History of Sanaa

The Arab historian al-Hamdani wrote that Sana'a was walled by the Sabeans under their ruler Sha'r Awtar, who also built the Ghumdan Palace in the city. Because of its location, Sana'a has served as an urban center for the surrounding tribes of the region and as a nucleus of regional trade in southern Arabia. It was positioned at the crossroad of two major ancient trade routes linking Marib in the east to the Red Sea in the west.

When King Yousef Athar (or Dhu Nuwas), the last of the Himyarite kings, was in power, Sana'a was also the capital of the Ethiopian viceroys.

Islamic era

From the dawn of Islam until the founding of independent sub-states in many parts of the Yemen Islamic Caliphate, Sana'a persisted as the governing seat. The Caliph's deputy ran the affairs of one of Yemen's three Makhalifs: Mikhlaf Sana'a, Mikhlaf al-Janad and Mikhlaf Hadhramawt. The city of Sana'a regularly regained an important status and all Yemenite States competed to control it.

Imam al-Shafi'i, the 8th-century Islamic jurist and founder of the Shafi'i school or jurisprudence, visited Sana'a several times. He praised the city, writing La budda min Ṣanʻāʼ, or "Sana'a must be seen." In the 9th–10th centuries, the Yemeni geographer al-Hamdani took note of the city's cleanliness, saying "The least dwelling there has a well or two, a garden and long cesspits separate from each other, empty of ordure, without smell or evil odors, because of the hard concrete (adobe and Cob probably) and fine pastureland and clean places to walk." Later in the 10th-century, the Persian geographer Ibn Rustah wrote of Sana'a "It is the city of Yemen—there not being found ... a city greater, more populous or more