The Yemen.

Description

One of the First Maps of Yemen Made by a Yemeni.

Seven institutional copies are recorded worldwide.

This striking map of North Yemen was compiled by H. Althamary (an anglicization of Husayn ʿAbd Allāh Dhamārī) one of a small number of indigenous Arab cartographers active during the first decades of Arab independence and among the rarest figures in the modern cartographic record.

The history of cartography in the Middle East during the colonial and immediately post-colonial era is overwhelmingly a history of maps made by outsiders: British military surveyors, French geographers, American intelligence agencies. A map of Yemen made by a Yemeni, produced in the years immediately following the country’s first border war with its southern neighbor, is consequently an object of unusual significance.

The Map in Detail

The map presents North Yemen — the Yemen Arab Republic — in warm ochres and yellows, muted orange, and a bright blue, the colors deployed as a relief scheme to convey the country’s dramatic variation in elevation. Yemen’s terrain is one of the most topographically complex in the Arabian Peninsula, rising from the Tihama coastal plain on the Red Sea through the rugged heights of the western escarpment to the high central plateau, then descending eastward toward the desert. Dhamārī’s color scheme communicates this geography directly, without requiring a reader literate in conventional cartographic conventions.

The map’s boundaries are as informative as its contents. The Red Sea coast forms the western edge; the Gulf of Aden defines the south; the region of Asir marks the northern limit where Yemen meets Saudi Arabia. To the east, the frontier dissolves deliberately into the Rubʻ al-Khali (the Empty Quarter), the vast uninhabited desert that constitutes one of the world’s great cartographic blanks. The southern border, where North Yemen faced the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, is left undefined. This is not an oversight. Strategically significant governorates including Taiz, al-Bayḍāʾ, and Maʾrib are clearly marked within the territory depicted.

Historical Context

The map’s silence at its southern edge encodes the central political reality of the Arab world in 1972. In October of that year, a brief but sharp border conflict erupted between the Yemen Arab Republic in the north — aligned with Saudi Arabia and the Western powers — and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south, aligned with the Soviet Union and following a Marxist-Leninist model of government unique in the Arab world. The war ended with the Cairo Agreement, which called for eventual unification of the two Yemens; unification would not actually occur until 1990, when the modern Republic of Yemen was formed. To draw the southern frontier of North Yemen in 1972 was to make a political statement; Dhamārī chose instead to leave it open, a blank as suggestive in its way as any line could have been.

Publication History and Census

First published in Egypt in 1972, in the immediate aftermath of the border conflict. A first English edition and an Arabic edition followed; the present example is from the second English edition of 1976. Husayn ʿAbd Allāh Dhamārī is also known for a companion map of Ṣanʿāʾ, equally rare. Institutional copies of this map (OCLC 5485806) are recorded at seven libraries worldwide, including the Library of Congress, Cornell University, the University of Exeter, Leiden University, and the National Library of Scotland.