tour 3 of 20
The kingdoms of ancient South Arabia
Calcite-alabaster panel with bull’s head
The kingdom of Qataban emerged in the seventh
century BC and by the fifth century BC it had replaced Saba as the
most powerful kingdom of South Arabia. In the early 1950s the
American Foundation for the Study of Man conducted excavations at
the walled city of Tamna, the capital of the Qatabanian kingdom,
where they discovered spectacular alabaster and bronze artefacts
and monumental buildings. They also demonstrated that the nearby
settlement of Hajar ibn Humayd was occupied as early as the tenth
or eleventh centuries
BC.
In the centre of this
panel is a bull's head carved in high relief. The bull was
an especially popular motif on funerary stele at Heid ibn Aqil, the
cemetery at Tamna, because it was the symbol of Amm, the patron
diety of the Qatabanians, who considered themselves
'progeny of Amm'. This stela may have originally
had a stone base inscribed with the name of the
deceased.
The Qatabanians
derived great prosperity from agriculture and the incense trade but
by the end of the second century AD their kingdom had declined and
collapsed.