Factors Behind Bedounization of Arabia

Last updated: May 23rd, 2025 at 12:17 pm · Est. Reading Time: 2 minutes

The question why Tribal Zone expanded from first century BCE onwards and took the place of all Arabian states except those at the northernmost and southernmost fringes, is still not settled.  Scholars implicate a few factors.

The Economic Decline

The inland incense trade was the lifeline of the economy in the first century BCE.  Diodorus Siculus describes the people of Yemen as richer than any other group he knows of.  “The farthest parts [of Arabia], Arabia Felix (Arabia the Happy), produce myrrh and frankincense, which is carried all the world over,’ Diodorus tells, explaining the reason for them being rich.¹  Soon after the comments of Diodorus Siculus, the inland trade of myrrh and frankincense suffered a great setback.  In 25 BCE, a Roman army attacked Arabia from the land of Egypt and reached Yemen.  Once they discovered (or rediscovered) the caravan route and the land of incense, they turned the trade to the sea.²  Both Strabo and Periplus Maris Erthyrae describe the growth of maritime traffic in the first century CE between Roman seaports of Egypt, Arabia, and India, just after the Roman invasion of Yemen.³  The monopoly of Arab middlemen weakened, and they had to adjust their profits.  The incense trade suffered a further serious blow when the price of incense crashed in international markets due to the political and economic crises that the Roman Empire experienced by the middle of the 3^rd century CE.⁴

The Environmental Changes

Lately, some historians are suggesting environmental changes, which led to an economic crisis, which later on resulted in Bedounization of Arabia.⁵

Further reading

Warner Caskel, “The Bedouinization of Arabia,” American Anthropologist 52, no. 2, part 2, memoir no. 76 (1954):  37 – 39.

34. Hirschfeld, ‘The Crisis of the Sixth Century: Climatic Change, Natural Disasters and the Plague’, Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 6 (2006): 19 – 34.

Valentina A. Grasso, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 204.

https://historyofislam.org/pre-islamic-arab-politics

Footnotes

1. Diodorus Siculus, The Historical Library of Diodorus The Cicilian, trans. G. Booth, (London: John Chruchil, 1700), P 79, book II, Chap. IV.
2. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo Vol. III, ed. and trans. H. C. Hamilton, (London, Henry G. Bohn, 1857), P 210 to 213; paragraphs 22 to 24; chapter; book XVI.
3. Casson L. The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
4. Gary Keith Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BC – AD 305, (London: Routledge, 2011), 128.
5. Andrey Korotayev, Vladimir Klimenko, and Dimitry Proussakov, “Origins of Islam: Politial-Anthroplogical and Environmental Context,” Acta Oreintalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 52 (1999): 263 – 269.