The fabled peninsular land of King Solomon and Queen Sheeba or the modern-day Yemen at the mouth of the choppy Red Sea has had a vivid history of engagement with India. Greek and Latin writers even wrongly addressed this region as ‘India’.
Geography afforded it an invaluable site for the trade of spices, textiles, and aromatics (e.g., frankincense, myrrh, etc.) and even rare cultivation (at one time, the only place in the world growing coffee) to ship goods between the proverbial ‘West’ and the ‘East’. Antiquity of the land ensured that it saw interchanging rule and dominance of Paganistic beliefs, Judaism, Christianity to Islam with uniquely tribal, sectarian, and ethnic sub-strains to survive and thrive, cheek-by-jowl with each other, but always uneasily.
Irreconcilable lawlessness amongst its constantly fighting tribes has been the norm for eons and the Ottoman Statesman and Military Commander, Hadim (eunuch) Suleiman Pasha, had lamented, “Yemen is a land with no lord, an empty province. It would be not only possible but easy to capture, and should it be captured, it would be master of the lands of India and send every year a great amount of gold and jewels to Constantinople.”
But even the Ottomans had to accede to the native and puritanical Wahabi movements and then to the British, who were keen to establish a coal depot in the region to service the busy sea lanes of steamers ferrying up and down to India. Again, Yemen’s location on the busiest sea lanes (accentuated further with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869) made it even more prized and sensitive.