Monotheism, kingship, and religious transformation in late antique Yemen : the rise and fall of Joseph dhu Nuwas

In 517 CE, a man called Yūsuf ’As’ar Yath’ar, but whom we know under the name Joseph dhu Nuwas, rose to take power over the Jewish Ḥimyarite kingdom. This kingdom was situated in the highlands of modern-day Yemen and had existed since 110 BCE, and had professed to some form of Judaism since roughly 390 CE. After less than a decade of strife and war, this Jewish kingdom succumbed to the Ethiopian Christians of Axum led by the king Kaleb. Ḥimyar then continued as a vassal state first of Axum and then of the Sassanians until the coming of Islam a century later. A few contemporaneous epigraphs describe these events, and a number of later Syriac, Arabic, and Greek texts preserve the memory of the fall of the Ḥimyarite kingdom and the victory of Axum. This dissertation examines the context in which the events of Ḥimyar took place, and situates them within the broader context of Late Antiquity. Further, it discusses the changes that occur when monotheism takes the place of polytheism, in terms of religious expression. To accomplish this task, I primarily examine the contemporaneous epigraphic evidence from both Ḥimyar and Axum (in both Sabaic and Ge’ez). I argue that the texts perform differently and that they reflect contemporaneous kingdoms with remarkably different vocabulary when they express how they perceive themselves and others. Thus, the main questions that the dissertation seeks to answer is what the accounts concerning Joseph dhu Nuwas’s rise to power in circa 517 CE might tell us of the religious transformation taking place in ancient Ḥimyar, and how this might fit into the general cultural milieu of the time. In extension to this question, I discuss later Islamic and Christian traditions and how they portrayed dhu Nuwas and his conqueror, Kaleb of Axum. The result is a cultural history of Joseph dhu Nuwas’s Jewish rule in Ḥimyar and his demise at the hands of the Christian king of Axum with an extended discussion of how monotheism arose in ancient Yemen before IslamMiddle Eastern Studie