Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Ḥimyar is the name of a geographical area in southwest Arabia as well as that of a tribal confederation in power from the 1st cent. BC to ca. AD 525. At times the Ḥimyarites ruled over large parts of S. Arabia, well into the Arabian desert. Their capital was Ẓafār, near present-day Yarīm (in Yemen). Inscriptions in Sabaic, an Old South Arabian language, were produced until the 6th cent. AD. Living from trade, the Ḥimyarites had to assert their power vis-à-vis the Ethiopians in the Horn of Africa, and vis-à-vis the Romans in the north. In the 4th cent. they came into contact with both Christianity and Judaism.
The Ḥimyarites are occasionally mentioned in Syriac literature. In the Life
of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa (which details events
from the first half of the 5th cent.) it is reported that Paul and John, on
their way from
One of the main sources providing information on the persecution and the
martyrdom of Christians in Nagran is the Syriac ‘Book of the Ḥimyarites’
(Ktābā da-ḥmirāye), which is only fragmentarily
known in a 10th-cent. ms. (ed. A. Moberg). The Book is anonymous, but I.
Shahîd argued that its author was