SOUTHERN ARABIA—COON 395 
two families jockeyed each other about in their struggle for exclusive 
power. 
The later history of southern Arabia, until the arrival of Islam, is 
relatively well known. In 24 B. C. Aelius Gallus led an expedition 
to conquer this whole section, known to the Romans as Arabia Felix, 
but the Romans never got there. Somewhere in the sands near the 
Nejran the majority of them perished, and those who survived at 
this point turned back. About A. D. 270 the Axumite Ethiopians 
conquered Arabia Felix and ruled it—they were Christians and set up 
bishops and bishoprics. But by A. D. 378, apparently, their rule 
had come to an end. The Axumites themselves were the descendants, 
in whole or in part, of earlier emigrants from the Hadhramaut, who 
had carried Semitic civilization to Ethiopia and there become 
Christianized. 
In A. D. 449 and 450 the dam at Marib burst twice, washing out the 
valley and ruining agriculture, and at this time there must have been 
a mass exodus. Perhaps it was at this time that the region of Sana‘a 
became the nucleus of Yemen. The later kings, who ruled before the 
bursting of the dam, were in many instances Jewish in religion, and 
the strong Jewish colony of Yemen had before then been founded. 
In A. D. 525 the Ethiopians returned, and in A. D. 570, the birth year 
of Mohammed, the Ethiopian viceroy Abraha, who ruled Yemen, 
organized an expedition, mounted on elephants, against Mekka. This 
expedition soon came to grief, however, and in the same year the 
Persians conquered the country. In A. D. 628 the last Persian gov- 
ernor became a Moslem, and Arabia Felix was ruled from Mekka. By 
the time of the establishment of Islam in Yemen, southern Arabia had 
lost its earlier importance. This was due to the break-up of the over- 
land trade, caused chiefly by the establishment of ports along the 
coastal Tihama by the Ethiopians. Before this time we hear little of 
the coastal plain—it was ethnically a different country, as it is today. 
About the political and social organization of the four southern 
Arabian states, we have sufficient information to permit the recon- 
struction of at least a plausible if striking system. Since each of the 
four was organized in essentially the same way, it will suffice to de- 
scribe the functioning of the best known, Saba. Here society was 
graded and subdivided on two interlocking bases, kinship and in- 
heritable rank. These divisions were formally expressed by the pres- 
ence within the state of several parallel tribes and four graded classes. 
The tribe was both a kinship grouping and a geographical expression; 
each tribe except one was a completely parallel unit, which included 
members of the three lower classes, in approximately equivalent pro- 
portions. The one asymmetrical tribe possessed in addition the entire 
personnel of the highest class, small in number, and including the 
priest-king and his near kinsmen. 
