394. ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
the Minaeans. At what time Hadhramaut changed from a trade depot 
to a kingdom is not known. 
The Sabaeans appear toward the end of the Minaean reign, perhaps, 
as Nielsen suggests, from the northern Arabian Jauf. They were 
perhaps also camel nomads, who carried the trade for the Minaeans, 
and who, later having decided to take their share of the business di- 
rectly, established a domain in the south, grafting themselves on the 
northern portion of what had been Katabanian territory. There are 
‘two Sabaean periods: the earlier, called the Mukarrib period, in which 
the king bore the title mukarrib, which indicated a primarily priestly 
office, and a later, in which he is called malik, the common Semitic 
word for king. A parallel transition took place in Kataban. The 
exact dates of these two periods are unknown, depending on a floating 
correlation. For the first Nielsen offers 1115-815 B. C., 950-650 B. C., 
and 815-510 B. C., of which he prefers the middle one. This, of course, 
goes with the early dating for the Minaeans. 
The most important Mukarrib of Saba was Karika-Ilu (the Priest 
of the God Il), who killed 4,000 men in a war against Kataban, then 
turned on Ma‘an and killed 45,000 while taking 63,000 prisoners and 
31,000 head of cattle. At the same time his army laid the Nejran 
country waste, destroying the Minaeans forever. Two Assyrian in- 
scriptions, dated 715 and 685 B. C., respectively, serve to locate this 
Kariba-Ilu accurately in time. He gave presents to King Sargon of 
Assyria, although he was in no sense a vassal of the latter monarch. 
The difficulty in pinning the entire chronology to him is that there 
were several kings named Kariba-Ilu, and it is not yet known which 
one of them was the great conqueror and Sargon’s friend. 
At any rate, this Mukarrib period was the period of rise and efllores- 
cence for the Sabaeans. They established themselves definitely as 
the principal people in southern Arabia; for after destroying the 
Minaeans and crippling the Katabanians and Hadhramautis, they 
turned to offer these two latter peace and alliance, which must have 
implied a Sabaean hegemony. The material high point of this period 
was the erection of the great dam at Marib, which provided irrigation 
water for the whole section. 
From about 650 to 115 B. C., according to Nielsen’s correlation, the 
Sabaeans continued to be the dominant people in the incense and In- 
dian trades. This was the Malik period. In 115 B. C. their nation be- 
came the dual kingdom of Saba and Dhu Raidan, with rival families 
arising ; the Hamdanis, of whom there is still an entire tribe in Yemen, 
and the Himyarites, who were only a single noble family, although 
their name has erroneously been preserved as the title of the whole 
South Arabian civilization. The Hamdanis were centered at Marib, 
the Himyarites at Dhu Raidan. From 115 B. C. to A. D. 270 these 
