Archaeological Work in Arabia Now Possible

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Opportunities for archaeological investigation appear to be opening up in the Arabian peninsula for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, according to reports from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Recently returned from a four-month visit to Yemen, Father Albert Jamme of Catholic University visited 70 sites, copied over 300 formal South Arabian inscriptions and over 900 graffiti. Father Jamme is generally recognized as the world’s leading South Arabian epigrapher.

Father Jamme had not previously visited Yemen since 1952 when he spent a month in a Yemen jail for refusing to surrender his latex squeezes of some South Arabian inscriptions. Several months after he was released, the entire archaeological expedition had to flee the country secretly, barely escaping with their lives. The squeezes for which Father Jamme went to jail had to be left behind. A swashbuckling account of this adventure may be found in a book entitled Qataban and Sheba (1955) by the romantic American leader of the expedition, Wendell Phillips.

Father Jamme saw his 1952 squeezes on his recent visit, but the Yemen government claims to own them.

Since the 1962 revolution, however, the Yemen government’s attitude toward archaeological scholarship has changed, according to Father Jamme. “All it takes now is money,” says the Belgian linguist. Yemen is not an oil-rich country.

Yemen is the home of the ancient kingdom of Saba or, as it is called in the Bible, Sheba. From here, the Queen of Sheba came to visit King Solomon. According to the Bible, the land of Sheba was famous for its merchants, its gold and its spices.