Abraha’s expedition against Mecca: the Year of the Elephant

According to Ibn Ishaq and later historians, Abraha built a splendid church, al-Qalis, at Sanaa and wished to draw the Arabs’ pilgrimage away from the Kaaba; after a man of the Kinana tribe defiled the church, he set out against Mecca with a large army that included a war elephant named Mahmud. Tribes that tried to stop him on the way were defeated. Abd al-Muttalib, the grandfather of Muhammad, is said to have told the Meccans to take refuge in the hills, declaring that the Lord of the House would defend it. At the edge of the sanctuary the elephant would not move, and the army was struck down — by birds carrying stones, as Sura 105 (al-Fil) says; Ibn Ishaq also connects the disaster with an outbreak of smallpox.

The episode is known only from the Qur’an, Muslim tradition and a few verses held to be pre-Islamic; Abraha’s own inscriptions do not mention Mecca, and many historians doubt the story as it is told. Yet his inscriptions confirm that he campaigned deep into Arabia: one, dated 552, records a raid on the Maʿadd tribes of central Arabia, and another claims the submission of Yathrib (Medina) and of tribes on the Roman and Persian frontiers. The historian Iwona Gajda proposed to identify the expedition of the elephant with the campaign of 552, and Christian Julien Robin considers a failed attack on Mecca plausible; rock drawings of elephants have been found at Bir Hima, on the road north from Najran.

The date remains uncertain. Tradition places the Year of the Elephant about 570, the year of Muhammad’s birth, but Abraha’s last dated inscriptions belong to the late 550s and he was probably dead by 570; proposals range from 552 to 568–569. The memory of the Kaaba’s deliverance raised the prestige of the Quraysh as guardians of the sanctuary, and the Meccans used the Year of the Elephant as a starting point for dating events.