribes from the middle and south peninsula to create an Arab empire a century before the first Caliphate. The idea of a north Arab kingdom, perhaps a Monophysite or Nestorian one, which made full use of modern Roman and Persian military technologies, must have been something that Byzantine and Sasanian rulers ultimately lost sleep over, and may have been a major reason for the extinction of the two dynasties at the end of the 500s. When, however, Byzantine and Persian rulers did away with their Arab client kings and client kingdoms, the two great empires exploded into what ended up being their terminal war – the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628. This war, spearheaded by the rulers Heraclius and Khosrow II, which exhausted each side, and paved the way for Islam’s expansion into Byzantine and Persian territories, might have gone rather differently if the Ghassanid and Lakhmid dynasties had persisted. The Arab client kings had been deployed, again and again, for peacekeeping. They were sometimes fractious. Sometimes they attacked one another. But when they were gone – when the deft political stratagems and unique religiosity of rulers like al-Mundhir stopped being there, the Byzantine and Sasanian empires lost some of the mechanisms that had maintained the tenuous balance between them, and they fought a catastrophic war that nobody won – that nobody won, excepting, of course, those adaptable, resilient Arabs, who had been their subordinates for so many centuries.

An Introduction to Pre-Islamic Arabian Tribes

There is another history of Pre-Islamic Arabia that we’ve scarcely touched on in this episode. That is the history of Pre-Islamic tribes – the dozens of groups that inhabited the peninsula’s coasts and interior, and ultimately, the ancestors with whom many Arabs still identify today. And while we’ve already covered a lot of ground in this program, I want to go a little further, and talk about Arabic historiography prior to Muhammad, and the way that Arab-Islamic historians, in the 700s, 800s, and afterward, understood the politics, relationships, and lineage between the many different groups who lived in Arabia by the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

Early Arab Muslims, by the eighth century, were tracing their lineage back to two patriarchs. The first of these was Adnan. Adnan, according to tradition, was the descendant of Ishmael, that older son of Abraham in the Bible. In the Book Genesis, poor Ishmael, though firstborn, is sent with his mother Hagar to live in the desert after God proclaims that Isaac – Abraham’s younger, legitimate son, will be the patriarch of the Israelites and share a covenant with God. Ishmael’s subsequent exile comes with a consolation, though – God tells Abraham “I will make a nation of [Ishmael] also, because he is your offspring” (Gen 21.13), and then, later, God assures Ishmael’s mother Hagar, “lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him” (Gen 21:18).²⁵ Ishmael, then, is one of the Tanakh’s loose ends – a son of the patriarch of patriarchs, Abraham, given hardly any consideration in the remainder of canonized Biblical scriptures. The Bible leaves Ishmael in a place called Moriah, having learned the craft of archery and married an Egyptian woman. In Arab-Islamic traditions, though, Ishmael, or Ismail is the ancestor of Adnan, from whom the Adnani Arabs descended.

The Adnani Arab tribes were associated with much of the Arabian Peninsula – the western, eastern, and central parts of the peninsula. Adnan does not appear in the Bible, but his name does show up in Pre-Islamic inscriptions indicating that his name was out there in central and north Arabia prior to the life of Muhammad. Whether assigning the Arab patriarch Adnan to the lineage of Ishmael was an Arab-Jewish, Arab-Christian, or Arab-Muslim innovation, what’s most important for our purposes is that Adnan was the legendary forefather of the many Arab tribes whose names have been in circulation since the seventh century – the Ma’ad, Mudar, Qais, ‘Abs, Bakr, Asad, and also, the Quraysh tribe – that of the Prophet Muhammad.

A whole different lineage of tribes, in Arab-Islamic historiography, descended from another patriarch. His name was Qahtan, and he was the forefather of many South Arabian tribes. Qahtan’s name comes up in Pre-Islamic inscriptions from modern-day Yemen, and in later Arabic works of history, in which Qahtan was allegedly the forefather of the Himyarites, the Lakhmids, and many other tribes associated with South Arabia. If you are a newcomer to the Arab world, it’s important to remember that the tribal genealogy we’ve just raced through has been, and continues to be very important for Arabs today. It is presently 1446 in the Islamic calendar, which begins in CE 622, with the hijra, or migration of Muhammad and the first Muslims from Mecca to Medina. And since 622, Islam’s main operating language has continued to be Arabic, which means that a pure taproot of Arabic source texts, dating back to the early medieval period, have been available to Islamic scholars curious about the ancient tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and their complex genealogy, with a particular focus placed on the Quraysh tribe and the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad himself.

The vast tribal lineages of the Adnani and Qahtani Arabs – once again the Adnani being the eastern, western, and central tribes, and the Qahtani being the southern tribes – the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula were central to the work of early Muslim historians who chronicled the Pre-Islamic period. However, inasmuch as Arabic has been the standard language of Islamic history and scholarship for 1500 years, even very early Islamic historians had parse material to work with when it came to chronicling the 500s CE and what came before. I’d like to offer you an example, now, as we wrap up this program, of a story famous in early Islamic history, about one of the great tribal showdowns of Arabia before Muhammad, a conflict called the War of al-Basus, between the Bakr tribe, seated in upper Mesopotamia during the story you’re about to hear, and the Taghlib tribe, a Christian group seated in the Najd, or central Arabian Peninsula. After I tell you the story, I will talk about the source texts we have for it, and how they coalesced in the first half of the ninth century. Here is the story of the War of al-Basus, in Arabic Harb al-Basus a four-decade conflict which took place from roughly the 490s until the 530s, that Muhammad’s grandparents might have witnessed.²⁶ [music]

The War of al-Basus

In the 490s CE, a powerful king named Kulayb ruled over the Taghlib tribe. Kulayb was a proud man, having defeated Arab tribes from present-day Yemen. He had married a woman from the Bakr tribe named Jalila, and Kulayb allowed Jalila’s family access to a special grazing land, even though they were from a different tribe. This shared grazing land soon became a point of contention. When Kulayb was out walking one day, he found a distressed bird – a lark, crying over her broken eggs. When King Kulayb of the Taghlib tribe investigated, he discovered strange camel tracks all around where the lark lived, and he made note of it.

The next day, king Kulayb of the Taghlib tribe was out walking with his brother-in-law, who was of the Bakr tribe. And among the Bakr tribe’s livestock, King Kulayb noticed an unfamiliar camel. The camel, Kulayb reasoned, must have been the very animal that had trampled the poor lark’s eggs. King Kulayb told his brother-in-law that the offending camel must never graze on their shared pasturage again, or he would shoot an arrow into its udder. Kulayb’s brother-in-law remonstrated fiercely, saying that if Kulayb hurt the camel, then Kulayb would take a spear to the back. Fuming, the in-laws departed from one another, and Kulayb’s wife said that her brother wouldn’t back down, though his wife did her best to ease the tensions suddenly billowing up between the two tribes.

Soon, however, things went wrong. Kulayb was out in the shared tribal grazing lands when he observed his in-laws’ camel trampling all over the place and making a mad dash toward some water. Feeling disrespected, and perhaps acutely conscious of the delicate balance in the land shared between the Taghlib and Bakr tribes, Kulayb shot the offending camel in the udder as he’d promised. The poor dromedary limped to Bakr territory and collapsed at the tent of king Kulayb’s aunt-in-law. She was incensed, and said that she would never harm guests, for Bakr people had been wronged on Taghlib territory in spite of promises of hospitality, and betraying such promises was a great moral infraction in ancient Arab culture. Straightaway, Kulayb’s brother-in-law, hearing that the Taghlib king had indeed shot a Bakr camel, waited for the right opportunity, and then, when king Kulayb had gone out unarmed, murdered King Kulayb of the Taghlib tribe.

Needless to say, this regicide threw the Bakr tribe into consternation. Kulayb’s brother-in-law, whose name was Jassas, had gone too far, everyone agreed, and the young man was put in chains by his father. Jassas’ father proposed that Jassas should be given to the Taghlib tribe so that they could have their revenge, but other members of the Bakr tribe were unwilling to sacrifice one of their own for the sake of peace. And so, due to the intransigence and martial spirit of some of the Bakr tribe, a war broke out – a war with roots in broken bird’s eggs and a single camel; a war that would eventually last forty years.

Though the war dragged on for a long time, not everyone was convinced it was necessary. A fair-minded warrior of the Bakr tribe said, “I have neither camel nor she camel in it,” in other words, I don’t have a horse in this race, an expression still common in Arabic today.²⁷ Yet as the war intensified, maintaining neutrality on either side became increasingly difficult. The man who didn’t want to get involved was Harith. Poor Harith’s nephew was murdered by the new Taghlib king, Muhalhel, brother of the slain Kulayb. When Harith, trying to make peace at all costs, sent a message to the murderous Muhalhel, asking if the murder of Harith’s nephew were sufficient for Muhalhel’s desire for vengeance, Muhalhel said he had only had enough vengeance for his brother’s sandal buckle – in other words, he was just getting started. This, in turn, dragged Harith, who had sought peace, into the war.

Harith was a strategist. Because his tribe – the Bakr – had fewer warriors than the ravaging Taghlib tribe, Harith of the Bakr came up with a scheme. The Bakr tribeswomen would come with their men, bearing water, and clubs. The plan was that all of the Bakr men would mark themselves clearly, and that as the battle unfolded, and the injured fell to the ground, the Bakr women could give water to the thusly marked Bakr men and help them back up, and the Bakr women could kill anyone without the appropriate Bakr marking. The Bakr men then all shaved their heads. All of the Bakr men, that is, but one – a man named Juhdar, who refused to cut his hair. As you might predict, Juhdar fell during the battle, injured, and the Bakr women, mistaking him for one of the enemy, clubbed the stubbornly hirsute man to death. The presence of women on the battlefield enabled the Bakr to win the battle, but it came with a cost. Along with the women, necessarily came some children, and when children from the Bakr tribe were killed by Taghlib warriors, Bakr fighters attacked them fiercely.

The War of al-Basus, then, fought in various places in the northeast of the Arabian Peninsula and way up into the north of modern-day Iraq between the 490s and 530s, finally came to an end when the Lakhmid king Alamoundaros forced the warring tribes to broker peace.

Pre-Islamic Tribal History and Later Historiography

So that was the tale of a major tribal conflict during the years of Muhammad’s grandparents’ generation. It’s a great story – in the various source texts, full of cinematic moments, ringing monologues, earnest efforts toward peacemaking that are steamrolled by unfortunate coincidences, and prideful pursuits of revenge that ultimately beget tragedy. As with other epics from pagan antiquity, it is a story with neither heroes nor villains – but instead two forces, mutually culpable of valor as well as mistakes.²⁸ The oral Arabic poetry of the sixth century was, from what we can tell, both narratively and morally complex, as well as linguistically marvelous, driven by specific meters and end rhymes that served Arab bards as mnemonic devices.

There is also valuable history in the story you just heard, in spite of its set pieces and soliloquies, and varnish of poetic license. When we think of feuds between tribes on the peninsula during antiquity, we may be tempted to imagine unending clan wars based on peccadillos and trivial matters of honor. However, the cause of the War of al-Basus is probably more significant than it might seem to us at first glance. The grazing lands shared between the Taghlib and Bakr tribes – the grazing lands to which Kulayb allows his in-laws access, would have been a very precious resource. Access to secure pasturage, to hunting, trade goods, and above all else, water – tribal, and intertribal agreements on how to share such resources would have been the cause of wars far more often than kidnapped brides or petty trespasses or tiffs at fairs and crossroads. With resources so scant in large stretches of the Arabian Peninsula, small infractions related to water, food, pasturage, and hospitality were more likely to prompt violence between groups, not because those groups were passionate by nature, or hung up on honor or hospitality or propriety, but because tribespeople were trying to stay alive an environment that in places only barely supported human existence.

The War of al-Basus, then, is a story rich with poetic and historical detail. But the story I told just told you, which scholar Reynold Nicholson calls “the most famous [war] waged in Pre-Islamic times,” also comes down to us by means of an echo chamber three hundred years long.²⁹ The most important main source on the War of Al-Basus is a book called the Hamasah, a poetic compilation put together in the early 800s by the Abbasid scholar and poet Abu Tammam, one of our great sources on early Arabic poetry. The main Arabic poems chronicling the War of Al-Basus were allegedly written by members of the Bakr and Taghlib tribes – al-Harith ibn Hilliza of the Bakr, and then ‘Amr ibn Kulthum of the Taghlib. The fact that the tribespeople involved in such conflicts, or their descendants, composed poems about ancient Arabia’s wars is, needless to say, a good thing for historians, and surely, as in all oral cultures, the intention of any tribal chronicler of events was, to some degree, setting the facts straight for posterity. However, as with any poetry of any culture discussing ethnic or national ancestry, human beings have a compelling inclination to make use of poetic license, to make ourselves and our own clans look good, or, alternatively, to praise the patrons who are paying us to write. Contemporary to al-Harith ibn Hilliza and ‘Amr ibn Kulthum’s poems about the War of al-Basus, a poet in Burgundy was writing the Chronicle of Fredegar, which claimed that Merovech, patriarch of the Merovingian Dynasty, was born from the union of a woman and a magical sea-creature. A glaze of mythmaking and pure fiction was always a part of history written during antiquity, and our current expectations for historians to be impartial purveyors of facts are anachronistic when applied to a century like the 500s.

When we approach the tribal history of Pre-Islamic Arabia, then, we are confronted with two challenges, especially if we’re outsiders to Arab culture. The first is the complexity of this history, as many of the tribal groups descended from Adnan and Qahtan have their own histories and story cycles, and many contemporary Arab families, dynasties, and regions trace their roots back to these progenitors, though with varying degrees of earnestness. The second is the historiographical problem we’ve just considered – that much of the tribal history of ancient Arabia comes down to us via chroniclers and poets of the 800s and after anthologizing the poetry and legends of the 500s and before, poetry and legends that survived orally for two centuries before being written down in societies very different than the ones that had engendered them.

Summing Up: Al-Jahiliyya

In spite of such historiographical challenges, I still wanted you to hear at least one Arab-Islamic story about the Jahili period, since the present program has been so full of Greek and Roman historians and their like. And speaking of al-Jahiliyyah, now that we’ve heard the story of the War of al-Basus, we can begin to understand what this term meant, perhaps even very early in Islamic history. Al-Jahiliyyah, again, is an Arabic word that’s generally translated as “the period of ignorance before Islam.” It is, as I said, a condemnatory term in Islamic history, dismissing what came before Muhammad as an epoch of impiety and benightedness. Yet Jahiliyyah is translated differently in different contexts when it appears in the Qur’an itself, and I think that Surat al-Fat’h in the Qur’an uses it in a way very pertinent to our current discussion. Let’s hear this Surah, first in Arabic, and then in English,إِذْ جَعَلَ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ فِى قُلُوبِهِمُ ٱلْحَمِيَّةَ حَمِيَّةَ ٱلْجَـٰهِلِيَّةِ فَأَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ سَكِينَتَهُۥ عَلَىٰ رَسُولِهِۦ وَعَلَى ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَأَلْزَمَهُمْ كَلِمَةَ ٱلتَّقْوَىٰ وَكَانُوٓا۟ أَحَقَّ بِهَا وَأَهْلَهَا ۚ or in English, “Disbelievers had stirred up fury in their hearts – the fury of ignorance [or Jahiliyya] – God sent His tranquility down on His Messenger and the believers and made binding on them [their] promise to obey God, for it was more appropriate and fitting for them.”³⁰ The fury in question here was, perhaps, the fury of confused pagans. But it was the fury of internecine tribal warfare in Arabia known to the Peninsula’s townspeople and Bedouins alike for generations. In the Qur’an, Jahiliyya doesn’t simply describe blasphemy – it also describes primitivity. To later Arab Muslims, writing about the tribal conflicts that had predated Islam, and living in large, lawful empires, Islam had been a unifying force that offered something more permanent and cohesive than tragic wars fought over lark’s eggs and trespassing camels.

But also, during the first centuries of Islam, there remained a pride in, and a fascination with, the valorous, hardy years of Jahiliyyah. Just as educated Athenians told stories about Achilles, but knew these stories were literature; just as elite Romans read tales of Romulus and Remus, but with a considerable grain of salt, Muslim intellectuals of the 800s and 900s and after read, preserved, and embellished their Jahili history with pride, enthrallment, and at the same time, the knowledge that some of it was embellished, and some of it reflected the deficiencies of a less civilized time. Al-Jahiliyyah, then, is a complicated term. Its primary meaning is indeed the period of ignorance before Islam. But Jahiliyyah also calls to mind a simpler, epic time when the awesome machinery of Arabic literature came into being, when ancient Arabian civilization, with its emphases on hospitality, fairness, and honor flourished over giant and often inhospitable stretches of the peninsula, and when one of the great cultures of human history came decisively onto the world stage. [music]

Moving on to Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry

That war we discussed a moment ago, the legendary War of al-Basus, according to tradition produced the first Arabic ode, when Muhalhel, the leader of the Taghlib tribe during much of the conflict, composed an ode to honor his brother, the murdered Kulayb and the tribe’s previous leader.³¹ And in the next program, we’re going to spend a couple of hours learning all about Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. The historiography behind the earliest Arabic poetry is complicated. Some of it was probably forged in later centuries. Some of it was tampered with, and all of it went from oral compositions memorized by rawis, or professional reciters, to written compilations collected generations later. In spite of these complexities, though, a fair amount of Arabic poetry survives from within and around the 500s CE.

Most famously, a collection of seven odes called the Muʻallaqāt, or “hanging poems,” form the taproot of Arabic poetry today. These odes, or qasidas, are lengthy, diverse, complex works of literature, but the qasida is only one form of Jahili poetry still extant today. Arabs of the 500s wrote in a variety of genres – again the qasida, or ode, which had its own conventions, but also the hija, or satire, the fahr, or boast poem, the ritha, or lament, the sa’alik, or wanderer poem, and more besides these. While, once again, there are historiographical challenges to studying the earliest Arabic literature, Jahili poetry is still a wondrous body of work. Next time, we’ll go through the famous Muʻallaqāt, or “hanging poems,” and explore the qasida, ancient Arabia’s quintessential poetic form. But we’ll also meet some of the larger-than-life personalities of the earliest Arabic literature – Imru’ al-Qays, Ta’abbata Sharran, Tarafa, al-Khansa’, and other poets whose work has been a part of Arabic speaking civilization for a thousand and a half years.

I have a quiz on this program available at literatureandhistory.com – give it a try and make sure you see some of these perhaps unfamiliar Arabic words in standard English transliterations – I think it will help you learn, and check out the episode transcription, also linked to in your podcast app’s description, to see some useful maps of pre-Islamic Arabia. For you Patreon supporters, in addition to that super special secret present I sent your way a couple of weeks ago, I’ve also recorded Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” which had a publication anniversary just a couple of days ago – I hope you enjoy that one! I didn’t have time to write and record an original tune for the end of this show – I never did get that day off I mentioned, and as you can imagine, going from one season of the podcast to the next and effectively changing entire academic departments is – shall we say, time consuming, to put it concisely. So next time, once again, we’ll learn about the earliest Arabic poetry, some of the historiography behind it, and get to know the Late Antique Arabian Peninsula a bit better. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.

References

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