Product Code Database
Ma'in (; ) was an ancient kingdom in modern-day Yemen. It was located along the strip of desert called Ṣayhad by medieval Arab geographers, which is now known as Ramlat al-Sab'atayn. Wadd was the national god of Ma'in. The spoken language was Minaic. The kingdom appears in the historical record in the 8th century BCE, and transition from a city-state to kingdom in the last quarter of the 7th century BCE. The date of the end of Ma'in is heavily disputed, but the most popular hypothesis places its demise in the 1st century CE.
The Minaean people were one of four ancient Yemeni groups mentioned by Eratosthenes. The others were the Sabaeans, Hadhrami people and Qataban. Each of these had regional kingdoms in ancient Yemen, with the Minaeans in the north-west (in Wādī al-Jawf), the Sabaeans to the south-east of them, the Qatabānians to the south-east of the Sabaeans, and the Ḥaḑramites further east still.
A chronological historical reconstruction of what happened from the fifth centuries BCE onwards is still not possible, although plenty of information is known about it. One apparent fact is that in this time, Ma'in becomes the most active of the South Arabian kingdoms in land trade. The kingdom of Ma'in in this time was mainly based on an alliance between two cities: Ma'in and Baraqish. Inscriptions from these cities end with invocations to the gods and the tribes of the two cities. Other tribes and cities also entered into the orbit of the Minaean kingdom, but only played a secondary role compared to these cities. The most prominent example is Nashshan, the most important city of the Jawf valley. It was absorbed under the dominion of the Kingdom of Ma'in between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. This event also coincided with the replacement of the traditional pantheon of Nashshan with the one from Ma'in, although Nashshan was to restore its old pantheon when Ma'in eventually fell. Another religious development was the spread of the high god of Najran, Dhu Samawi, throughout the Minaean kingdom, from Baraqish in the north, to Sawam in the south, presumably due to the outsized role placed by the Najran oasis in trade.
After the collapse of the Minaeans, the Nabataean Kingdom took over long-distance trade in the region, as part of their expansion southwards from their capital city Petra.
Minaean trade extended throughout Arabia and even extended to more distant, international polities, where colonies were set up to manage trade with Ma'in and the revenue that it brought in. The main evidence for this is a group of about seventy discovered monumental inscriptions beyond the borders of the Kingdom of Ma'in composed in the Minaic script, which was the written form of the Minaean language. A study of these inscriptions shows that the Minaeans established communities in these far-flung regions to manage their international trade apparatus. The Minaean communities set up abroad were able to retain their cultural and political identities in the process. The majority of these inscriptions are from northwest Arabia, at the oasis of al-Ula in the Lihyan, numbering about fifty. Two inscriptions are also known from a trading station the Minaeans set up at Qaryat al-Faw, located in Central Arabia. One read: "Hạ̄niʾ and Zaydʾīl of (the clan of) Ḫaḏab set up the altar of Waddum and the gods of Maʿīn in Delos. (Greek) (Belonging to) Oddos, the god of the Minaeans. For Oaddos." These inscriptions have also been discovered as far as Egypt and at the Greek island of Delos. The Delos inscriptions show that Minaean merchants had set up an altar for their national god, Wadd, and composed the inscription in Minaic.
|
|
