Sabaeans on the Somali coast

Abstract

In 2019, the illegal excavation of an ancient sanctuary on the Somali coast yielded monumental Sabaic inscriptions from approximately the eighth–seventh centuries BCE. The inscriptions, similar in content and script, have shed light on their authors’ origin (Sabaeans presumably from Maʾrib in Yemen), on the location’s cultic nature, and more broadly on Sabaean endeavours to establish an ambitious trade network in the first half of the first millennium BCE for the supply of aromatic resins from across the Horn of Africa in order to convey them to the Near East and Mesopotamia. These inscriptions also highlight mastery of navigation techniques in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden as early as the period of the Sabaean mukarribs.