SOUTHERN ARABIA—COON 397 
An officer called Kebirv, in Greek rpecBirepos, presided over each 
tribe as head. The name itself implies that he was originally an elder, 
and that his position was determined by family precedence. His office 
was partly priestly, perhaps in the earlier stages of South Arabian 
social evolution largely so. It was he who brought sacrifices to the 
tribal temple and offered them to the tribal god. 
Besides the lands governed by the tribal princes, there were crown 
lands governed directly by the king, and the occupants of these terri- 
tories paid him taxes and military services. Presumably these were the 
lands occupied by members of his own tribe. Much of the land also 
belonged to the temple; on it were priestly colleges, each with its Kebir. 
Thus, the prototype of the modern zawya and its sheikh or fakih 
existed in pre-Islamic Saba. Every member of society, of whatever 
class, was obliged to do some work on the temple lands, and the gods 
were offered sacrifices, ex votos, and the tithes of all produce. The 
temples themselves were built with money given or bequeathed as 
offerings to wipe away specific sins committed by the donors. 
The dual system of national partitionment, vertically into tribes and 
horizontally into classes, produced a state held together by religious 
sanction and by a specialized common economic purpose. Exactly how 
the caravans were organized, and who had control of the road taxes, 
we do not yet know, but the technique must have fitted into the system 
already described. 
One can find a number of parallels to this tightly integrated and 
overtly stratified form of organization, in various parts of the world. 
The Inca system in Peru was basically similar, and that of the Aztecs 
was, at the time of Cortez, assuming a similar form, while the germs of 
such a system may be found in the tribal organization of the Muskho- 
gean peoples of the southeastern United States. In the Old World, 
the Sumerian and Bablyonian systems were not radically dissimilar. 
In Egypt the divinity of the king and the role of the nomes and 
nomarchs might be considered parallel. The caste system, with occupa- 
tional segregation, has its parallels in India, and may there go back to 
the time of the Indus Valley civilizations. Thus the technical perfec- 
tion of the South Arabian state, as exemplified by Saba, is not surpris- 
ing, and its form relates it to the whole string of civilized communities 
reaching from the Nile to the Indus. 
But like all other systems, no matter how perfectly adjusted, it was 
susceptible to change. As the Sabaean power grew through military 
conquest, the importance of the military element naturally increased. 
A subcaste, called by the consonantal sequence ’Khms, arose from the 
middle class, to parallel the Kshatrias in India; this was a strong mili- 
tary caste, which came in later periods to cut across tribal lines, and 
developed into a strongly unified group which wielded great political 
