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The episode of the destruction of the church of the Aksumites at Ẓafâr by the troops of the Himyarite king Joseph in 522 allows us to study the practices of historical recording in pre-Islamic Arabia and the circulation of historical information between the various historiographies at work in the Near East. Analyzing contemporary inscriptions, this study sheds some light on the mechanisms of the transmission of information to Christian narrative sources, and shows that even later hagiographic sources may have preserved more reliable material than other older texts.

The ancient inscriptions found in northeast and south Arabia over the past decades revealed new findings that have often gone unnoticed. The two main ones are the probable extension of the Characene kingdom into northeast Arabia towards the beginning of the Christian era and the identification of the Tanūkh kingdom with that of al-Ḥīra (3rd-6th centuries of the Christian era).

Jacques Ryckmans demonstrated in 1963 that horses had appeared in South Arabia in the 1st century AD. Of the numerous epigraphic texts and carved representations published since, briefly summarized by the authors, none of them contradict this hypothesis. However, two points can be clarified. Firstly, the fact that horses do not appear in epigraphic and visual sources until the late 1st century AD does not necessarily mean that it was introduced at that time. This introduction must have spanned a long period of time, with many failures and renewed attempts.The second important development has to do with the scarcity of horses, greater than previously expected, until Late Antiquity. This was already suggested by the corpus of South Arabian inscriptions; and it has since been proven by the petroglyphs discovered in the region of Ḥimā in southern Saudi Arabia. Most of the many engravings of horsemen to be found there can be attributed to the Islamic period. In fact, representations of horsemen confidently dated to the pre-Islamic period are exceptionally rare.