Ancient Yemen only became an object of archaeological study relatively recently. Today sites are being lost that were not long ago discovered and made available to scholars. A major role in bringing the history of Yemen back to the world was played by scholars from Russia.
The economic and political intrigues in the period of the martyrs of Najran were brilliantly examined in several books by Nina Pigulevskaya and Avraam Lundin. Lundin became one of the world’s leading specialists on ancient Yemen or Saba.
The great Arabist Ignaty Krachkovsky published several ancient Yemenite texts and left an amazing description in his memoirs of the delight a researcher experiences when he delves into the depths of ancient South Arabia’s past. Gleb Bauer produced an exemplary grammar of the language used in ancient Yemenite inscriptions. In the 1970s, the Arabist Piotr Griaznevich managed to make a journey though many parts of ancient Yemen that were at that time still barely accessible to researchers. The materials collected formed the foundation for a multi-volume study of the monuments of South Arabia and a fascinating book about the search for those sites.
The success of individual researches made possible the creation in 1982 of the Soviet-Yemeni Multidisciplinary Expedition of the Academy of Sciences, whose work initially was directed by Griaznevich. (In 1989–92 it was headed by Mikhail Piotrovsky and from 1992 to the present by Alexander Sedov.) The expedition survived all the difficult periods in the history of Yemen and our own country. It still exists and has been working actively for several decades now. The expedition was multidisciplinary in nature. Dozens of Russian and Yemeni scholars have carried out research in archaeology (prehistoric, ancient and mediaeval), numismatics, palaeography, epigraphy, ethnography, linguistics, sociology and other fields. Dozens of books have been published, representing an important stage in the study of the Arabian Peninsula as a distinct historico-cultural region. The expedition’s field work was initially focussed on the eastern part of Yemen – romantic Hadhramaut and Mahra, the sources of the ancient aromatic resins. Among the main discoveries made by the expedition mention can be made of the discovery of sites used by prehistoric humans, the al-Guza cave, for example, the excavation of the Raybun site and the port town of Qana, the study of trade routes and inscriptions and researching the ethnography and language of the legendary island of Socotra. The work of the expedition is still continuing in Yemen and other countries of Arabia. The tragic events of the civil war are, however, threatening both the historical monuments and those who study them.
