is well summarized by F. Hommel (1903) and david g. hogarth (1904), but for the first half of the twentieth century, A. Grohmann (1963) is the only comprehensive survey yet published. Quite obviously, there is a difference between exploration and archaeology. The heroic accounts of the often dangerous expeditions to Yemen led by Joseph Halévy in 1869, Eduard Glaser in 1884–1894, and Count Landberg in 1898; of the journeys to Madain Salih, al-’Ula, and Tayma in the Hejaz (northwestern Arabia) undertaken by Charles Doughty in 1876–1878, Julius Euting in 1884, Charles Huber in 1884, and the Dominican fathers A.J. Jaussen and R. Savignac from 1907 to 1910; and of the unparalleled survey of central Arabia conducted by G. and J. Ryckmans, Captain P. Lippens, and H. St. J.B. Philby in 1951 do not, properly speaking, belong to the history of Arabian archaeology. These investigations were primarily epigraphic ones, for the early “penetration of Arabia,” to use Hogarth’s phrase, was largely the work of scholars of Semitic languages seeking to throw new light on the Bible.

Nineteenth-century scholars, many of whom were products of the German comparative philological method, looked to the newly discovered inscriptions of southern and northwestern Arabia for answers to Old Testament riddles. As Hommel wrote in 1903: “The queen of Sheba proved Solomon with hard questions, all of which in his wisdom he answered her. Now we who study the Old Testament, reversing the process, go to the wonderland of that queen with a multitude of inquiries, to many of which it has already given us a satisfactory reply. For the fact that we now have such comparatively clear views on all these points is due chiefly to the results of epigraphical researches in Arabia during the nineteenth century” (751).

When Hommel and Hogarth praised the intrepidness of the likes of Halévy and Glaser, they did so with good reason. More than one would-be explorer of Yemen lost his life in the attempt, and political conditions throughout most of the Arabian peninsula during the nineteenth century, with the possible exceptions of Bahrain and Oman, were indeed anarchic by any standard. Ottoman influence was only slight in Yemen and al-Hasa, today’s eastern province of Saudi Arabia; inner Arabia was lawless and outside the sphere of the great powers; and diplomatic representation was nonexistent in all but a few ports of call in the Arabian Gulf. Thus, in contrast to Mesopotamia, iran, turkey, Syria, and Egypt, where more-stable political conditions permitted the undertaking of archaeological excavations by British, French, and eventually American and German missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Arabian peninsula was virtually untouched until after World War II. With this general background in mind, let us turn now to a closer examination of the individual subregions of the Arabian peninsula, since the history of archaeological research in each has followed a unique trajectory.

Yemen

Despite the fact that the first southern Arabian inscriptions were copied as early as 1810 by the German schoolteacher Ulrich Jasper Seetzen, Yemen’s archaeological heritage has only been slowly revealed since that time. Tribal conflict in Yemen has long been endemic, which had precluded field research on anything but a very restricted scale.

Excavations at al-Huqqa in 1928 by C. Rathjens and H. von Wissmann were the first ever conducted in Yemen, and helped by the British political presence in Aden, gertrude caton-thompson and R.A.B. Hamilton worked in the Hadhramaut in 1937–1938. World War II interrupted the fieldwork, and there was little activity until 1951–1952, when the American explorer and later oil baron, Wendell Phillips, launched his American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM) expeditions to Timna (capital of the kingdom of Qataban), Hajar Bin Humaid (a major stratified prehistoric site), Marib (capital of the kingdom of Sheba), and Khor Rori (a southern Arabian colony founded on the coast of Dhofar in what is now Oman. The work at Marib ended abruptly when relations broke down between the team’s epigrapher, Father A. Jamme, and the local governor and the Americans were forced to flee Yemen after a series of incidents involving harassment, intimidation at