The ārNāArabian version of this story, according to Cazotte’s French rendering (and Habicht’s German translation agrees with it in this respect), gives a very different account of the circumstances of Abū Saber’s elevation to the supreme power. Abū Saber, it seems, had been cast by the wicked King into a deep, dry well in the palace-yard. Now it happened that this impious and cruel King “had a brother whom he had always concealed from every eye, in a secret part of the palace; but suspicion and uneasiness made him afraid lest he should one day be carried off and placed upon the throne. Some time before he had privately let him down into this well. This unhappy victim of politics soon sank under so many distresses: he died; but this event was not known, although the other parts of the secret had transpired. The grandees of the realm, and the whole nation, shocked at a capricious cruelty which exposed them all to the same danger, rose, with one accord, against the tyrant, and assassinated him. The adventure of Abū Saber had been long since forgotten. One of the officers of the palace reported that the King went every day to carry bread to a man who was in the well, and to converse with him.[52] This idea led their thoughts to the brother who had been so cruelly used by the tyrant. They ran to the well, went down into it, and found there Abū Saber, whom they took for the presumptive heir to the crown. Without giving him time to speak, or to make himself known, they conducted him to a bath; and he was soon clothed in the royal purple, and placed upon the throne.”
_Page 56._ “The King of Yemen.”—As the Kings of Egypt were named Pharaoh, those of the Sassanian dynasty of Persia, Khusrū, those of Abyssinia, Negashi, so were the Kings of Yemen distinguished by the title of Tobba, from being the paramount sovereign of a number of tribes or _followers_ (_tābi`īn_). Some of the ancient Kings, having considerably enlarged their dominions by conquest, became proverbial for great power.
Yemen (or _Arabia Felix_) in the time of Strabo was divided into five kingdoms (l. 16, p. 112), and has been successively subdued by the Abyssinians, the Persians, the Sultans of Egypt, and the Turks.—On the west Yemen has the Red Sea; on the south the Straits of Babu-’l-Mandab and the Indian Ocean; on the east Hadramaut, and the north Nejed and the Hijāz. The inhabitants plume themselves on their country being “the birth-place of the sciences and religion” (_Biladu-’l-`Ulm o Biladu-’d-Dīn_).—_Niebuhr_, par. ii, p. 247.