The Book of the Himyarites
A Syriac account of the persecution of Christians in south Arabia under the Jewish king Masruq and of the Aksumite invasion that followed. It survives only in fragments recovered from a book binding, with its table of forty-nine chapters.
Read the text at archive.org ↗The editor’s introduction on the dates given in the work (p. lviii) ↗
The work was unknown until Axel Moberg found its leaves in the boards of a later Syriac manuscript. The copy to which they had belonged was finished, according to its scribe’s note, on 10 April of the year 1243 of the Greeks, which is AD 932. Only part of the text survives, together with the index of chapters, which shows what the lost parts contained: the first coming of the Abyssinians, the burning of the church at Zafar, the siege of Najran, the deaths of the clergy, the leading men and the women, and the expedition of King Kaleb.
Moberg judged that it was composed shortly after the Aksumite expedition, about 525, from the accounts of people who had come from Yemen and said that they had seen the events, and that the later Greek Martyrdom of Arethas drew mainly on it. Those are his conclusions. The author writes as a Christian honouring martyrs and calls the king “the crucifier” throughout. He names many of the dead, and he gives days of the week and of the month. Moberg noticed that the two do not agree for the year 523: he gives Sunday, 25 November, for the death of Harith, and in 523 that date was a Saturday.
Cited in
- AD 523 (or 518), estimated date