Has Yemen Ever Known the Theater? [Archives:1999/07/Culture]

Human civilizations have been scientifically and culturally interconnected in societies through the centuries. When a nation gains prosperity, other nations make that prosperity their own. This human instinct of solidarity and inter-dependence, if not well directed and controlled, turns out to be a kind of public charge. This means that some feel satisfied with taking from what others have achieved.
Right from the beginning of life on earth, civilizations existed. Every century presents a different kind of civilization which disappears as the century ends. They come and go leaving behind totally unproductive societies. The new generation have given up creativity, and are contented with their ancestors’ accomplishments. From this comes the necessity of searching history.
Yemen’s civilization did not vanish with the destruction of Mareb Dam. It was alive inside every Yemeni, though they happened to be ignorant people and wandering nomads. Even nomads had had their own civilization which showed their greatness throughout the Arab Peninsula. Theater had been a feature of the Yemeni culture.
Theater, as historians depict it, began as a means of carrying out religious rituals. It was also closed due to religious beliefs. Yemen knew all religions, from paganism and nature worship to Islam. One who reads Mahammed Tawfeek’s book Jaof Al-Lail (Midnight), about religions in Yemen, will realize that Yemen has had many cultural and literary advances. One of its main cultural institutions was theater.
Theater and civilization:
For centuries, theater has been associated with some level of civilization. History records that Yemen had witnessed one of the greatest of the ancient civilizations. Although those civilizations were wiped out, they left valuable traces which made their greatness stick in history. Literature, with all its genres, especially theater, had always been a representative of those civilizations. In Ashorian and Babeli civilizations, we find a simple foundation of literary development. There are some ruins of places for acting out performances which we may simply call theaters.
Yemen, A Source of Civilization:
The Yemeni civilization buried under the ground is a brings many questions. To the moment, it is not explored and there are still so many things to be discovered. The very few uncovered historical features attract the entire attention of scientists and researchers. Israel Welfenson says, “The southern part of the Arabian Peninsula is regarded as the original center of civilization. Geographically, Yemen is a country of hills, high mountains, and level lands. This diversity makes Yemen one of the more fertile countries of the world. Where fountains and wells streams, all kinds of crops and fruits grow. All the time, Yemen has been famous for that. This natural phenomenon helped to develop creativity and imagination in the minds of the Yemenis. It paid off with great developments in literature. These developments, in one way or another, are associated in other civilizations with solidarity and independence.” 
Unfortunately there are not specific historical details about Yemen in the ancient times, and those we received do not tell much about its development. However, all the historians agree that Yemen had witnessed one of the oldest civilizations in the world, in which architecture and agriculture greatly flourished. But, historians still want a clear view of cultural activities in Yemen during those decades. Welfnson says that a country like Yemen, which reached that high level of prosperity and cultural development, must have had a formidable history in literature. Literary development, especially in poetry and theater, was a definite result of the development Yemen achieved in all fields of life. Definitely, it was no less thriving than the political or the agricultural development. Much evidence assures us that theater has existed in Yemen in the past and epics especially were its main subjects in acting performances. 
This evidence is supported by the Egyptian Sheikh Ahmed Zaki and other contemporary historians and archeologists. In his introduction to Ahmed Shawqi’s Al-Sit Hoda or (Miss Hoda), Ahmed Zaki assures us of the existence of theater in Yemen, where people were highly cultured. “Thus, it was not unusual that our explorations in Al-Qahtanyeen land, home of Saba and Hemiar, led us to the remains of a theater near the Mareb Dam. Definitely, theater existed in Yemen, Arabia’s center of civilization and development. When the Al-Arem flood came, all was brought to ruin and people left to the north.” 
He says, “If those surface explorations asserted the existence of theater in Yemen in the past, then the coming serious explorations will discover origins of theater activities and other literary texts. Let’s take, for example, Sifr Ayoob or ( Ayoob’s Book). Some historians assure us that this text was originally written by a Yemeni author in the 20th century B.C. It was written in verse, they think, and then Jews translated it into Hebrew and made it one of their holy psalms. That made this text distinguished as an Arabic text. Even the names mentioned in Sifr Ayoob are common for people or nomads who lived in the Arab desert and this attests its Arabic or Yemeni origin. The historians attributed with this fact are, as recorded in (Arab History Before Islam), Dr. Gawad Ali and Ibn Azar, a Jewish scholar in the 18th century. Poems like Mont Gamri, they assert, are actually of an Arabic origin for Arabic is the only language that can competently present such works. The orientalist Mergelion supported this idea by linguistic comparisons. The American scholar Foster also shares the same opinion.
It is a fact that Yemen has distinguished works of poetry which date back to more than 20 centuries B C, before many Greek or Latin dramatic pieces appeared. This leads us to conclude that Yemen used to have a highly developed theater.
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