Antiquities of South Arabia

Kitāb al-Iklīl (Arabic: كتاب الإكليل) fully known as the Kitāb al-Iklīl min akhbār al-Yaman wa-ansāb Ḥimyar, known in English as the Antiquities of South Arabia (or more fully: Crowns from the Accounts of the Yemen and the genealogies of Ḥimyar), is a book on the pre-Islamic Arabian history of Yemen and the Himyarite Kingdom by the 10th-century grammarian, chemist and historian Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani.

The Antiquities of South Arabia celebrates South Arabian and Yemeni identity, in a time after the Abbasid Caliphate had withdrawn from the region and political turmoil was rife.^[1]

The work was originally written in ten volumes, only four of which exist to this day (vols. 1, 2, 8, 10), although a portion of the sixth volume was discovered and published in 2020.^[2]

The contents of the lost volumes were noted in other surviving works.^[3] The topics covered by the ten volumes are as follows:^[4]

• Volume 1: Genealogies of tribes of South Arabia
• Volume 2: Genealogies of tribes of South Arabia
  • Special focus on the family of king Sheba, the mythical Sabaean ancestor.^[2][5][6]
  • Contains the poem, al-Risala al-Damighah,^[7] sometimes separately published with commentary.^[7]
• Volume 3: Merits and deeds of people who lived in South Arabia
• Volumes 4–6: History of the Kingdom of Himyar, from its inception until the rise of Islam
• Volume 7: False reports on the history of South Arabia
• Volume 8: Monuments, burials and their inscriptions, and poetry from South Arabia
  • Discussions on the poetry of Dhu Jadan and Abu Karib.^[2][5]
• Volume 9: Proverbs and aphorisms from Himyar
• Volume 10: Genealogies of tribes of South Arabia
  • Focuses on the history of the people of Hamdan, the hometown of the author.^[8]

Of the ten volumes of Kitāb al-Iklīl published in the 10th century, only the first, second, eighth and tenth volumes survived intact to the present day.^[2][5]

In 1881, parts of the work were translated into German by David Heinrich Müller.^[9]

The historian Nabih Amin Faris compiled the four surviving volumes into an annotated work, al-Juz' al-Thamin, published in 1940 by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Oriental Texts collection.^[5]

An abridged version of the texts has been made available under a Creative Commons license for reading in some online libraries.^[10][6]

No complete English translation has been made of the Antiquities, and the following only translate parts of it.

• Faris, Nabih A. (Trans.) – The Antiquities of South Arabia (Kitāb al-Iklīl, X). Princeton, 1938.
• Müller, David Heinrich (Trans.) – Die Bürgen und Schlösser Südarabiens, Vols. 1–2 (Kitāb al-Iklīl, VIII). Vienna, 1879.
• Müller, David Heinrich (Trans.) – Ṣifa: al-Hamdânî’s Geographie der arabischen Halbinsel (ṣifat ǧazīrat al-ʿarab). Leiden, 1884-1891.
• Toll, Christopher (Trans.) – Die Beide Edelmetallen Gold und Silber (Kitāb al-jawharatayn al-ʿatīqatayn). Uppsala, 1968.

• The Book of Crowns on the Kings of Himyar by Ibn Hisham
• History of the Prophets and Kings by Al-Tabari

• Mahoney, Daniel (2021). "The Formation of South Arabian Identity in al-Iklīl of al-Hamdānī". In Pohl, Walter; Mahoney, Daniel (eds.). Historiography and Identity IV: Writing History across Medieval Eurasia. Brepols. pp. 137–156.

• Filson, Lily (2020). "Hydraulic and Pneumatic Devices in Pre-Islamic Yemen". Ancient West & East. 19: 269–283.
• Mahoney, Daniel (2016). "The Political Construction of a Tribal Genealogy from Early Medieval South Arabia". In Hovden, Eirik; Lutter, Christina; Pohl, Walter (eds.). Meanings of Community across Medieval Eurasia: Comparative Approaches. Brill. pp. 163–182.

• The full readable manuscript of the Kitāb al-Iklīl on the Al-Maktaba Al-Shamela library
• Digitized and PDF versions of the 1949 Cairo edition of the 10th volume of Kitab al-Iklīl, under a Creative Commons license