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The Marib Dam
To the north of Yemen are the ruins of the ancient city of Marib. Scholars who have studied these ruins believe that the city of Marib was the site of Queen Saba’s (Sheba’s) ancient capital. Across the narrow water is the Land of Ethiopia and it is said that the famous queen had acquired the land and ruled it from her capital. According to the Qur’an, Queen Saba visited the Kingdom of Sulaiman in the land of Palestine to pay her respects to him.
The Marib Dam was a huge dam which provided irrigation for large tracts of land in the capital city of Queen Saba. In the 20th century, adventurous Western travellers explored the heartlands of Yemen and laid bare to the world the existence of this marvellous dam. A party of American archeologists headed by Wendell Philips and Professor William F. Albright of John Hopkins University, Maryland, made excavations and described in their book, “Qataban and Sheba,” the impressive site of an ancient dam, a few miles outside the old city - of which sections were still standing. They saw whole sections of mountainside carved alongside the dam to form spillways to irrigate the adjacent fields. The dam had served as the central control for the mass of water pouring down from the mountains of Yemen, and formed the spot from which it was distributed to create miles of green fields.
They found stonewalls made up of huge boulders which were so perfectly dressed that they fitted into each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There was no trace of mortar of any kind to cement these blocks together, and yet there were portions of the walls left which were more than 50 feet high, standing in the deserts of Yemen as Queen Saba’s artisans built them approximately 3000 years ago.
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