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Arabia Felix: the history of Yemen told by its travelers

To the Greeks and Romans, the south-west of the Arabian Peninsula was Arabia Felix, "Happy Arabia", the land of frankincense and myrrh. The kingdoms of Saba, Qataban and later Himyar flourished there for more than a thousand years around the great dam of Marib, and the Bible has the queen who visited Solomon come from Sheba. In 26 BC Augustus sent Aelius Gallus to seize these riches: the Roman army wore itself out in the desert and turned back, as the geographer Strabo, a friend of the general, relates. A century later the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a merchant's handbook, described the port of Muza and the anchorage of Aden.

Yemen also described itself. In the tenth century the scholar al-Hamdani devoted to his homeland a geography of the peninsula and an encyclopedia of its antiquities. Ibn Battuta passed through Zabid, Taiz and Aden in 1331, and Zheng He's Chinese fleets called at Aden in the early fifteenth century. Around 1503 Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna, disguised as a Muslim, was arrested as a spy and imprisoned; he owed his freedom, he tells us, to the interest the sultan's wife took in him.

The Portuguese failed before Aden in 1513; the Ottomans took it in 1538 and were driven out in 1635 by the Zaydi imams. Yemen then became the land of coffee. All Europe drank mocha, named after the port the sacks sailed from, and the Dutch, English and French opened trading posts there. In 1708 ships from Saint-Malo went to load it directly; a second expedition was received by the imam in the mountains, and Jean de La Roque drew from it his Voyage to Arabia Felix of 1716.

In 1761 the king of Denmark sent six scholars to study the country. The philologist Frederik von Haven died at Mocha, the naturalist Peter Forsskål at Yarim; only Carsten Niebuhr returned, and his Description of Arabia, published in 1772, long remained the standard work. In the nineteenth century the British took Aden in 1839 and made it a coaling station on the route to India, the Ottomans returned to Sanaa in 1872, and Joseph Halévy, disguised as a rabbi from Jerusalem, copied hundreds of Sabaean inscriptions in 1870.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early writings on Yemen.

Our titles on this subject

Safarnama

Nasir Khusraw, 1045-1052

In 1045, a Persian official leaves everything behind to seek what elevates the mind. Over seven years, Nasir Khusraw crosses Fatimid Cairo, Jerusalem, and Mecca: the first great travel journal of the medieval Muslim world.

In the mid-eleventh century the Near East was divided between Seljuks and Fatimids, on the eve of the Crusades. Nasir Khusraw, a Persian official turned pilgrim, crossed it with no aim of conquest or trade, recording what he could measure: ramparts, markets, prices, mosques, taxes. His picture of Cairo and of Jerusalem before 1099 has few equals, and it offers a Muslim's view of the Muslim world, the reverse of the European accounts that followed.

The Star Raft

Fei Xin, 1409-1433

Half a century before Vasco da Gama, a soldier of Zheng He's fleet describes forty-four countries across Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and East Africa. A Chinese view of the fifteenth-century world.

In the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent the largest fleets of the age into the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin sailed with them as an ordinary soldier, neither envoy nor admiral, and he writes as a literate member of the crew. His forty-four entries, each closed by a poem, describe Malacca, Calicut and Hormuz as the Chinese empire saw them, before the Portuguese arrived to redraw the trade routes of the whole region.

The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema

Ludovico di Varthema, 1502-1508

Disguised as a pilgrim, an Italian infiltrates forbidden Mecca and returns alive.

Published in Rome in 1510, Ludovico di Varthema's *Itinerario* is one of the first European accounts based on direct observation of Arabia, India and Southeast Asia, just as the Portuguese were opening the Cape route. Enlisted among the Mamluks, Varthema was one of the first European non-Muslims to enter Mecca, and he went on to describe Calicut, Vijayanagar, Malacca and the Spice Islands. Translated across Europe, it shaped the image of the Indies.

Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies

Alexander Hamilton, 1688-1723

A Scottish merchant spends thirty-five years crossing the Indian Ocean, from the Cape to Basra and Bombay. Shipwrecks, trading posts, the court of the Great Mughal: up to the reckless war Aurangzeb wages against the English Com...

Around 1700 the western Indian Ocean was changing masters: the Omanis of Muscat drove the Portuguese from the Swahili coast, Safavid Persia collapsed before the Afghans, and the English Company risked its first war against Aurangzeb. Hamilton, an independent trader whom the companies regarded as an interloper, watched these upheavals from the coffee ports, the Persian Gulf and Gujarat. Free of any official tie, his testimony lights up the merchant side of a world being reshaped.

Volumes I II III

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Ibn Joubayr, Relation des voyages (1183-1185)

The Andalusian pilgrim from Valencia made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185 and wrote the notebook that would found the classical Arabic genre of the rihla. He passed through the same Egyptian ports, sailed down the Red Sea, and saw Mecca one hundred forty years after Nasir, under the Ayyubids of Saladin. More literary, more brilliant, and also more laudatory toward the restored Sunni power, he completes his predecessor on every point where Nasir remained silent. The two notebooks read almost like a two-voice score on the same Levant.
Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde (1298)

On his way back from China, the Venetian sails along the Coromandel coast, stops at the tomb of Saint Thomas, describes the pearl fisheries, the naked kings covered in jewels, the widow-burning pyres and the kingdom of Ceylon with its sacred peak. All the marvels that Hamilton finds diminished or disputed, Marco Polo sees in their full brilliance, four centuries earlier. To read one after the other is to follow the slow transformation of the same shore, from medieval splendors to the fortified trading posts of the age of the companies.
Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)

The great traveler from Tangier crisscrossed, over thirty years between 1325 and 1354, the entire Muslim world, from sub-Saharan Africa to China. When he passes through Jerusalem, Cairo, or Mecca, it is three centuries after Nasir, and the world has been transformed: the Crusades over, the Mongols established, the Mamluks in Cairo. The contrast with the Persian's notebook gives the measure of what has changed. Where Nasir describes in a few pages, Ibn Battuta expands into personal adventures, marriages, learned disputes, and princely banquets.
Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)

A Bolognese adventurer of the early sixteenth century, Varthema is one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca disguised as a pilgrim, then to sail down the Red Sea to Aden and reach India. He travels the Arabian coast that Hamilton will follow two centuries later, stops at the same coffee ports, and describes the same sheikhs greedy for tribute. His picaresque account illuminates, in advance, the Arab world that the captain will later observe with the colder eye of a merchant.
Tomé Pires, Suma Oriental (1512-1515)

An apothecary sent to the Indies by King Manuel, Tomé Pires wrote in Malacca and in India, between 1512 and 1515, a compendium of everything he learned about the trading East, from the Red Sea to China. He describes ports, goods, weights, rulers, above all Malacca, which the Portuguese had just conquered, a few years after Varthema's visit. Pires then left on an embassy to China, where he died without being able to return. His manuscript, long thought lost, was found in Paris only in 1944. The Suma Oriental lets us measure, on the same shores, what Portuguese conquest changed in the world Varthema had seen.
Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (1519-1522)

Two centuries before Hamilton, the gentleman of Vicenza embarks with Magellan and survives the expedition that first crosses the Pacific. He touches at the Philippines, where the captain will meet his death, reaches Borneo and its splendid court, loads cloves from the Moluccas and sails along Timor, these same islands the Scottish merchant will visit two hundred years later. His wonder-struck journal shows the spice archipelago at the very moment Europe discovers it, when Hamilton will see nothing of it but the trading posts the companies fight over. To read one after the other is to follow the passage from the dream of spices to their ordinary trade.
Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (1615)

The Jesuit Ricci, who entered China at the end of the sixteenth century, learns the language and the classics, wins the friendship of the scholars and makes his way to Peking. His account, set down by Trigault, reveals to Europe a refined civilization that the captain, a century later, will encounter only through the customs gate at Canton. Where Hamilton rages against the Hoppo and his extortions, Ricci describes the court from within, the examination of the mandarins and the wisdom of Confucius, and lends to the China of the merchants a learned depth that the trader's eye alone lacks.
Duarte Barbosa, Le Livre de Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516)

A Portuguese factor of the early sixteenth century, Barbosa describes the Indian Ocean at the moment his nation holds its keys, two centuries before Hamilton observes its decline. Cambay, Diu, Hormuz, Mombasa, Mozambique: every stronghold the Scottish captain finds fortified, besieged, or lost, Barbosa sees new, in the hands of the Crown of Portugal. Reading the two in succession is to measure the slow tide that draws Lusitanian power back from these shores.
François Pyrard de Laval, Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales (1601-1611)

Leaving Saint-Malo in 1601, Pyrard of Laval was shipwrecked in the Maldives on 2 July 1602 and remained a captive there for five years, learning the islanders' language and customs. Escaping in 1607, he passed through India and knew Goa, Portuguese India at its height, before returning to France in 1611 and publishing his account. A century after Varthema, he finds again the ports of India's western coast and the merchants of the Indian Ocean, but seen from inside the empire that the Bolognese saw being born at Cannanore. His pages on the Maldives remain among the most precise ever written by a European of his time. The book is The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies.
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Nicolas Sanson and the Cartographers of the Grand Siècle (1650-1700)

Before modern surveys, the Indian Ocean can be read on the maps of the king's geographers, where the coastlines Hamilton calls so poorly rendered gradually take shape. Following these maps, from the Ethiopic Sea to the mouths of the Indus, helps explain why the captain constantly complains of shoals and rocks missing from the charts: he sails through a world still only half guessed at, one that others, after him, would finish drawing.
Johan Nieuhof, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces-Unies vers l'empereur de la Chine (1665)

A member of the first great Dutch embassy to Peking, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Nieuhof travels up China from Canton to the capital and brings back hundreds of drawings that fix, for a long time to come, Europe's image of the country. He sees, fifty years before Hamilton, the same rivers, the same bridges and the same cities, but from the side of the pleading embassy rather than the deceived merchant. His book sheds light on the ceremony and the haughtiness of the imperial administration that the captain will suffer in his turn, without ever penetrating its ways.
Arnoldus Montanus, Ambassades mémorables vers les empereurs du Japon (1669)

A Dutch compiler of the seventeenth century, Montanus gathers the accounts of the Company's envoys to the Japan of the shoguns, that country closed upon itself which only the Dutch may still approach, through the narrow window of Nagasaki. His book, alive with processions and marvels, shows the closed empire that Hamilton only glimpses from afar, and tells in full the suppression of Christianity and the cunning of the merchants that the captain sums up in a few forceful pages. It is the great European picture of forbidden Japan, of which Hamilton gives only the sketch.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)

Two centuries later, the gem merchant Tavernier still traveled through Hormuz, Persia, India, and the Bay of Bengal. His Les Six Voyages describe the diamond mines, the courts, and the trade routes of the same regions as Fei Xin. Here one sees what became, under other empires, of the trading posts and markets that the treasure fleet had once visited.
Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense. He crosses China, goes up to Peking, contemplates the Great Wall, then embarks at Manila on the galleon that links the Philippines to America. Almost a contemporary of Hamilton, he sails exactly the seas of this third volume, but as a free-roaming man of curiosity rather than a merchant. His testimony confirms, corrects or colors many a scene of the captain's, from the court of Canton to the streets of Manila, and gives a learned traveling companion to the crossing of the Malay Archipelago and the China seas.
Carsten Niebuhr, Description de l'Arabie (1762-1763)

In 1761 the King of Denmark sent five scholars to explore Arabia Felix. After Cairo, Sinai and Jeddah, the expedition reached Yemen and was received at Sanaa by the imam, but fever decimated it: Niebuhr, the surveyor, was the only one to return. From Mocha to Sanaa he travelled the mountains and cities that Varthema had crossed as a prisoner of the Sultan of Aden, two and a half centuries earlier. His Description of Arabia, published in 1772 and translated into French the following year, brings maps, measurements and precise observations where the Bolognese told stories. It remains a reference for the history of Yemen.
Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787)

The French philosopher traveled through the Ottoman Orient between 1783 and 1785 and published his account in Paris in 1787. He describes Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and the Levantine coast with a rationalist and critical eye. The same geography as Nasir's, seven centuries later, under another empire and other dynasties. A foundational text of modern Orientalism, illuminating to read after the Persian because it shows, ten generations later, what the same land had become: an Ottoman Levant, impoverished, numbed, yet still largely recognizable as the one Nasir had crossed.
James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)

Half a century after Hamilton, the Scotsman James Bruce finally enters the Abyssinia his countryman had known only through the accounts of fleeing missionaries. He lives at the court of the ruler Europeans called Prester John, and sees with his own eyes the customs, the raw meat, and the salt currency that Hamilton had known only by hearsay. His account confirms, corrects, and extends the astonished pages the captain devotes to the Christian kingdom of the mountains.
Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1806-1807)

Setting out in 1806, the French writer crossed Greece, reached Constantinople, landed in the Holy Land, visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem, then returned by way of Egypt and the Maghreb. His account, published in Paris in 1811, follows almost step by step Nasir's Syro-Palestinian route, but the gaze has changed entirely: where the Persian measures cubits and counts gates, the Romantic seeks ruins, tombs, and emotion. Two opposite ways of keeping a notebook before the same stones.
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (1814-1815)

Under the name Sheikh Ibrahim, the Swiss Burckhardt spent several months in the Hejaz in 1814 and 1815, performed the pilgrimage and stayed in Mecca and Medina. His notes, published in London after his death, describe the Kaaba, the rites, the population and the trade of the holy cities with an exactness later travellers have scarcely surpassed. Three centuries after Varthema, also disguised to enter the sanctuary forbidden to non-Muslims, Burckhardt follows the same roads from Jeddah and the caravan. Reading the two accounts side by side lets us sort what the Bolognese saw from what he embellished. His book is Travels in Arabia.
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Edward Lane, Mœurs et coutumes des Égyptiens modernes (1836)

The English Arabist settled in Cairo in 1825, then again in 1833, in the time of Muhammad Ali, and published in 1836 the most meticulous description of the Cairo of his century. He too distinguishes, as Nasir had eight hundred years earlier, between Cairo and Old Cairo, the pomp of power and the abundance of the bazaars. It is the same labyrinth of alleys, the same call to prayer, the same spice merchants, but the dynasty has changed many times over and the caliphate no longer exists. Lane completes from within what Nasir had begun: an anthropology of the city as lived.
Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)

In 1853 the British officer Richard Burton passed himself off as an Afghan physician and joined the pilgrims on the road to Medina and then Mecca. His account, published soon after, became one of the great classics of Oriental travel: a meticulous description of the rites, the caravans, the Bedouins, the constant danger of being unmasked. Burton knew Varthema, whose account he quotes at length in an appendix, and knew himself the heir to a line of disguised travellers that begins with the Bolognese enlisted among the Mamluks. Three and a half centuries lie between them, but the same question remains: how to see, and tell, what one has no right to see. The book is Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah.
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Guy Le Strange, Palestine sous les musulmans (1890)

In 1890, the English orientalist gathered the descriptions that Arab and Persian geographers had left of Syria and Palestine from the seventh to the fifteenth century, giving considerable space to Nasir's account of Jerusalem and the Haram. Reading this collection after the Safarnama places the Persian's notebook within the chorus of all those who described the holy city before the Crusaders: Le Strange translates, compares, situates, and lets Nasir's voice be heard among his peers.

Arabia Felix: the history of Yemen told by its travelers