Old South Arabian is a group of closely related Semitic languages of pre-Islamic Yemen, among them Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian and Hadramitic. Almost everything known of it comes from inscriptions, of which many thousands survive, cut in a distinctive monumental alphabet of angular letters designed to be carved rather than written, and A. F. L. Beeston's grammar of Sabaic is the standard description of the best attested member of the group. A cursive form written on wooden sticks was identified much later and has widened the picture considerably, because it records ordinary correspondence rather than public dedications.
The inscriptions are largely religious. Each kingdom had a principal deity: Almaqah for Saba, Wadd for Main, Amm for Qataban, Sayin for Hadramawt, alongside the star god Athtar, who is shared between them. The great temple of Almaqah at Marib was a pilgrimage centre with an oval precinct, and the state and the temple were not separable, since the king's standing and the god's cult supported one another.
Much of the corpus consists of dedications, and of confession texts in which a person records an offence, states the affliction that followed it, and dedicates an object in acknowledgement. That genre is unusually direct evidence for what ordinary people believed the gods punished, because it is their own account of the matter rather than a priestly prescription written for them.