Sirwah was a capital before Marib was. This ruined city on the edge of the Yemeni desert, east of Sanaa, was a major centre of the Sabaean kingdom in the first millennium BC, the culture that grew rich on the incense trade and later gave rise to the legend of the Queen of Sheba. The best known remains are the walls and the temple of Almaqah, the moon god of the Sabaeans, whose big oval wall of finely cut stone is inscribed with long lists of laws, treaties and victories. Together with the ancient dam at Marib, the group of sites is on the World Heritage list of Yemen.
The dam is the other great marvel. A huge earth and stone barrier built across a wadi, it stored seasonal floods and fed a network of irrigation canals that made the desert bloom, and its failure, around the sixth century AD, is remembered in the Quran and in Arab tradition as a great disaster. The sluices of the northern bank still stand, mighty blocks of stone worn smooth.
Yemen is in the middle of a long conflict, and the Marib region has been a front line, with fighting, mines and air strikes. Foreign governments advise against all travel, and there is no safe or sensible way to ride here, so this entry is for the memory and for the future. The roads are controlled by armed groups, fuel is scarce and checkpoints are many, and independent travel is not possible. Marib town, with seventeen thousand people in the recorded data, has grown enormously with displaced families, so the old numbers mean little.
If you want to understand the place while peace is out of reach, read about the Sabaeans, look at the photographs taken by archaeologists before the war and support the organisations working to protect Yemeni heritage. The landscape, with its dry red mountains, pale dunes and fortified tower houses, is among the most striking in Arabia, and there will be a day when travellers return. Until then, what remains is a map pin and the hope that the stones will survive.