Yemenاليمن

South Arabian kingdoms — Saba (Sheba), Ma'in, Qataban, Hadramawt and later Himyar — grew rich from about 1000 BCE on frankincense and myrrh carried north by caravan, and on terraced farming watered by dams, the greatest at Marib. Roman writers called the region Arabia Felix. Himyar's kings adopted Judaism in the fourth century; Aksumite Ethiopians and then Sasanian Persians took control in the sixth. The final failure of the Marib dam around 570 is remembered in the Qur'an and in Arab tradition as a turning point.

Yemen accepted Islam in the prophet Muhammad's lifetime. In 897 a Zaydi imam established rule in Sa'ada, and Zaydi imams dominated the northern highlands, on and off, for over a thousand years, while Rasulids, Tahirids and Ottomans held the coasts at various times. Mocha on the Red Sea gave its name to coffee, which Yemen exported to the world in the 16th–18th centuries. Britain seized Aden in 1839 as a coaling station, and the Ottomans returned to the north until 1918.

The north's last imam was overthrown in 1962, beginning a civil war in which Egypt backed the republicans and Saudi Arabia the royalists; the Yemen Arab Republic emerged. In the south, an armed struggle drove out Britain in 1967, and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen became the Arab world's only Marxist state. The two united in 1990 under Ali Abdullah Saleh; a southern attempt to secede was crushed in 1994.

The 2011 uprising forced Saleh to hand over to his deputy Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The Houthi movement, a Zaydi revivalist group from Sa'ada that had fought six wars with Saleh's government, allied with Saleh and seized Sana'a in September 2014. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015. The war killed hundreds of thousands, directly and through hunger and disease. A UN truce in 2022 largely stopped the big offensives, but Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 brought US, UK and Israeli strikes, and rivalries among anti-Houthi factions flared again in late 2025 (check the current state).

Yemenis are overwhelmingly Arab, and tribal confederations — Hashid and Bakil in the north above all — shape politics, conflict resolution and loyalty. Families from Hadramawt have traded across the Indian Ocean for centuries, and their descendants form communities in Indonesia, Malaysia, East Africa and the Gulf. People of African descent known as the Muhamasheen face deep discrimination.

Zaydi Shia Islam, which recognises any learned descendant of the prophet who rises against injustice as a possible imam, is the historic faith of the northern highlands; it is closer to Sunni law than Iran's Twelver Shia. Most Yemenis in the south, the Tihama coast and the east follow the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam; Hadramawt's Tarim is a centre of Sufi learning. Yemen's ancient Jewish community emigrated almost entirely to Israel after 1949; the last families left during the current war.

Socotra, far out in the Arabian Sea, has its own language, Soqotri, related to the Mehri spoken on the mainland's eastern edge, and a culture shaped by isolation and the monsoon.

UNESCO lists the Old City of Sana'a, with its tower houses decorated in white gypsum; Shibam in Hadramawt, a walled town of mud-brick high-rises nicknamed the 'Manhattan of the desert'; the Historic Town of Zabid, a medieval centre of Islamic learning on the coastal plain; the Socotra Archipelago for its dragon's blood trees and plants found nowhere else; and the Landmarks of the Ancient Kingdom of Saba in Marib, added in 2023.

Sana'a, Shibam, Zabid and the Saba sites are on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Air strikes damaged houses in Sana'a's old city in 2015, floods and neglect have collapsed mud-brick buildings, and Marib has been a front line.

Mud-brick skills, terracing and the qamariya — coloured glass fanlights over windows — survive with masons and families who keep repairing their homes, often with international heritage funds.

Friday is the weekly day off. Afternoons in much of the country revolve around the qat chew, when men — and in separate rooms women — gather to chew the mildly stimulant leaves and talk; the plant uses much of the scarce irrigation water.

Food is built on bread and stews: saltah, a bubbling fenugreek-topped stew eaten at lunch, fahsa, mandi (rice and meat slow-cooked in a pit) and honey from Hadramawt's sidr trees, among the most prized in the world. Traditional men's dress includes the curved jambiya dagger worn at the belt.

War has made daily life a struggle over salaries paid late or not at all, two currencies, fuel queues, power cuts and aid distributions; checkpoints divide families across front lines, and Sana'a airport has had only limited service.