Unearthing Arabia: The Archaeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips

Unearthing Arabia: The Archaeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips traces for the first time the extraordinary archaeological expeditions of Wendell Phillips and his intrepid team. Much of their work was conducted in 1950 and 1951 at Timna, the ancient capital of the kingdom of Qataban, and at nearby Hajar bin Humeid, which “in antiquity stood at the fork in the incense road,” as Phillips observed. The objects are organized according to the different sites that the team excavated: Timna and its South Gate, the House Yafash, the monumental temple, and the cemetery located just outside the city limits, as well as the site of Hajar bin Humeid. Unearthing Arabia concludes with a discussion of more recent excavations in Marib, conducted from 1998 to 2006 and supported by the American Foundation for the Study of Man and its current president, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson. Wendell Phillips’s own words and lively descriptions of events convey the excitement, drama, and challenges of this expedition more than sixty years ago.

Unless otherwise indicated, all of the objects shown here are from the archaeological expeditions led by Wendell Phillips in modern-day Yemen in 1950 and 1951. All of the expedition photographs are courtesy of the American Foundation for the Study of Man. All quotes are from Wendell Phillips, Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

Excavations: Awam Temple

When Wendell Phillips left for Marib in northern Yemen in the spring of 1951, he did so “with such feelings of elation and excitement as I have never had in my life, before or since.” The focus of this expedition was the Awam Temple (Mahram Bilqis), the largest of its kind on the Arabian Peninsula. According to legend, Marib was the capital of the Sabaean kingdom, ruled by the biblical Queen of Sheba. Sabaean inscriptions refer to it as the Temple of Almaqah, the moon god who was the principal deity at Marib.

At that time only the tops of the temple’s eight massive pillars and the upper sections of an oval wall remained visible. Workers painstakingly removed the windblown sand before the expedition team uncovered a large hall lined with monumental pillars, stairways, impressive bronze and alabaster sculptures, and numerous inscriptions.

Unfortunately, tribal tensions brought the Marib expedition to a sudden halt. In their haste to leave, Phillips and his colleagues had to abandon all their equipment and archaeological discoveries. The team’s written records were later incorporated into scholarly publications, including an archaeological report published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Phillips always hoped to return to Marib, but his untimely death in 1975 prevented that wish from becoming a reality.

Almost a half-century later, in 1998, the government of Yemen invited Merilyn Phillips Hodgson to continue her brother’s work in Marib. The next year, more than fifty workmen and an international team of archaeologists, epigraphists, architects, and geomorphologists once again began to work on this important site. For the first time, the interior of the oval precinct walls was excavated to a depth of sixteen feet, and new inscriptions were discovered. The team’s surveyor generated digital topographic plans and three-dimensional models of the site, which will greatly aid future expeditions. During nine seasons of excavations at Marib, the team unearthed one of the most significant architectural complexes and religious centers of ancient Arabia.

Excavations: Hajar bin Humeid

When Wendell Phillips and William Albright, his chief archaeologist, first studied the large oval-shaped mound in the Wadi Beihan, they focused on a naturally eroded vertical gash on the western side. That site in the wadi—an Arabic term for valley or riverbed—became the center of their excavations in 1950 and 1951. They hoped that within the scarp they would uncover pottery and layers of human occupation that would help them in reconstructing the consecutive town sites down to the original bedrock.

Such an undertaking, however, was not without its challenges. Once a layer of occupation was removed, the material remains could not be restored or replaced. Phillips explained: “All shovel work must be under the supervision of a man who knows where to dig, how deep, what to look for, and above all, when to stop.”

By the end of the second season of excavating the sixty-foot-tall multilevel site, archaeologist Gus Van Beek established a dating sequence based on eighteen strata. Through their work, the archaeologists determined Hajar bin Humeid had been located on the caravan routes to the Mediterranean. Relatively modest in scale, the city served the Qataban kingdom by collecting customs from all caravans traveling through the Wadi Beihan area.

Excavations: Timna

Timna (or Tamna‘) was the capital of Qataban, one of the five kingdoms that included Ma’in, Saba, Himyar, and Hadhramaut in southern Arabia. According to the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 CE, Timna was a bustling city with some sixty-five temples. For hundreds of years it maintained a monopoly on the cinnamon trade and levied taxes on caravans carrying incense. The city flourished as Qataban’s main commercial and religious center from the early seventh century BCE until the last quarter of the first century CE. Excavations conducted by AFSM suggest a major fire at Timna forced its inhabitants to abandon the city sometime in the first century CE. Commercial and religious activities apparently were transferred to nearby Hajar bin Humeid, where they continued for at least another century.

In 1950 and 1951, Wendell Phillips and his team succeeded in excavating several important sites at Timna. These include its South Gate, several private residences, a large structure that the team identified as a temple complex to Athtar (Venus), and the cemetery, locally known as Haid bin Aqil, just outside the city walls.

Language and Writing

The profusion of funerary, religious, and administrative inscriptions discovered in Timna and Wadi Beihan suggests the Qatabans were a highly literate culture. Scholars have classified the script as South Arabian. It contains twenty-nine letters and occurs in both a monumental and a cursive form. The absence of vowels has hampered modern understanding of the system of vocalization. Originally, the script could be written from right to left or from left to right, and at times the progression of letters switched direction in the middle of long passages. Later on, however, the preferred direction was from right to left. The script was current until the advent of Islam in the seventh century and was occasionally used to write Arabic, but it was soon abandoned in favor of the Arabic script. South Arabian still survives, however, in Ethiopian syllabary, a set of written characters that represents syllables.

Father Albert Jamme was a leading scholar in reading and recording the South Arabian script. Much of his work was done by painstakingly transcribing thousands of inscriptions. He and his workmen also made squeezes, a process whereby inscriptions carved into walls are covered with sheets of moist paper or latex to make a three-dimensional impression of the texts, as seen above.

Ancient Incense Trade

The term incense, including both frankincense and myrrh, broadly refers to a substance that emits a fragrant aroma when burned. The resins are collected from certain tree barks found only in the arid regions of southern Arabia and from a lesser variety in eastern Africa. As early as the eighth century BCE, incense was popular across the ancient world for sanctifying religious ceremonies to masking the stench of sewage. As Phillips pointed out, “Today we can scarcely appreciate the role of incense in the ancient world because, for one thing, it is difficult to imagine the odors of that world, requiring clouds of sweet-smelling smoke to cover them.”

Caravans transported incense and other luxury commodities from the southern regions of the Arabian Peninsula up the coast of the Red Sea and across the Sinai desert to Egypt. There, the precious goods were loaded on ships and sailed to destinations across the Mediterranean Sea. Arabia not only cultivated incense but also controlled its trade, making the region immensely prosperous. Timna and other cities along the principal trade roads provided necessary shelter to travelers and in return levied taxes on the incense caravans. Long-distance trade with the Greeks, Romans, and Persians also introduced new artistic and cultural traditions to ancient Arabia.

Explore this map to see the ancient incense routes. The lucrative trade in incense, in particular the highly prized commodities of frankincense and myrrh, encouraged the creation of this complex network of routes. The area in the rectangle is the focus of Unearthing Arabia.

Why Southern Arabia?

When Wendell Phillips first went on a reconnaissance trip to Yemen in 1949, few other archaeologists had ventured into the territory, where “time fell asleep.… and the husks of ancient civilizations were buried in the deep sand, preserved like flowers between the leaves of a book.” The Ottoman Turks had governed northern Yemen for centuries. Since 1832 British authorities had controlled the southern regions by establishing the so-called Aden Protectorate as a strategic point between England and its colonies in India. The Ottomans lost control of the north after World War I, and by 1950 the region was ruled by Imam Ahmed. Phillips was assured that working within the Aden Protectorate in the south safeguarded him from the political and tribal unrest in the north—an assessment that proved accurate. When Phillips and his team moved north to Marib to excavate the Awam Temple in 1951, the expedition was cut short by tribal unrest and unease at the presence of a foreign archaeological expedition. Fearing for their lives, the team hastily fled south across the protectorate’s border.

Wendell Phillips

Expedition leader
(1922–1975)

Wendell Phillips graduated from the University of California with a degree in paleontology in 1943. At the age of twenty-seven, he participated in his first expedition to Africa and Egypt. Two years later he led his own expedition to southern Arabia. He also founded the American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM) in 1949 with the mission to “conduct scientific research, study and investigate man and his habitats with emphasis on archaeological investigation, excavation, preservation, analysis and dissemination of scientific results.”

In 1950 and 1951, Phillips and his team excavated the site of Timna in the Wadi Beihan, where they unearthed one of the largest temples in the region, several important residences, and the Timna cemetery. The discovery of a wealth of inscriptions at Timna established a solid basis for South Arabian paleography, and the pottery finds from different occupational levels at Hajar bin Humeid allowed the creation of a chronology for the region.

In the spring of 1951 Phillips and his team moved to Marib in Yemen to fulfill his dream of excavating the Awam Temple, associated with the Queen of Sheba. Local tribal hostilities, however, prevented the team from completing the season. Under the guidance of Phillips’s sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, the American Foundation for the Study of Man resumed work at Marib from 1998 until 2006.

Expedition Team

William Foxwell Albright
Chief archaeologist
(1891–1971)

When approached to join Phillips’s expedition, William F. Albright was perhaps the country’s most distinguished scholar of the ancient Near East. A professor of Semitic languages, Albright had produced major studies on biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Ugaritic. In the 1930s he developed a system for dating ceramics by examining the sequence of excavated strata. According to Phillips, “Expeditions come and expeditions go, potsherds are found or they remain in the ground, but there is only one Professor Albright and there will never be another.”

Gus Van Beek
Archaeologist
(1922–2012)

A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Gus Van Beek excavated Hajar bin Humeid and established the first chronology for ancient South Arabian ceramics, a major contribution to the field. He studied ancient Near Eastern archaeology at Johns Hopkins University under Albright. In 1959 Van Beek joined the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History and was responsible for a major exhibition devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls. As a result of his work in southern Arabia and at subsequent sites, Van Beek also became a leading authority in ancient and contemporary mud architecture around the world.

Alexander M. Honeyman
Archaeologist and epigrapher
(1907–1988)

Professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at the University of St. Andrews, Alexander Honeyman supervised the first season excavation at Timna cemetery in 1950. He also was the bookkeeper and distributed weekly wages to the local workers. A meticulous excavator, Honeyman discovered the gold necklace belonging to Fari’at and the fine alabaster head that the workers referred to as Honeyman’s daughter and nicknamed “Miriam.” His discoveries at Timna allowed him to revise his understanding of Qataban tombs and burial practices. Phillips noted, “He began his investigations of certain selected tombs… determined to explore each one more thoroughly rather than do a more cursory job on the whole cemetery.”

Father Albert Jamme
Epigraphist
(1916–2004)

“With hardly a moment’s rest,” Phillips recalled, “Dr. Jamme was back at work on his beloved inscriptions.” An expert in ancient Semitic languages, Father Albert Jamme of the Society of Missionaries of Africa became a leading researcher in reading, interpreting, and classifying ancient South Arabian inscriptions. His first major field experience was as chief epigrapher at Timna, where he copied thousands of inscriptions. In 1952 he published some three hundred inscriptions from the Timna cemetery alone. Two years later, in 1954, he joined Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he taught for decades. His archives are kept there today.

Gladys Terry
Business manager and driver

Gladys Terry and her husband Bill, the expedition’s field director and photographer, first joined Phillips on his 1947–49 expedition to Africa. She showed her superior mechanical capability by driving a two-ton truck and trailer from Cairo to Capetown. Terry became the first American woman explorer to reach Beihan and Hadhramaut, where her “pace-setting was so expert that not a truck blew a tire or broke a spring on that rocky road,” a practically impossible feat. She also maintained the field accounts of three major expeditions.

Eileen Salama
Arab speaker and secretary

Only nineteen years old, Eileen Salama served as translator and expedition secretary. Born in Cairo, she grew up speaking English, French, Syrian, Italian, and of course Arabic. Phillips credited her “for the tremendous good will she created for our expeditions wherever she went” and for “her major role in obtaining hitherto unobtainable information first hand from leading sultans, princes, saiyids, sheikhs, and sheriffs of South Arabia….”

Family Guide

Download and print this family guide for exploring the exhibition with children. Best for ages 6 and up.