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The celebrated Shahara Bridge in Yemen was built across a 300-metre deep gorge in 1620, ostensibly to repel Turkish invasions. Shaharah is a fortified village high in the Yemeni Sarawat Mountains about six hours drive north of Sana'a.<br/><br/> Fortified mountain villages are common in Yemen, but Shaharah is the most inaccessible. Incredibly inaccessible, Shaharah has been a thorn in the side of any invading army and a bolthole for retreating imams for centuries. It wasn’t until the civil war of the ’60s that the village was finally conquered through the use of air power. In addition to its defensive fame the village has a long tradition of learning (dating back to the time of the Zaydi dynasty in the 9th century). Its scholars were known throughout south Arabia.<br/><br/> The village lies at 2600m and overlooks mountainous bulging swells to the south and shimmering hot plains to the north. The climb up from these plains to the village takes you through some of the most impressive scenery in the country.
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama (Persian: شاهنامه Šāhnāmeh, 'The Book of Kings') is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Iran and related Perso-Iranian cultures. Consisting of some 60,000 verses, the Shahnameh tells the mythical and to some extent the historical past of Greater Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.<br/><br/> The work is of central importance in Persian culture, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces the historical links between the beginnings of the religion with the death of the last Zoroastrian ruler of Persia during the Muslim conquest.
Qataban was an ancient Yemeni kingdom. Its heartland was located in the Baihan Valley. Like some other Southern Arabian kingdoms it gained great wealth from the trade of frankincense and myrrh incense which were burned at altars. The capital of Qataban was named Timna and was located on the trade route which passed through the other kingdoms of Hadramaut, Sheba and Ma'in. The chief deity of the Qatabanians was Amm, or 'Uncle' and the people called themselves the 'children of Amm'.<br/><br/> Qataban was the most prominent Yemeni kingdom in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE.