From the Sands of Time

The Story behind the Opera Zarqa Al-Yamama

Introduction to the series

The premiere of the first opera of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was given on April 25th, 2024, in its capital Riyadh, at the King Fahd Cultural Centre. As engraver and score designer of the opera’s composer, Lee Bradshaw—read his interview here—, I had the honour to witness the last week of preparation and rehearsal, and the premiere itself.

This trio of articles will cover the following topics:

1. Historical recount(s) of the story behind the opera. We’ll cover facts, myths, and sources.
2. Synopsis of the opera. We will look at how the story became a libretto, and at how this was then adapted to make it representable on stage.
3. The Music. Finally, we will delve deep into the opera, going scene by scene, analysing the evolution of the musical themes as they unravel through the story.

Before we start, I would like to state that these articles will be presented in both English and Italian. The total lack of coverage of this opera by the Italian press is something I can only describe as shameful. Regardless of the reasons behind this, what happened in Riyadh is history, and it deserves to be told.

The Story in a Nutshell

The legend of Zarqa Al-Yamama is, perhaps, the most well-known and told story among the Arab people. She was a seer (clairvoyant, doomsayer) from the tribe of Jadīs—itself under the joke of the Ṭasm tribe’s king—, capable of seeing events coming from afar three days in advance and to commune with the spirits of the past and the future. She predicted the extermination of her tribe but was not believed, and suffered the same fate of her tribe at the hands of the Himyarite king Ḥassān.

Zarqa’s figure is present in so many texts that it is difficult to believe she was just a legend. In any case, the story of these tribes is set in the V century CE so, to contextualise, during the last years of the Western Roman Empire.

The full plot

Historical Context

Before the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661), the word “Arab” referred to any of the largely nomadic or settled Arabic tribes from the Arabian Peninsula, Syrian Desert, North and Lower Mesopotamia¹. This story, or legend, is therefore part of the pre-Islamic folklore of the Arab people. It must have happened before the founding of the Kingdom of Kinda, a confederation initiative encouraged by the strongest entity in the region, the Himyarite Kingdom (today’s Yemen). From our Western standpoint, we know how the Romans called those regions: today’s Yemen was “Arabia Felix” (happy Arabia), while the great desert expanses beyond that were “Arabia Magna” (big Arabia).

The Extinct Arabs

In the opera, we see several appearances of “The Extinct Arabs” being represented by the off-stage choir. One may consider it to be a simple staging device to drive the story forward, but it is not. A quick search shows how this label dates back to the XIV century, when the Arab genealogists gathered to make order into their ancestors.

Al-Arab al-Ba’ida (Arabic: العرب البائدة), “The Extinct Arabs”, are defined as an ancient group of tribes in pre-Islamic Arabia which included, among others, the Ṭasm and the Jadīs tribes. In the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, page 368, the Jadīs tribe is spelled out “DJadīs”², but there is only a reference to go check the “Ṭasm” entry. This provides us with an initial clue about the relationship these two tribes were into.

The IV Volume (“The Ancient Kingdoms”) of The History of al-Ṭabarī³, a massive work in 39 volumes completely translated into English with the help of UNESCO, has a dedicated chapter on the Jadīs and Ṭasm tribes. Within it, we learn of several interesting details. This period in Arab history is known as the “Period of the Regional Princes”. The extinction of the Jadīs tribe is said to have been brought about by king Ḥassān bin Tubba’, one of the rulers of the Himyar region, who were contemporaries of the Persian kings. Thanks to this detail, we can pinpoint these events to between 410 and 450 CE, when said king ruled the Himyarites.

The Location: al-Yamama

The region we now call al-Yamama[h] is found in the centre-eastern portion of today’s KSA, just West of Bahrain. At the time, it was called Jaw[w] and it was a most fertile and cultivated land, a land most prosperous, with a variety of fruit, wondrous orchards, and tall castles⁴.

The Ṭasm and Jadīs

The Ṭasm and Jadīs were two cousin tribes who inhabited this area already from around 110 BCE. At the time of the events of the opera, both tribes were ruled by the wicked and tyrannical king of Ṭasm, called ‘Amlūq⁵. It is said that he repeatedly mistreated and humiliated the Jadīs. Possibly, the weakest point of the story is that the casus belli originates from the assumption that this evil king enacted the ius primae noctis on every virgin of Jadīs on the night of her wedding. Thanks to modern historiography, we know that there has never been a written law which gave any ruler this kind of right, in any civilisation⁶. This does not imply that it couldn’t, or didn’t, happen, simply that it was not a law.

The Jadīs tribe endured these abuses until a poetess of the tribe, Al Shumoos, suffered this fate. Coming out from king ’Amlūq’s bedchamber in tatters and covered in blood, Al Shumoos went back to her tribe and gave a speech in front of them, asking how they could keep accepting this humiliation⁷. Her brother, the Jadīs nobleman Al Aswad bin Ghifār, answered her desperate plea and called upon his tribe to “rise to the occasion” (‘izz al-dahr) and reject the humiliation⁸.

They knew they couldn’t defeat Ṭasm on the battlefield, and thus devised a cunning plan. A feast would be organised, to which the king and all his people would be invited. These would then be stripped of their weapons at the tent’s door, while the Jadīs would have their swords hidden beneath the sand. The party would be set up so that each one of Jadīs would sit next to one of Ṭasm.

King ‘Amlūq and his retinue arrived, and they were massacred almost to a man. The few survivors managed to flee towards the South, to the court of the king of the Himyar, Ḥassān bin Tubba’. One of them was called Riyāh b. Murrah and will become important shortly.

The genocide of Jadīs

King Ḥassān had always wished to expand his kingdom towards the North to include the Jaww region (also known as al-Qaryah), and thus seized the opportunity, preparing his army for invasion. While they were marching, Riyāh approached the king to warn him that he had a sister, who married into the Jadīs tribe, some sources calling her Zarḳā’ (lit. “The blue-eyed woman”), others simply al-Yamāmah. Riyāh mentioned that “nobody upon earth has better vision than she”⁹, and that she would have noticed a rider approaching from the distance of a three-night ride. He suggested that every one of the Himyar men cut down a tree, hold it in front of him, and proceed in this way¹⁰.

Even with this stratagem, the blue-eyed seer managed to notice them and tried to warn the Jadīs, saying “The Himyar are on the march.” When her people asked her what it was that she was seeing, she replied, cryptic, that she saw trees marching upon them. In a Cassandra-like style, her people didn’t believe her and, in the morning, Ḥassān struck, wiping them all out and devastating their country. All adults were slaughtered, while the children were taken captive and sold as slaves.

Of the Jadīs tribe, the newly elected king Al Aswad managed to escape to the mountains near today’s Yemen and survived for a while before being killed by a bandit who recognised him. Even if Riyāh had begged Ḥassān to spare his sister’s life, she had her eyes gouged out and was later crucified. In her eyes, they found black veins, and the king asked Zarḳā’ what that black stuff was, to which she replied:

It is a tiny black stone called antimony [ithmīd] which I used to color the eyelids.

The substance used by Zarḳā’ is today called al Athmad, a type of kohl that is known to improve vision. It is said she was the first person to use antimony to colour the eyelids. Arabs still buy it from local markets for the same reason, and they still also say “as sharp as Zarḳā’’s sight”.

Following this event, king Ḥassān ruled that Jaw should henceforth be called “al-Yamāmah”. He then continued on further conquests, attacking a tribe of Amalekites who suffered the same fate as that of the Jadīs.

Bottom Line

That’s it for the first part of this trilogy of articles on the opera Zarqa Al-Yamama. Next time, we will delve deep into the work done to shape this story into a suitable operatic libretto, and what the final result was.

Stay tuned!

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Until next time, thank you.

Michele

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Arabs. Accessed May 7th, 2024. ↩
2. This makes sense if you know any Slavic language, where the pronunciation of the letter Ђ in, for example, Ђоковић (Djokovic) is equivalent to the English “J” in “Jonathan”. ↩
3. Learn more here this work here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Prophets_and_Kings, and about its author here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Tabari ↩
4. The History of al-Tabari, Vol. IV, p 151, State University of New York Press ↩
5. Some sources call him Imleeq or Imlooq. Both are derivative of Al Amaleeq, an Arab tribe that lived in the East, said to be descendant of Prophet Noah. ↩
6. The concept of “ius primae noctis” itself is first documented in the XIV century, and it was always either an assumption, or a tool of propaganda against a certain political adversary. ↩
7. https://www.omanobserver.om/article/11056/Opinion/the-story-of-blue-eyed-woman-of-yamama ↩
8. The History of al-Tabari, Vol. IV, p 152. ↩
9. ibidem. ↩
10. Another source states that Riyāh told Ḥassān to take the leaves of palm trees and hide his army behind them at night. ↩