GEO-CHRONOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE KINGDOM OF SHEBA: An Interdisciplinary Review of the Solomon Narrative and the Northern Arabia Hypothesis

Traditional historiography places the diplomatic encounter between King Solomon (c. 970 BCE) and the Queen of Sheba within a Jerusalem–Yemen axis, identifying her kingdom with the Sabaean polity of Ma’rib. This identification generates a cluster of empirical paradoxes that have received insufficient critical scrutiny. The present paper applies a six-domain triangulation methodology — ornithological logistics, archaeological stratigraphy, zooarchaeology, script compatibility, solar-cult geography, and a grammatical analysis of the title Malkat Sheba — to evaluate the geographical claims embedded in the Biblical and Qur’anic accounts. The analysis reveals: (i) a chronological gap of ±200 years between Solomon’s reign and the monumental phase of Ma’rib; (ii) a logistical anomaly of ±2,200 km for avian communication inconsistent with the narrative’s temporal markers; (iii) a zooarchaeological constraint tied to the late introduction of domestic camels in the southern Levant (c. 930 BCE); (iv) a script- incompatibility between Musnad (Ancient South Arabian) and the Northwest Semitic diplomatic idiom of Iron Age IIA Canaan; (v) a probabilistic cult-geographic asymmetry, qualified explicitly, between the Qur’anic description of solar worship and the lunar-dominated dynastic cult of Iron Age Sabaean Yemen; and (vi) a grammatical argument establishing that the title Malkat Sheba (Heb. construct state) designates a ruler over the community of Sheba, not a ruler originating from a fixed territorial state named Sheba in Yemen. This final argument is the paper’s central new contribution. It resolves the principal terminological objection to prior formulations of the Northern Hypothesis — the apparent incompatibility between the ethnonym Saba’ and the Qedar/Aribi identity of North Arabian queens in Assyrian records — by demonstrating that Saba’ (Saba‘u) functioned in the early first millennium BCE as a trans-regional commercial ethnonym, distinct from the tribal-pastoral Aribi/Qedar designation, and that a Malkat Saba’ resident at Tayma — the primary northern Hijaz candidate, with Dedan as a secondary site requiring further stratigraphic confirmation — is grammatically, historically, and geographically coherent. The paper concludes by proposing a Two-Phase Model in which Sheba in Solomon’s era designated a polycentric trading federation whose northern node was located primarily at Tayma, and in which the later centralised Sabaean Kingdom of Yemen represents a distinct Phase II development retrospectively projected backward by medieval commentators.