In the first century BCE, a monumental inscription was erected in the kingdom of Sabaʾ at Itwat – today Jabal Riyām, approximately thirty miles north of Ṣanʿāʾ in Yemen – in the local prestige language, Sabaic; it outlined a number of ordinances prescribed by the god Taʾlab for his people Samʿay. The first of these stated “that Samʿay should not fail in [the month] Dhū Abhay to go on pilgrimage (hḥḍrn) to [the shrine of the god] Almaqah in Mārib.” More than a thousand miles north of Jabal Riyām, near Biʾr al-Ruṣayʿī in southern Syria, at some point between the first century BCE and the early fourth century CE, a (semi)nomadic inhabitant of the desert steppe on the fringes of the Roman Empire inscribed a graffito upon an available rock in the language of the nomads of that area, which today we call Safaitic. He dated his short text with reference to “the year the pilgrimage to Sīʿ was in vain/suspended” (s nt bṭl ḥg sʿʿ). At these two extremities of the Arabian Peninsula, practices of pilgrimage were current in the centuries preceding the start of the prophetic career of Muhammad in Mecca, loosely halfway between the sites of our two texts and the location of another shrine, the Kaʿba, already associated with practices of pilgrimage for those who lived in the surrounding areas.

This prevalence of pilgrimages, in some parts of the Arabian Peninsula at least, should not really come as any surprise. Pilgrimage was certainly popular in the late antique eastern Mediterranean. The most famous center of such practices in this period was, of course, Palestine and in particular Jerusalem. Ever since the reign of Herod the Great (r. 37–4 BCE), Jerusalem had been a center of interregional pilgrimage for Jews, albeit that various Roman emperors had at certain times attempted to restrict their right of access to the city. Jerusalem and the other biblical sites of Palestine were then taken up enthusiastically by Christians as places for pious visitation, in spite of the opposition to such practices from a theologian as prominent as Gregory of Nyssa, and the indifference of others, such as Augustine.