KitÃÂb al-Iklël (Arabic: ÃÂêçè çÃÂÃÂ¥ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ) fully known as the KitÃÂb al-Iklël min akhbÃÂr al-Yaman wa-ansÃÂb Ḥimyar, known in English as the Antiquities of South Arabia (or more fully: Crowns from the Accounts of the Yemen and the genealogies of Ḥimyar), is a book on the pre-Islamic Arabian history of Yemen and the Himyarite Kingdom by the 10th-century grammarian, chemist and historian Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani.
The Antiquities of South Arabia celebrates South Arabian and Yemeni identity, in a time after the Abbasid Caliphate had withdrawn from the region and political turmoil was rife.
The work was originally written in ten volumes, only four of which exist to this day (vols. 1, 2, 8, 10), although a portion of the sixth volume was discovered and published in 2020.
The contents of the lost volumes were noted in other surviving works. The topics covered by the ten volumes are as follows:
Of the ten volumes of KitÃÂb al-Iklël published in the 10th century, only the first, second, eighth and tenth volumes survived intact to the present day.
In 1881, parts of the work were translated into German by David Heinrich Müller.
The historian Nabih Amin Faris compiled the four surviving volumes into an annotated work, al-Juz' al-Thamin, published in 1940 by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Oriental Texts collection.
An abridged version of the texts has been made available under a Creative Commons license for reading in some online libraries.
No complete English translation has been made of the Antiquities, and the following only translate parts of it.