Understand Where You're Travelling
Learn about a brief history to Yemen summarised below.
If you're looking to travel to Yemen, get a good understanding of the politics and history that make the nation today.
The land that is now Yemen sat at one of the most strategically valuable positions on the ancient trade map. The Sabean kingdom, at its commercial peak from roughly the 7th century BC, controlled the overland frankincense and spice routes that linked southern Arabia to Egypt, the Mediterranean and, later, Rome.
The ancient world called Yemen "Arabia Felix," the fortunate Arabia, a deliberate contrast to the barren deserts of the north. The Sabeans were so central to the global economy of their time that Roman writers complained their merchants were draining gold from the empire faster than any military defeat could manage.
The centrepiece of the Sabean civilisation was the Marib Dam. Constructed in its earliest form as far back as the 8th century BC and massively expanded over the following centuries, it was one of the greatest feats of civil engineering in the ancient world. At its peak, it irrigated an agricultural system large enough to sustain one of the most densely settled regions in Arabia. Its collapse around 570 AD, after centuries of increasingly costly maintenance, sent shockwaves across the peninsula: tribes dispersed northward into the Hejaz and eastward across Arabia, contributing to the demographic shifts that preceded the rise of Islam.
The dam's collapse is mentioned in the Quran.
The arrival of Islam in Yemen came faster and more peacefully than almost anywhere else. In 628 AD, the Prophet Mohammed sent messengers to Yemen's rulers. Within a short time, and largely without military coercion, Yemen converted.
The country takes genuine pride in this distinction. Within a century, Sana'a had become one of the great centres of early Islamic learning, its mosques, markets and tower houses drawing scholars and merchants from across the expanding Islamic world. The city built during this period is, in its essential character, the city that still stands.
The Zaydi Imamate, a system of Shia Islamic governance rooted in a branch of Islam specific to Yemen's north, took root in 897 AD and proved extraordinarily durable. For over a thousand years, it defined the political and religious character of the northern highlands, creating a distinct Yemeni identity that was always somewhat resistant to the various empires that came and went around it.
Understanding this history is essential to understanding the Houthis' movement today. The Houthis are Zaydis, and their political project is inseparable from a theological and cultural tradition that has shaped the north for eleven centuries.
External powers came and went, each drawn by the same logic - whoever controlled Yemen's coastlines and ports controlled some of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The Ottomans arrived in 1538, were never fully able to subdue the country, and eventually withdrew in 1636.
They returned in 1849 and stayed until the collapse of their empire in 1918, when the north became an independent Mutawakkilite Kingdom under the Zaydi Imam.
The south told a different story. Britain seized Aden in 1839, recognising its value as a coaling station on the route to India. The city grew into one of the busiest and most cosmopolitan ports in the world by the mid-20th century, a prosperous colonial hub that sat somewhat incongruously at the edge of some of Arabia's most remote landscapes.
The British Aden Protectorate gradually extended its influence across the surrounding southern tribal territories over the following decades.
Both pieces of Yemen fell away from their respective masters within a few years of each other. In the north, a 1962 military coup overthrew the Imamate and established the Yemen Arab Republic, though a civil war between royalists and republicans, with Saudi Arabia and Egypt backing opposite sides, dragged on for nearly a decade.
In the south, a Marxist-led independence movement drove the British out in 1967, establishing what became the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen: the only communist state in the Arab world. The two Yemens eyed each other across their shared border with the particular suspicion of ideological opposites forced into proximity.
Unification came on 22 May 1990. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the canny northern leader who had famously described governing Yemen as "dancing on the heads of snakes," became president of the unified country.
Four years later, southern leaders, feeling marginalised by the north, declared independence. A brief civil war followed - the North won decisively.
The fault lines never healed, and the Southern Transitional Council, which today controls much of southern Yemen and continues to push for independence, is in many ways the direct product of those unresolved grievances.
Saleh managed Yemen's overlapping crises with considerable political skill for the next two decades, while the country grew steadily poorer, and a religious revivalist movement in the northern province of Saada grew steadily stronger.
The Arab Spring protests of 2011 finally broke his grip on power. He eventually agreed to hand the presidency to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, in 2012.
Two years later, Houthi forces swept south from Saada, took Sana'a in September 2014 and dissolved the government. Hadi fled to Aden.
By March 2015, with Houthi forces advancing on Aden, a Saudi-led military coalition intervened to restore the internationally recognised government. The war that followed has become one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century.
Infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture and the basic economy of one of the Arab world's poorest countries have been devastated.
The political picture today is as fragmented as it has ever been. The Houthis hold the north, including Sana'a; the Presidential Leadership Council controls parts of the south; and the Southern Transitional Council holds much of Aden and the surrounding areas.
Against all of this, the ancient cities, the Hadhramaut desert and the extraordinary warmth of the Yemeni people continue to exist in the spaces in between.
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