Sana, where they received a cordial welcome from the imam, el Mahdi Abbas.
The aspect of the city must have been nearly the same as at present; Niebuhr describes the enceinte flanked by towers, the citadel at the foot of J. Nukum which rises 1000 ft. above the valley, the fortress and palace of the imams, now replaced by the Turkish military hospital, the suburb of Bir el Azab with its scattered houses and gardens, the Jews’ quarter and the village of Rauda, a few miles to the north in a fertile, irrigated plain which Niebuhr compares to that of Damascus. After a stay of ten days at Sana the mission set out again for Mokha, travelling by what is now the main route from the capital to Hodeda, through the rich coffee-bearing district of J. Haraz, and thence southward to Mokha, where they embarked for India. During the next year three other members of the party died, leaving Niebuhr the sole survivor. Returning to Arabia a year later, he visited Oman and the shores of the Persian Gulf, and travelling from Basra through Syria and Palestine he reached Denmark in 1764 after four years’ absence.
The period was perhaps specially favourable for a scientific mission of the sort. The outburst of fanaticism which convulsed Arabia twenty years later had not then reached Yemen, and Europeans, as such, were not exposed to any special danger. The travellers were thus able to move freely and to pursue their scientific enquiries without hindrance from either people or ruler. The results published in 1772 gave for the first time a comprehensive description not only of Yemen but of all Arabia; while the parts actually visited by Niebuhr were described with a fulness and accuracy of detail which left little or nothing for his successors to discover.
C. G. Ehrenberg and W. F. Hemprich in 1825 visited the Tehama and the islands off the coast, and in 1836 P. E. Botta made an important journey in southern Yemen with a view to botanical research, but the next advance in geographical knowledge in south Arabia was due to the Asir.French officers, M. O. Tamisier, Chedufau and Mary, belonging to the Egyptian army in Asir; another Frenchman, L. Arnaud, formerly in the Egyptian service, was the first to visit the southern Jauf and to report on the rock-cut inscriptions and ruins of Marib, though it was not till 1869 that a competent archaeologist, J. Halévy, was able to carry out any complete exploration there. Starting from Sana, Halévy went north-eastward to El Madid, a town of 5000 inhabitants and the capital of the small district of Nihm; Jauf and Marib.thence crossing a plateau, where he saw the ruins of numerous crenellated towers, he reached the village of Mijzar at the foot of J. Yam, on the borders of Jauf, a vast sandy plain, extending eastwards to El Jail and El Hazm, where Halévy made his most important discoveries of Sabaean inscriptions: here he explored Main, the ancient capital of the Minaeans, Kamna on the banks of the W. Kharid, the ancient Caminacum, and Kharibat el Beda, the Nesca of Pliny, where the Sabaean army was defeated by the Romans under Aelius Gallus in 24 B.C. From El Jail Halévy travelled northward, passing the oasis of Khab, and skirting the great desert, reached the fertile district of Nejran, where he found a colony of Jews, with whom he spent several weeks in the oasis of Makhlaf. An hour’s march to the east he discovered at the village of Medinat el Mahud the ruins of the Nagra metropolis of Ptolemy. In June 1870 he at last reached the goal of his journey, Marib; here he explored the ruins of Medinat an Nahas (so called from its numerous inscriptions engraved on brass plates), and two hours to the east he found the famous dam constructed by the Himyarites across the W. Shibwan, on which the water-supply of their capital depended.
One other explorer has since visited Marib, the Austrian archaeologist, E. Glaser (1855–1908), who achieved more for science in Yemen than any traveller since Niebuhr. Under Turkish protection, he visited the territory of the Hashid and Bakil tribes north-east of Sana, and though their hostile attitude compelled him to return after reaching their first important town, Khamr, he had time to reconnoitre the plateau lying between the two great wadis Kharid and Hirran, formerly covered with Himyaritic towns and villages; and to trace the course of these wadis to their junction at El Ish in the Dhu Husen country, and thence onward to the Jauf. In 1889 he succeeded, again under Turkish escort, in reaching Marib, where he obtained, during a stay of thirty days, a large number of new Himyaritic inscriptions. He was unable, however, to proceed farther east than his predecessors, and the problem of the Jauf drainage and its possible connexion with the upper part of the Hadramut valley still remains unsolved.
The earliest attempt to penetrate into the interior from the south coast was made in 1835 when Lieuts. C. Cruttenden and J. R. Wellsted of the “Palinurus,” employed on the marine survey of the Arabian coast, visited the ruins of Nakb (el Hajar) in the W. Mefat. The Himyaritic Exploration in Hadramut.inscriptions found there and at Husn Ghurab near Mukalla, were the first records discovered of ancient Arabian civilization in Hadramut. Neither of these officers was able to follow up their discoveries, but in 1843 Adolph von Wrede landed at Mukalla and, adopting the character of a pilgrim to the shrine of the prophet Hud, made his way northward across the high plateau into the W. Duwan, one of the main southern tributaries of the Hadramut valley, and pushed on to the edge of the great southern desert; on his return to the W. Duwan his disguise was detected and he was obliged to return to Mukalla. Though he did not actually enter the main Hadramut valley, which lay to the east of his track, his journey established the existence of this populous and fertile district which had been reported to the officers of the “Palinurus” as lying between the coast range and the great desert to the north. This was at last visited in 1893 by L. Hirsch under the protection of the sultan of Mukalla, the head of the Kaiti family, and practically ruler of all Hadramut, with the exception of the towns of Saiyun and Tarim, which belong to the Kathiri tribe. Starting like von Wrede from Mukalla, Hirsch first visited the W. Duwan and found ancient ruins and inscriptions near the village of Hajren; thence he proceeded north-eastward to Hauta in the main valley, where he was hospitably received by the Kaiti sultan, and sent on to his deputy at Shibam. Here he procured a Kathiri escort and pushed on through Saiyun to Tarim, the former capital. After a very brief stay, however, he was compelled by the hostility of the people to return in haste to Shibam, from which he travelled by the W. bin Ali and W. Adim back to Mukalla. J. Theodore Bent and his wife followed in the same track a few months later with a well-equipped party including a surveyor, Imam Sharif, lent by the Indian government, who made a very valuable survey of the country passed through. Both parties visited many sites where Himyaritic remains and inscriptions were found, but the hostile attitude of the natives, more particularly of the Seyyids, the religious hierarchy of Hadramut, prevented any adequate examination, and much of archaeological interest undoubtedly remains for future travellers to discover.
In Oman, where the conditions are more favourable, explorers have penetrated only a short distance from the coast. Niebuhr did not go inland from Muscat; the operations by a British Indian force on the Pirate coast in 1810 gave no opportunities for visiting the interior, and it was Exploration in Oman.not till 1835 that J. R. Wellsted, who had already tried to penetrate into Hadramut from the south, landed at Muscat with the idea of reaching it from the north-east. Sailing thence to Sur near Ras el Had, he travelled southward through the country of the Bani bu Ali to the borders of the desert, then turning north-west up the Wadi Betha through a fertile, well-watered country, running up to the southern slopes of J. Akhdar, inhabited by a friendly people who seem to have welcomed him everywhere, he visited Ibra, Semed and Nizwa at the southern foot of the mountains. Owing to the disturbed state of the country, due to the presence of raiding parties from Nejd, Wellsted was unable to carry out his original intention of exploring the country to the west, and after an excursion along the Batina coast to Sohar he returned to India.
In 1876 Colonel S. B. Miles, who had already done much to
