47 Fun Facts About Yemen

What is the constitutional capital and largest city of Yemen?

Sanaa was overrun by Houthi rebels in September 2014, so the internationally recognised government now sits in a southern port that it declared its temporary capital.

Which two countries share a land border with Yemen?

Saudi Arabia and Oman are the only two: the Saudi frontier is more than four times the length of the Omani one, and its line was not finally agreed until a treaty signed in 2000.

Which biblical queen do Yemenis and Arabic lore call Bilqis?

Queen of Sheba is the title the Bible and the Quran give her without a name, so later storytellers supplied one: Bilqis in Arabic lore and Makeda in Ethiopia's national saga, the Kebra Nagast.

The Sabaeans' Great Dam, an ancient engineering marvel, stood near which city, their capital?

Marib's dam watered the Sabaean capital for more than a thousand years; a flood from one of its breaches is recalled in the Quran, and tradition says the disaster scattered whole tribes across Arabia.

Which Judaism-influenced kingdom succeeded Saba around AD 275 and unified most of Yemen?

Himyarite rulers adopted Judaism in the late fourth century, and under one of the last of them, Dhu Nuwas, the Christian kingdom of Aksum invaded from Ethiopia in 525 and took control.

Through which Red Sea port did Yemen ship its coffee to Europe in the 17th century?

Mocha lent its name to the coffee it shipped, and Yemen stayed Europe's main supplier until the Dutch began growing their own on Java at the end of the 1600s.

The earliest reports of coffee drinking come from the mid-15th century among which group in Yemen?

Sufi mystics in Yemen's monasteries were drinking coffee by the mid-1400s to stay awake for night devotions, and the habit reached Mecca and Cairo within a century.

South Yemen, independent from 1967, held what distinction in the Middle East?

The region's only communist state tied itself to the Soviet bloc after a 1969 coup, and it merged with the north in 1990 just as that bloc was falling apart.

Which city was the capital of South Yemen before the 1990 union with the north?

Aden lost its capital status at unification, and when southern leaders tried to break away again in 1994 the short civil war ended once northern troops took the city that July.

Who was the first president of unified Yemen, in power until the Arab Spring forced him out in 2012?

Ali Abdullah Saleh had already led North Yemen since 1978 and stayed on top for 33 years in all, a balancing act he likened to 'dancing on the heads of snakes'.

How did Yemen's long-time strongman, ousted in 2012, die in December 2017?

Killed by his erstwhile Houthi allies: two days after he publicly broke with them and offered talks with their enemies, Houthi fighters killed him.

The Houthi movement, which seized the capital in 2014, follows which branch of Islam?

Zaydi Shia: the Houthis, formally Ansar Allah, emerged in the late twentieth century from a revivalist movement among Yemen's Zaydi community, whose imams had ruled parts of the country on and off for a millennium.

Which country launched 'Operation Decisive Storm' against the Houthis in March 2015?

Saudi Arabia began airstrikes on 26 March 2015 at the head of a mostly Arab coalition, after President Hadi fled abroad; the Houthis were accused of receiving Iranian support.

Which three colours, in horizontal bands, make up Yemen's national flag?

Red, white and black: adopted at unification, the plain tricolour uses the pan-Arab colours of Egypt, Syria and Iraq but carries no stars, eagle or inscription.

Which disease swept war-torn Yemen from 2016 in one of the largest outbreaks ever recorded?

Cholera spread as the war wrecked water and sanitation and left health workers unpaid, producing some 2.5 million suspected cases and about 4,000 deaths.

Which Yemeni island, closer to Africa than Arabia, has about a third of its plant species found nowhere else?

Socotra broke away from the mainland long ago, and that isolation is why 37% of its plants, 90% of its reptiles and 95% of its land snails live nowhere else.

The umbrella-shaped dragon's blood tree of Yemen's islands is named for what?

Its dark red resin, known as dragon's blood, was highly prized in the ancient world as a dye and a medicine, and islanders still use it to colour wool and glue pottery.

The walled town of Shibam in eastern Yemen is famous for what?

Tower blocks built of mudbrick, each many storeys high, were packed inside one wall for defence, earning Shibam the nickname 'Manhattan of the Desert'.

What did workers repairing the Great Mosque in Yemen's capital find hidden in its attic in 1972?

Early Quran manuscripts: not realising what they had, the workers stuffed the old parchments into potato sacks and left them on a minaret staircase; one is among the oldest Qurans known.

Zabid, a former capital and centre of Islamic learning, was placed on which UNESCO list in 2000?

World Heritage in Danger: UNESCO moved Zabid to the danger list in 2000, seven years after inscribing it, because so many of its historic houses had given way to concrete buildings.

Why can farmers terrace and crop Yemen's western highlands, unlike most of Arabia?

Summer monsoon rains reach the highlands because the mountains, which rise above 3,600 metres at Jabal an-Nabi Shu'ayb, Arabia's highest peak, catch moist air that never gets to the desert beyond.

What is the Tihamah?

The hot, flat Red Sea coastal plain: the Tihamah runs along Yemen's west coast from the northern frontier to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, with humid heat, lagoons and wadis that mostly dry out before reaching the sea.

Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait between Yemen and Djibouti, has an Arabic name meaning what?

Gate of Grief, also rendered 'Gate of Tears', is said to recall the dangers ships once faced there; an Arab legend instead blames an earthquake that drowned many as Arabia split from Africa.

Which stimulant leaf do Yemenis chew at long afternoon social gatherings?

Khat is so popular that the thirsty crop takes a large share of Yemen's scarce irrigation water, much of it pumped from deep wells.

In Yemen, what is a jambiya?

A curved dagger worn at the belt, the jambiya can carry a prized hilt of rhinoceros horn, and Yemeni demand for those hilts drove much of the rhino poaching of the 1970s and 1980s.

Saltah, Yemen's national dish, is a meat stew topped with a froth made from which spice?

Fenugreek seeds are ground, mixed with water and whisked until they swell into a light froth, which is spooned onto the stew while it is still bubbling.

What is Yemen's most popular sport?

Football kept its hold through the war: most of the national squad had to flee by boat to Djibouti in 2015, yet four years later Yemen played its first Asian Cup as a unified country.

What is the currency of Yemen?

Rial notes are no longer one currency in practice: the Houthis refuse banknotes printed by the rival government since 2017, so the rial trades at very different rates on each side of the front line.

What was Operation Magic Carpet?

The airlift of Yemenite Jews to Israel carried nearly 49,000 people in 1949 and 1950; its official name, On Wings of Eagles, came from a biblical image of being carried to safety.

Which vast sand desert covers Yemen's far north-east and much of southern Arabia beyond it?

The Empty Quarter translates its Arabic name, Rub' al Khali: the sand sea goes so long without rain that almost nobody lives in its 650,000 square kilometres.

What did the Romans call the fertile south-west of Arabia that is now Yemen?

Arabia Felix means 'Fortunate Arabia': the Romans named it for its fertility and rich trade, to set it apart from the forbidding interior they called Arabia Deserta.

Which Portuguese governor of India failed to storm Yemen's main port in 1513?

Afonso de Albuquerque wanted the port because it commanded the mouth of the Red Sea; when the assault failed he sailed on into that sea and explored its coasts.

Yemen's Queen Arwa sent missionaries who founded a lasting Indian community of which sect?

Ismaili preachers sent to western India under Arwa's patronage founded a community in Gujarat in the eleventh century that survives there today as the Bohras.

Turan Shah, who conquered Yemen in 1174, was the elder brother of which ruler?

Saladin had just made himself master of Cairo when his brother set out for Yemen in 1174; Turan Shah took Zabid and the main port within months and began Ayyubid rule there.

Which US Navy destroyer was bombed by al-Qaeda while refuelling in a Yemeni harbour in October 2000?

USS Cole was holed when a small boat packed with explosives came alongside and blew up, killing 17 sailors; she had to be carried home on a heavy-lift ship.

Which country sent tens of thousands of troops to back the republicans in North Yemen's 1960s civil war?

Egypt had as many as 70,000 soldiers in Yemen under Nasser, and the war bogged down so badly that Egyptian military historians call it their 'Vietnam'.

Who alone ran against Yemen's president in 1999?

A party colleague was his only rival: the main opposition candidate failed to win parliament's approval and his party boycotted the vote, so the president took 96% against a member of his own party.

In which Gulf capital did Yemen's outgoing president sign the 2011 deal handing power to his deputy?

Riyadh hosted the signing in November 2011 after he had backed out of the Gulf-brokered deal three times; in return for stepping down he was promised immunity from prosecution.

Which country across the Red Sea fought Yemen over the Hanish Islands in 1995?

Eritrea seized Greater Hanish in three days of fighting, but both sides then went to arbitration, and in 1998 the court awarded most of the islands to Yemen.

If 'Yemen' comes from the Arabic yamīn, 'right hand', what would the name mean?

The South: early Arabs took their bearings facing the sunrise, so the right hand pointed south; a rival theory derives Yemen from yumn, 'blessed'.

Which British-backed federation of sultanates collapsed when the National Liberation Front took power in 1967?

Federation of South Arabia was a federal state under British protection, but the National Liberation Front overran it in 1967 and proclaimed a people's republic of its own when the British withdrew that November.

Which Yemeni human rights activist won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2011?

Tawakkol Karman, a journalist who had led weekly protests since 2007, became the first Arab woman to win the prize; Yemenis called her the 'Mother of the Revolution'.

Which flamboyant British featherweight world champion of the 1990s is of Yemeni descent?

Naseem Hamed, billed as 'Prince' Naseem, made his entrances part of the show, somersaulting over the top rope and once arriving in the ring on a flying carpet.

Which pair of luxuries, carried north by camel caravan, made ancient Yemeni kingdoms such as Saba and Hadhramaut rich?

Frankincense and myrrh came from trees of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, so Saba, Qataban, Hadhramaut and Ma'in grew rich controlling the Incense Route to the Mediterranean.

Which empire's troops ended Aksumite rule in Yemen in the 570s and made it a province?

The Sassanid king Khosrow I sent a force under the general Wahriz at the request of a Yemeni prince, and it drove out the Aksumites and left Persian governors in charge.

Which militant leader's father left a village in Yemen's Hadhramaut and built a construction empire in Jeddah?

Osama bin Laden's father Mohammed arrived poor and uneducated, worked as a porter in Jeddah and ended up the builder of choice for the kingdom's royal family.

The Ottomans' 1911 treaty left Imam Yahya as autonomous ruler of which part of Yemen?

The northern highlands were home to his Zaydi followers, so the Treaty of Daan widened his autonomy there; when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918 he ruled an independent north.