The Insight
The Quran describes the destruction of the people of Saba by 'sayl al-arim', the Flood of the Arim. The story of Saba was part of Arabian oral tradition, the dispersal of Yemeni tribes after a great flood was widely known. What was not known was a single word. Arim (أَرِم). Classical scholars debating this verse for over a millennium could not agree on its meaning. Ibn Kathir listed competing interpretations: a rat that gnawed through the dam, a strong structure, a proper noun. Al-Tabari catalogued the same uncertainty. The greatest Arab linguists of the medieval world, with full access to the Arabic lexical tradition, could not resolve it. In the 19th century, archaeologists excavating ancient Yemen began deciphering inscriptions in South Arabian script. They found 'arim' used repeatedly in Sabaean stone carvings as the precise technical term for a dam or reservoir. The ruins of the Ma'rib Dam, 620 metres long, whose collapse around 542 CE matches the Quranic account, bore this word in its own inscriptions. The Quran used the exact Sabaean engineering term for what destroyed Saba. A word preserved correctly in the text for thirteen centuries before anyone could decipher the inscriptions that confirmed its meaning.