398 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
power. Its rise was perhaps comparable to that of the Nazi party in 
modern Germany, whose beginning was both middle class and tinged 
with military concepts. Needless to say, the rise of this fascist military 
_class was entirely a Sabaean phenomenon; the power and initiative of 
Minaeans and Katabanians had declined long before its inception, and 
we know too little about the kingdom of Hadhramaut to make com- 
parisons in that quarter. 
The Katabanians, as a matter of fact, were more democratically gov- 
erned than the Sabaeans, for each tribe had a council or assembly of 
landowners; this was distinct from the parallel council of noblemen ; 
thus, the Katabanians had a bicameral parliamentary government, 
with a House of Lords and a House of Commons, with the king in the 
supreme position, over both. This system may well have been the 
early political formula of all of the South Arabian states, lasting 
- through the Mukarrib period in Saba, and replaced during the Malik 
period by the feudal system above outlined, eventually to be thrust in 
turn into the shade by the rise of the military caste, and of the rival 
warring families of Himyar and Hamdan. 
The religion of these southern Arabian states, so intimately en- 
twined with the social and political structure, is not easy to recon- 
struct. Moslems are notoriously loath to preserve traditions of 
earlier paganism and like to garble what pre-Islamic history they 
permit to survive in anachronistic terms. Our religious sources, 
then, are confined to the body of inscriptions so far published, and a 
few superficial Greek observations. Although to competent Arabic 
scholars the reading of the southern Semitic inscriptions is not diffi- 
cult, since the alphabet may be learned in a few hours, and the gram- 
mar and vocabulary are basically the same, the knowledge of this 
writing passed out of common circulation soon after the Islamic 
penetration brought a new Semitic speech and a new alphabet. In 
the tenth century Abu Mohammed el Hamdani could still read the 
old inscriptions, so we know that the knowledge had not, in his time, 
completely died. He wrote 10 books about the olden times, of which 
only 2 survive. 
The inscriptions consist largely of the names of gods, of which 
over a hundred are known. Many of them are attribute names, such 
as Wadd, love; Sadik, truth; and Rahman, the Compassionate, which 
passed over into Islamic terminology. Besides these are a number of 
animal names: the bull, the horse, the ibex, the snake. Others are 
kinship terms: father, paternal uncle, brother, mother, etc. Still 
others symbolize the omnipotence of the god: Ba’al, the ruler; and 
Malik, the king. Personal names of individual men are often of the 
“Slave of the Compassionate” type, the pre-Islamic prototype of 
‘Abd er-Rahman, and similar dedicatory terms. There is again a 
