Re: South Arabian world system/civilizat

Fri, 07 Jun 96 13:47:00 PDT
Wilkinson, David POLI SCI (wilkinso@polisci.sscnet.ucla.edu)

Thank you for the reply to my query about the politico-diplomatic-military
linkages of South Arabia; as I regard such linkage, of a sustained and
continuing character, as the essential criterion for an area's
inclusion/exclusion in a civilization/world system, the status of
South Arabia on that score would appear to be intriguingly ambiguous until at
least 26 BC. "[C]ontinuous embassies...made themselves the friends of..."
would for me be language decisively descriptive of South Arabian
membership in the Central system, probably from the first such embassy.

The duration and content of the embassies to Assyria, and the reasons to
believe or disbelieve in the continuation of such contact with the empires
that succeeded Assyria, would be important, from my perspective, in
determining when South Arabia first entered the Central system. (I would use
trade ties as evidence of entry into the trade network which I call the Old
Oikumene, which entirely includes but is larger than the Central
Civilization/world system.)

For me, another important form of social-taxonomical data is city sizes
and numbers. Can you say what range of estimates you would consider
currently persuasive for the number and size (population or area) of any
urban centers of South Arabia for any dates or range of dates down to say the
embassies to the Roman emperors?

David Wilkinson