400 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
We know comparatively little about the technique of sacrifice em- 
ployed in worshiping these divinities. The temple was the great 
economic nucleus of each tribal region, with sovereignty over its own 
grounds and fields, and it was ruled by its head priest with his troop 
of acolytes. To it came worshipers bearing votive offerings, little 
statuettes of gold in the forms of animals and men, brought to the 
god as instruments of supplication for future favors and as rewards 
for intervention in response to a previous oath. Models of arms and 
legs represent the divine curing of these limbs. A Greek source of 
the fifth century A. D. states that the Himyarites sacrificed the choicest 
of their war booty in the early morning light, to Venus in his role of 
Morning Star. The most important sacrificial victims were the hand- 
some young boys who had been led to the temples as prisoners. The 
same source also informs us that other tribes worshiped Venus in the 
role of the Evening Star, an old man, and consequently rendered him 
old men in sacrifice. 
It is possible, as Nielsen has done, to fit this whole religious system, 
as we now know it on the basis of incomplete evidence, into the general 
Semitic scheme, in which the four kingdoms of southern Arabia, and 
the northern Arabs as well, become the southern branch, and the Phoe- 
nicians, Babylonians, Assyrians, etc., the northern, with the Jews 
playing a mixed role. Whatever the findings of the learned school 
of southern Semitists in Denmark and Germany, we must, as these 
scholars would agree, still await excavation and a thorough strati- 
graphic and typological study of remains on the spot before any of 
the problems, religious or otherwise, which concern this civilization 
may be finally settled. 
For the present purposes it must be considered sufficient to have 
presented the foregoing brief and unscholarly resumé of the work of 
Nielsen and his associates, as a summary of present knowledge of this 
intensely interesting and important archeological problem. But even 
the short newspaper account of Philby’s journey, and Hellfritz’s uncrit- 
ical hegira, as well as the observations made from the air by the French 
aviators who, in 1935, flew over some as yet unidentified city, furnish 
their contributions, as does the equally uncritical inspection of the 
Imam’s Museum made by the author. 
We know now that the influence of the late classical world on the 
Sabaean kingdom cannot be overemphasized. Greeks or Byzantines 
must have been imported to the Sabaean state to make statues and 
carve stone. In earlier periods, Egyptian and Mesopotamian influ- 
ences were equally important. The South Arabian cities were com- 
mercial metropoles of a cosmopolitan character, grafted on a simpler 
agricultural state, in which imported goods and styles probably were 
more important than those which were more nearly indigenous. 
