Sabæans

Sabæans, or SABA', were the ancient inhabitants of Yemen in southern Arabia. They are the people called Sheba in Gen. x. 28, xxv. 3; Job, vi. 19; and other passages in the prophets; and it was probably the sovereign of this people who paid the celebrated visit to Solomon. The Sabæans were a powerful and wealthy people, who from long before the days of Solomon down to the beginning of the Christian era controlled the sea and caravan traffic in gold, sweet spices, ivory, ebony, and valuable tissues, that came from India and Africa, and were despatched northwards to Syria. To protect and watch over this trade they had stations or colonies in northern Arabia and in Ethiopia. The capital of their country was Mariaba (Marib), the ruins of which, including vast dams, lie north-east of Sanaa (q.v.). Their religion included the worship of the sun and moon, and a number of other deities. Their language is intermediate between Arabic and Ethiopian, but nearer akin to the former. In the 8th century B.C. the people of Saba' paid tribute to the kings of Assyria (Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon). The Roman governor of Egypt in 24 B.C., tempted by the fame of the great wealth of the Sabæans, sent an expedition under command of Ælius Gallus to invade their country; but it met with little success. Not long after this event, however, the trade upon which the Sabæans relied began to take a sea-route and go up the Red Sea, and from that cause their prosperity and power seem to have declined. Soon afterwards they appear to have been subject to the sovereignty of the king of the Himyarites. Then, in the 2d century, and again in the 4th, and yet again in the 6th, we read that kings of Ethiopia were lords over the Sabæans. See MANDÆANS, ZABISM; and various works, published since 1877, by D. H. Müller.