Breach of the Marib Dam and its repair by Abraha

The dam of Marib, an earthen dyke some 650 metres long between two massive stone sluices, held back the floods of the Wadi Dhana to water close to 10,000 hectares around the old Sabaean capital; most of its visible remains date from the 4th–6th centuries, when the kings of Himyar repaired it after repeated breaches. Abraha, the Christian of Aksumite origin who had seized the throne of Himyar in the 530s, had just crushed a revolt led by his governor over the Kinda, Yazid ibn Kabshat, when news came in July 547 that the main dyke had been breached.

Abraha assembled South Arabian and Ethiopian labourers, but an epidemic forced him to halt the work and send the men home; the historian George Hatke suggests that it may have been connected with the plague then spreading through the Mediterranean world. During these months Marib received embassies from the negus of Aksum, from Justinian and Khosrow I, and from the Arab client kings of both empires — the Lakhmid al-Mundhir III of al-Hira and the Ghassanids al-Harith ibn Jabala and his brother Abukarib; why they came is not known. Work resumed in January 548 and ended with a stone facing of the repaired parts. The long inscription CIH 541, dated to March 548, lists the provisions Abraha supplied — among them 76,806 measures of grain and dates and 10,200 head of livestock — and records that he celebrated Mass in the church of Marib.

Leaders of the Hamdan tribe repaired the dam again in 558, but at the end of the 6th century a last breach was left unrepaired, and the oasis and the city of Marib were gradually abandoned. The Qur’an (34:15–16) tells of the “flood of the Dam” (sayl al-ʿarim) sent upon Saba, and Arab tradition made the collapse the cause of the dispersal of the Yemeni tribes across Arabia. Dates differ in the literature: other reckonings put Abraha’s repair in 542–543 and the final breach in 570 or 575.