Yemen historical timeline

Origins

Yemen was the incense country. The kingdoms of Saba, Ma’in, Qataban and Hadhramaut grew rich on frankincense and myrrh, which grew almost nowhere else and which the ancient world burned in enormous quantities. The Marib Dam, begun around the eighth century BC and maintained for more than a thousand years, irrigated a desert on a scale nothing else in Arabia matched; its final collapse is recorded in the Quran. The Romans called the region Arabia Felix, fortunate Arabia, because it was green and it was wealthy. Islam arrived early, and a Zaydi imamate ruled the northern highlands from the ninth century.

Turning points

Ottoman control came and went. Britain took Aden in 1839 and made it one of the busiest coaling and bunkering ports in the world, on the route to India. The north’s imamate was overthrown in 1962 and a long civil war followed; the south became independent in 1967 and then the only Marxist state in the Arab world. The two unified in 1990, fought a short civil war in 1994, and were ruled by Ali Abdullah Saleh until the uprising of 2011. Houthi forces took Sanaa in 2014, a Saudi-led coalition intervened in 2015, and the war that followed produced what the United Nations has repeatedly described as one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. From late 2023 attacks on shipping in the Red Sea gave a local conflict global economic consequences.

Influential people

The queen of Saba — Sheba — who appears in the Hebrew Bible, the Quran and Ethiopian tradition alike. The Zaydi imams, who held the highlands for a thousand years. Ali Abdullah Saleh, who compared governing Yemen to dancing on the heads of snakes. And Tawakkol Karman, a journalist and protest organiser who in 2011 became the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cultural evolution

The old city of Sanaa has been inhabited for two and a half thousand years, and its tower houses — rammed earth and burnt brick rising six or more storeys, with fretted gypsum and alabaster windows — are unlike anything else. Shibam, in the Hadhramaut, is a walled town of five-hundred-year-old mudbrick towers that has been called the Manhattan of the desert. Socotra, far out in the Arabian Sea, has been isolated long enough that a third of its plants grow nowhere else, including the dragon’s blood trees. And coffee left for Europe through the port of Mocha, which is where the word comes from.

Present-day significance

All of Yemen’s UNESCO World Heritage sites are on the list of those in danger. Control of the country is divided, the economy and currency have broken down, and much of the population depends on aid. Qat, chewed through the afternoon across most of the country, consumes a large share of scarce water and of household income, which is a problem discussed openly and not solved.