Sheba

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WESTERN ARABIA AND THE SHEBA-MENELIK CYCLE
Secrets of the Bible People, suggesting that Abraham and Moses were
composite characters drawn from several other people, and interpreting
some of the Old Testament stories as allegories about folk deities. Salibi
suggested that the tale of Joseph was a myth symbolizing the death of a
sacrificed god, thus subverting one of history’s greatest stories. These small
points do not detract from the main thrust of his compelling argument that
the Promised Land was in western Arabia.
Salibi’s initial investigation was prompted by the extensive
archaeological remains in Asir, Jizan, and Hijaz. It is obvious that they
were part of the ancient past’s cyclical international trading network, which
linked southern Arabia and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean world,
prospering and declining in relation to the volume of traffic. The Saudi
Arabian government has never had an encouraging attitude towards
archaeology, the regime celebrating its seizure of power in 1927 by
destroying the mile-long tomb of Eve in Jeddah. So until archaeologists
have access to the ruins Salibi’s hypotheses will be untested.
Salibi introduced his work by stating that its inspiration had come
when he was shocked to find that the 1977 Saudi Gazette of Place Names
revealed astonishing numbers of place names too similar to those in the Old
Testament narrative to be dismissed as coincidental. This admission led
many of his critics to attack his conclusions on the grounds that they had
been reached in the same way as, for instance, Revivalist Christians
claiming the Israelite tribe of Dan migrated to Denmark (Danmark in
Danish); or the Motu people of Papua New Guinea wondering if they
colonized Zanzibar because the Swahili words for deceit and quickly,
respectively koi-koi and haraka-haraka, are identical to theirs. Later,
Salibi’s work was bracketed with Iman Jacob Wilkens’ 1990 book Where
Troy Once Stood, which argues that the events of the Trojan War described
in the Iliad had occurred in the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridgeshire, England.
Salibi’s conclusions were based on far from superficial evidence.
Unfortunately when he published his first book on the subject in 1985, few
mainstream archaeologists had concluded that the Old Testament was not
an accurate account when applied to Palestine. When Salibi eventually cited
Thompson and other archaeologists’ findings in 1998, his opponents had
developed a new strategy for dealing with him. Unable to refute his
hypothesis they simply ignored him. Axel Knauf, who studied the North
Arabian evidence, felt that Salibi’s hypothesis was not convincing yet it is
clear that Knauf, like many others, had not taken into account the Ethiopian
and Sabaean evidence. Knauf wrote that in his opinion the Queen of Sheba