Sana'a & the Northern Highlands

The eastern edge of the highlands, where the wadis spill into the desert, was the cradle of the South Arabian kingdoms. Saba, with its capital at Marib, grew rich on the incense caravans and built the great dam across the Wadi Adhanah, whose sluices watered two large oases; its final breach, usually dated to the 6th century AD, is remembered in the Qur'an. Further north in Al Jawf, the Minaean kingdom of Ma'in left the walled city of Baraqish. The highland Himyarites later absorbed Saba, and Sana'a, with its fabled Ghumdan palace, rose as their mountain stronghold.

In 897 Yahya ibn al-Husayn, known as al-Hadi, arrived in Sa'dah and founded the Zaydi imamate that would shape the north for over a thousand years. The south-western hills followed different rulers: the Sulayhid dynasty governed from Jibla, where Queen Arwa held power for decades in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. The Ottomans held Sana'a twice, in the 16th and 17th centuries and again from 1872, until Imam Yahya secured independence after the First World War.

The 1962 revolution ended the imamate and began an eight-year civil war fought largely in these mountains between republicans backed by Egypt and royalists backed by Saudi Arabia. Sana'a became capital of the Yemen Arab Republic and, in 1990, of unified Yemen. The Houthi movement grew out of Sa'dah, fought an intermittent insurgency against the government from 2004 to 2010, and took Sana'a in 2014–15, making the region the centre of the present conflict.

The northern highlands are the home of Zaydi Islam, a branch of Shia Islam that in practice long sat close to its Sunni neighbours; the Shafi'i Sunni tradition is followed by about half of all Yemenis. Tribal identity is strong, above all in the confederations of Hashid and Bakil north of Sana'a, whose sheikhs have long mediated disputes, negotiated with the state and supplied fighters to whoever ruled. The jambiya dagger, with its horn hilt and wide belt, is worn by many men.

Sana'a has its own urban culture. The Song of Sana'a, a poetic song tradition accompanied by the lute and a copper tray, is recognised as UNESCO intangible heritage. The city's tower-houses end in a mafraj, a top-floor room with low cushions and wide windows used for afternoon qat sessions, and their windows are decorated with carved frames and stained glass.

Life turns on the family, the mosque and the afternoon chew. Both Eids are the year's great gatherings.

Sana'a is by far the largest city in Yemen, with a population usually estimated at between two and four million, swollen by people displaced from other parts of the country. Ibb, Dhamar, Amran, Sa'dah and Hajjah are the other main towns, and Marib grew from a small town into a crowded city after 2015 as displaced people settled around it in camps and new districts.

Most people still live in villages on terraced hillsides, growing sorghum, wheat, vegetables, fruit, coffee and above all qat, which covers much of the irrigated land and drains the aquifers; the water table in the Sana'a basin falls by several metres a year. Marib's oil and gas fields, refinery and gas-fired power plant make it strategically vital.

Days start early with bread and tea, and by early afternoon men gather in the mafraj or a roadside shelter to chew qat until evening. Public-sector salaries have often gone unpaid, prices for fuel and flour swing with the war, and families rely on aid, remittances from relatives abroad and small trade. Power cuts and water shortages are routine.

The highland table is built on bread and stew. Saltah, the lunchtime dish of Sana'a, is a meat broth thickened with vegetables and topped with hulba, a whipped froth of fenugreek, brought bubbling in a black stone pot called a madhra; fahsa is its lamb cousin. Both are scooped up with malooj, a leavened flatbread. Aseed, a stiff wheat dough in a pool of broth or honey and butter, is eaten at births and in Ramadan, and shafut — flatbread soaked in spiced yoghurt or buttermilk and herbs — is a cooling starter.

Sweets are rich with ghee and honey. Bint al-sahn, the "daughter of the plate", is a pile of thin buttered pastry layers baked and drenched in honey and sprinkled with black seed. Raisins, zabib, are sold loose in Sana'a's markets.

Coffee grows on the high terraces of Haraz and the western escarpment, and much of it is drunk not as a bean brew but as qishr, an infusion of the husks with ginger and sometimes cinnamon. Tea, often with milk, is drunk with and after meals, and alcohol is effectively absent.

Sana'a's old city is the region's great monument: several thousand tower-houses of brown brick and stone outlined in white gypsum, the Great Mosque, one of the oldest in the Islamic world, the Bab al-Yemen gate and the Suq al-Milh market, all on the UNESCO World Heritage list. About 15 kilometres from the city, in the orchards of Wadi Dhahr, Dar al-Hajar — the rock palace — rises from a stone pinnacle.

West and north-west of the capital lie the terraced mountains. Shibam and Kawkaban, in Al Mahwit, are twin settlements: a market town with an old mosque below and a fortified village on the cliff above. Thula in Amran is a stone-built walled town under a hilltop fort, and the Haraz Mountains around Manakhah and Al Hajjarah hold coffee terraces and fortified villages, with Jabal an-Nabi Shu'ayb, at about 3,700 metres the highest point in the Arabian Peninsula, in Sana'a Governorate. In the far north, Sa'dah's mud walls and the al-Hadi mosque mark the birthplace of the imamate.

On the desert side, Marib's ancient dam survives as massive stone sluices at either end of the gorge, near the Awwam temple, called Mahram Bilqis, and the columns of the Barran temple; a modern dam was built upstream in the 1980s. Baraqish, in Al Jawf, keeps much of its ancient wall. In the south of the region, Ibb's green terraces climb steep valleys in the summer rains, and nearby Jibla keeps the Queen Arwa mosque.