Fortress in the Sky: Buried Christian Empire Casts New Light on Early Islam

[sysop]

Archeologists are studying the ruins of a buried Christian empire in the highlands of Yemen. The sites have sparked a number of questions about the early history of Islam. Was there once a church in Mecca?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-874048.html

[JosephBiddulph]

The Qur'an mentions Christian "tribes" as if a commonplace, and the Jewish community was so important that there is a "Yemenite" reading of the Aramaic Targums, with its own vowel system. I was under the impression that the Ethiopian occupation of the South Arabian homelands was quite well documented, and the Qur'an refers to the practices of Ethiopian Christianity as if well known. The picture of the "Ethiopian king" begs the question: where did the form of the Ethiopian crown come from? Does the similarity indicate that there was an Ethiopian presence in South Arabia, or does it merely indicate an artistic similarity? I am doing some work on Ethiopic literature and the Ascension of Isaiah at the moment, and I keep getting references to Christian texts "probably translated from the Arabic" - which I assume to be Coptic Egyptian, but the Arabic of Arabia also presents itself as a possibility - Ge'ez or Ethiopic is SIMILAR to Arabic, but neither it nor the former South Arabian are derived from Arabic proper. Possible Christian sites in "Arabia Felix" are then no surprise at all - and, even if one can't accept the bombardment by birds as too miraculous, there seems little reason to doubt that there is a history behind King Abraha's attack on Mecca in the year of the Prophet's birth - an attack by elephant would certainly leave a tradition as lively as Hannibal's expeditions in Europe! And the time-lapse between the birth of the Prophet and the recording in the relevant Sura of the Qur'an would hardly leave space for the formation of a "hoary old legend" with the main facts changed, as in the Germanic legends of the Voelkerwanderung. Perhaps for anyone familiar with the history of this part of the world, the surprising thing would not be the existence of traces of Christianity, but that they are so few.