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Ancient Arabian Religion and the Lives of Nomadic Cattle Pastoralists
Joy McCorriston, Associate Professor of Anthropology
For more than 100 years, both Western scholars and some of Islam's earliest chroniclers have argued that the religious practices of Islam came from the desert nomads that fringed the settled world of the ancient Near East. In the 8th C AD, Ibn Kalbi traced the idolatry expelled from Mecca to the corrupted practices desert dwellers inherited from the sons of Adam. Ibn Khaldun'13th century sweeping history of civilization invoked the society of Bedouins in the rise of the Prophet Muhammad, (leaving aside Muhammad's urbane roots in Mecca). Western scholars who assumed that Islam was heavily influenced by the (minority) Arabian Jews and Christians of the 6th century have been no less dismissive of the contributions of Arabia's own high civilizations. Because Arabia's indigenous kingdoms and great cities in Saba, Qataban, Hadramawt and Ma'in were perceived to have contributed nothing enduring to Arabian civilization, their genesis was long ignored and their influence on subsequent culture greatly underestimated.
Although archaeologist Dr. Joy McCorriston (Department of Anthropology) did not set out to investigate indigenous Arabian religious practices, her work in the highlands of Southern Arabia (Hadramawt) has nevertheless revealed ancient patterns of ritual practice among cattle pastoralists 6500 years ago and contributed to the longstanding debate about cultural origins of Islamic practices. In 2005, the archaeological team that she directs in Yemen uncovered a broken ring of cattle skulls deliberately pushed into soft lakeside mud during a winter ceremony that probably included sacrifice and feasting. The cattle skulls, some still fleshed when buried, faced inward toward a lone central skull. The 40 or so animals were all killed at prime age, and the meat would have fed a large gathering. While only about 60 people with their herds could be supported throughout the winter vegetation flush in the local grazing lands, the meat from cattle sacrifice would have fed between 3000-5000 of normally scattered pastoralists. A stone platform, perhaps as altar or butchery table, and numerous meat-roasting hearths are nearby.
McCorriston's research suggests that this is an early site of pilgrimage, to which a large gathering of tribes people came for sacrifice and feast. These elements of pilgrimage are consistent throughout Arabian archaeology and history. Ancient Arabian civilizations observed pilgrimage to federal gods, and the practice was the core constituting principle of Arabian state societies. Pilgrimage (and tithes) to the temples of the state gods—Sayin, ‘Anbay, Amm, Almaqah—knit together the largely mobil tribes people of the hinterlands with the agricultural and merchant city dwellers sponsoring the temples in cities. Pilgrimage to Mecca in the time of Muhammad accomplished a similar social integration, and modern pilgrimages to sacred ground continue to knit bedouin and urban folk in Southern Arabia today.
McCorriston is writing a book that documents the long habitus of pilgrimage in the social constitution of Arabian societies. She is less concerned with functionality of pilgrimage than with the means of cultural transmission, the endurance and transpositions of religious practice across great social and cultural changes, and the reasons that the ritual of pilgrimage was so important in ancient Arabia. Although the meaning of pilgrimage for the cattle pastoralists of 6500 years ago is forever lost, the tempo and spatial-social circle of their rituals have profound significance for the historical thread of Arabian religions thereafter.
