Word: mahram
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...radar has already located the remains of other structures, part of a vast temple complex covering more than 6 hectares. In addition to a thicket of buildings on either side of the hall, the radar has spotted a water well and what appears to be a grand causeway linking Mahram Bilqis with the ancient citadel of Marib, which rises above the desert about five km to the north. A separate team from the German Archaeological Institute, meanwhile, has uncovered dozens of multistory mausoleums in a cemetery area southwest of the oval enclosure. "We have excavated less than...
...century A.D. Although the oldest ones were carved several centuries after the Queen's lifetime, they contain priceless information about her kingdom's political and social history, including a chronology of Sabaean kings (the first that researchers have found), as well as the names of other important visitors to Mahram Bilqis and their genealogies and tribal affiliations. Since some of the names are female, one of them could be that of the Queen of Sheba...
...fact, Westerners have been looking for the Queen at Mahram Bilqis since 1843, when Joseph Thomas Arnaud, a French apothecary, arrived in search of the spices she brought to Solomon. By then, the site had long since been abandoned. The temple itself had ceased to be used sometime in the 6th century A.D., and the expanding desert had covered much of the complex. Sheba searchers returned to the region sporadically, most recently in the 1950s, when American oilman and explorer Wendell Phillips led an expedition that was driven out by political upheavals in Yemen...
...Phillips died in 1975, but his sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, has continued his work; she now heads the American Foundation for the Study of Man, which was the original sponsor of the current expedition. When the team arrived at Mahram Bilqis in 1998, most of the ruins were buried by sand drifts as deep as 8 m. While none of the sanctuary's existing masonry dates to the Queen's time, much of its layout remains as she would have seen it. The main entrance is marked by the remains of a portico - eight limestone pillars, today half submerged...
...team - which includes scientists from Canada, the U.S., Yemen, Britain, the West Bank, Germany and Australia, as well as local Bedouin tribesmen - recently completed another field season. But they estimate that it will take another 10 to 15 years just to uncover all the buildings at Mahram Bilqis and the surrounding pathways - and even then most of the site will remain unexplored. Eventually, the Yemeni government plans to restore and reconstruct the sanctuary in hopes of transforming it into what Glanzman calls "an eighth wonder of the world" - a tourist attraction comparable to the Pyramids or the Acropolis. (Yemen...