FIGURE 5. The sakieh, an ancient form of water wheel, was a highly prized innovation from al-Hadr Arabs and Persians. Typically driven by oxen, these water wheels were used for irrigation throughout the Middle East and Egypt. (Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

      Most of these fruits and vegetables were eaten raw while still fresh; the rest were sun dried for later use. The grains and even the legumes were toasted and ground, then made into harira, which often combined wheat, garbanzo beans, and lentils in the same dish. Spices, onions, and wild greens might be added. Unleavened breads were baked on woodfired ovens and used to mop up broths of grains, mutton, or goat meat, serving as precursors to dishes such as tharīd (a broth with bread, typically incorporating meat, but sometimes vegetarian) and maqluba (a boiled grain, meat and vegetable stew). Dates, fresh or pressed into thick pastes, were always available. This was desert peasant food at its most basic, and perhaps at its best.

      The Minaeans would be offered cotton and flax for their weaving in exchange for Sabaean-tanned hides of camel, goat, and sheep. The wild desert world and its nomads found a certain synergy with the tamed and tended world of the Ma’rib oasis for upward of twenty-eight hundred years, with regional trade providing prosperity to both.

      But then, some thousand years after Sumhu’ Alay Yanuf and his workers had attempted to control desert nature, the Ma’rib dam burst, releasing floodwaters.¹³ Overnight, the Sabaean Arabs witnessed the draining of the reservoir on which they had depended for more than forty generations. Their role in the world and that of their neighbors—the Minaean spice and incense traders—suddenly and irrevocably changed forever.

      Although some Semitic-speaking tribes had long before migrated out of Arabia Felix into other reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, by the third century, refugees from the Ma’rib flood joined them in a diaspora of unprecedented proportions for its era. The great Arab historian Albert Hourani marks the out-migration of proto-Arab Semitic clans from Yemen during this time as one of the pivotal moments of Arab history.¹⁴ Many of these clans left their southern motherland for good, fanning out across the peninsula and slowly transforming into the major Arab tribes that have dominated entire regions of the Middle East ever since. Some took the trails northward that had already been pioneered by the first mercantile caravans carrying frankincense to Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt. A number of their descendants later entered the spice trade themselves.

      And yet, like certain groups of Jews after their departure from their Promised Land, the Arabs who left the well-watered oases of southern Yemen became a restless lot, relatively unattached to any place other than the mythic motherland from which their ancestors had come. Of course, they were intelligent enough and resilient enough to physically and economically make a new home nearly anywhere, but in doing so, they severed the psychic umbilical cord that attached them to their mother country. They were able to build houses, dynasties, and economies in many climes, but they could never go home anymore.