Thaʾrān Yuhanʿim
King of the Himyarite Kingdom
Reign324–375 CE
PredecessorDhamar Ali Yuhabirr
SuccessorMalkikarib Yuhamin
Diedc. 375
Yemen
FatherDhamar Ali Yuhabirr
Religion

Thaʾrān Yuhanʿim (c. 324–375) was a king (Tubba', Arabic: تُبَّع) of the Himyarite Kingdom (in modern-day Yemen), and was the second king of the new dynasty founded by his father Dhamar Ali Yuhabirr. He had an unusually long reign, on the order of fifty to fifty-five years and his son, Malkikarib Yuhamin, appears to have entered the throne at an advanced age.[1]

Iwona Gajda has proposed that the oldest known monotheistic Himyarite inscription (YM 1950), dating either to 363 or 373, comes from his reign.[2] More recently, Christian Julien Robin has identified an earlier monotheistic inscription from his reign that dates earlier than 355.[3]

Byzantine historians more prominently know of a conversion to Judaism during the reign of his son and successor, Malkikarib.[4]

He is known to the Islamic-era Yemeni traditionalist al-Hasan al-Hamdani as Yunʿim Tārān, and was conceived by this author to be the founder of a dynasty. He is also known to Ibn Habib as Bārān Yuhanʿim in his al-Muḥabbar.[1]

Inscriptions

Tharan Yuhanim is known from the following inscriptions (though he authors none of them)[1]:

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Robin, Christian Julien (2012). "Arabia and Ethiopia". In Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald (ed.). The Oxford handbook of late antiquity. Oxford handbooks. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 264–265. ISBN 978-0-19-533693-1.
  2. ^ Gajda, Iwona (2002-07-01). "Monothéisme en Arabie du Sud préislamique". Arabian Humanities. Revue internationale d’archéologie et de sciences sociales sur la péninsule Arabique/International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula (in French) (10). doi:10.4000/cy.132. ISSN 1248-0568.
  3. ^ Nebes, Norbert (2008). "Die Märtyrer von Nagrān und das Ende der Ḥimyar. Zur politischen Geschichte Südarabiens im frühen sechsten Jahrhundert". Aethiopica (in German). 11: 17, n. 45. doi:10.15460/aethiopica.11.1.141. ISSN 2194-4024.
  4. ^ Hughes, Aaron (2020). "South Arabian 'Judaism', Ḥimyarite Raḥmanism, and the Origins of Islam". In Segovia, Carlos Andrés (ed.). Remapping emergent Islam: texts, social settings, and ideological trajectories. Social worlds of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. pp. 26–29. ISBN 978-94-6298-806-4.
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