Maʾrib

Antiquity

Maʾrib was the capital of Sabaʾ, the pre-Islamic kingdom of southern Arabia, and one of the oldest cities named in Arabian history. Its inscriptions are a primary record of the pre-Islamic south.

The dam

The Maʾrib dam irrigated the surrounding plain for well over a millennium. Its final breach is one of the fixed reference points of Arab tradition — recorded as *sayl al-ʿarim*, the flood of the dam — and the sources tie the dispersal of southern tribes northward to it.

In genealogy

Because of that tradition, Maʾrib sits at the origin of many Qaḥṭānī migration accounts. Those accounts are transmitted narrative rather than documented movement, and the sources differ over which tribes left, when, and how far — as always here, the framework is reported, not asserted.