- The expeditions commemorated by the inscription of ʿAbadān
- Arabia and Ethiopia in the time of the kingdom of Hiymar
The historicity of an expedition of Abraha against Mecca, and its resounding failure, does, however, appear plausible, because such an event provides an acceptable explanation for the primacy of Quraysh in the last decades of the sixth century, while this tribe, settled in an inhospitable region, was notoriously small in numbers and lived in poverty. If one is to believe the Arab-Islamic tradition, it is following its victory over Abraha that Quraysh was called ‘the people of God’ (ahl Allāh), and that its temple attracted many pilgrims (Kister 1972: 75). The last chronological benchmark of Abraha’s reign is the fragment of a superb inscription in three registers, which commemorates an expensive construction project. The costly materials involved apparently originated from the territory of tribes in the north-west of Yemen and were quarried by a workforce provided by these same tribes (3.25). This inscription incidentally mentions the date 559/60. It is likely that the text’s author—whose name is lost—is King Abraha himself since, at this time, all inscriptions are royal (and this is the case of texts even in the last forty years before the writing of this document). The building whose construction is celebrated is probably the church that Abraha built in S ˙ anʿāʾ, called al-Qalīs by the Arab-Islamic tradition, but one cannot dismiss that it might instead have been a reconstruction of the royal palace of Ghumdān. The splendour of al-Qalīs is celebrated by al-Azraqī (Akhbār Makka: Ch. 8, n. 34), who provides details on the wealth of materials used, and al-Tabar ̣ ī also commented on the structure (see 8.10).