386 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
the famous kingdoms of the Sabaeans, Minaeans, Katabanians, and 
Hadhramautis, whose splendors were immortalized by the biblical 
account of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Under the encroaching 
sands of the Empty Quarter lie the feet of splendid temples and lofty 
skyscrapers, abandoned to the desert after the breaking of the Marib 
dam, and the shift of the frankincense trade from the overland route 
to the sea. 
The peninsula of Arabia can hardly be called a unit. The Empty 
Quarter, probably the world’s largest stretch of sheer and utter desert 
without oasis and without relief, acts as the center of a ring, about 
which are set the Arabian kingdoms, like jewels of different hue and 
luster. The Empty Quarter divides these kingdoms as no sea could, 
for one can sail across seas, and some, such as the Mediterranean, 
and the Indian Ocean, have acted in history as highroads rather than 
as barriers. There is no barrier so great as a complete desert. The 
Empty Quarter may be crossed by camels and has been so crossed 
over long periods of time; this has been proved by the personal ex- 
perience and inquiries of Bertram Thomas. Such crossings, how- 
ever, are extremely exceptional, and most of the inhabitants of Arabia 
today entertain only fabulous notions of the actual character of this 
extensive waste. 
Although it would please exponents of pan-Arabian solidarity to 
think that all the Arabs in the whole peninsula and elsewhere form a 
racial and cultural unit, the truth is quite the opposite. Arabian 
unity north and west of the Empty Quarter may well extend into Syria, 
Iraq, and North Africa, but south of the great desert the vermiform 
appendix plays its retentive role. Here, small, ringlet-haired men, 
painted blue, swear mighty oaths over the tombs of Jnun, milk their 
cattle, sleep in caves, and initiate their sons in mass ceremonies of an 
Australoid character. ‘These men are not Arabs in the modern, Islamic 
sense; they are the survivors of an earlier age. 
Southern Arabia may be divided geographically into a number of 
discrete units. Most important politically, and in reference to popu- 
lation, is its westernmost segment, the divine kingdom of Yemen, where 
approximately 3 million farmers water their terraces and reap their 
barley under the spiritual sanction of their Imam. The Yemen con- 
sists geographically of two main parts, separated by a formidable 
barrier. The first part is the Tihama, a narrow coastal strip in which 
sand dunes alternate with fields of sorghum, and occupied by a mixed 
population of Negroid serfs from Africa and small elflike, brachy- 
cephalic men, whose racial origin is still a mystery. The barrier is a 
10,000-foot escarpment, rising sheer from the coastal plain, crowned 
by a range of castellated peaks, and folded and eroded into countless 
valleys. 
