The battle Yawm Halima (Arabic: يوم حليمة‎, lit. ’Day of Halima’) is the name given to a battle fought between the rival Ghassanid and Lakhmid Arabs in the 6th century. Considered “one of the most famous battles of pre-Islamic Arabia”, it was named after Princess Halima, who led the battle in revenge for the sacrifice of her brother to the goddess of the Lakhmids. The Lakhmids were clients of the Sassanid Persians, and the perennial tribal warfare between them and the Ghassanids was combined with the larger rivalry between Byzantium and Persia, with the Arabs fighting as auxiliaries for the two great empires.

Yawm Halima is now commonly identified with a battle fought in June 554 near Chalcis (modern Qinnasrin), where the Ghassanids confronted one of Mundhir’s raids. The Lakhmids were defeated and their king Mundhir fell on the field.

-excerpted from the blog of https://https://womenshistorymonth.wordpress.com/resources/women-and-series/women-and-war/female-warriors/

In the 7th Century, the prophet Mohammed united the desert nomads into a nation driven by the effectiveness of Arab warfare and ordered by the tenets of Islam. Many women’s names appear in the military history of these times.

Nusaybah Bint ka’ab Al Maziniyyah or Umm Umara has been called “the first woman warrior of Islam.” Believing that a woman had the same duty as a man to defend the new religion, she fought side by side with her husband and sons. In the battle of Uhud, when the tide was turning against the Prophet, she waded into the thick of the fighting to protect him. With her sword in one hand and her bow in the other, she imposed herself between him and the arrows aimed at him. Mohammed later said, “Wherever I turned, to the left or the right, I saw her fighting for me.”

In the battle she wore a waist wrapper, brought for the purpose of bandaging wounds. When her son was wounded, she waded through the battle to bandage him, then urged him get back into the battle to take his revenge on the one who had injured him.

Umm Umarah’s fighting was not confined to the battle of Uhud. She was also present at the treaty of ‘Aqabah, Al-Hudaybiyah, Khaybar and Hunayn. Her heroic conduct at Hunayn was no less than her heroic conduct at Uhud. At the time of Abu Bakr’s Khilafah, she was present at Al-Yamamah where she fought brilliantly and received many wounds as well as losing her hand.

-excerpted from David E Jones “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X and the website of the Nuseibeh Family

In the 7th Century, the prophet Mohammed united the desert nomads into a nation driven by the effectiveness of Arab warfare and ordered by the tenets of Islam. Many women’s names appear in the military history of these times. Salaym Bint Malhand fought among Mohammed’s soldiers with an armory of swords and daggers strapped round her pregnant belly.

-excerpted from David E Jones “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X

A century after Bat Zabbai rebelled against the Romans, a Saracen queen of the deserts did her one better. Although her people kept no written records, her story survives in oral tradition and song. Mavia, (Arabic: ماوية‎, Māwiyya; also transliterated Mawia, Mawai, or Mawaiy, and sometimes referred to as Mania) was an Arab warrior queen, who ruled over a confederation of semi-nomadic Arabs, in either southern Syria, or southern Palestine and northern Sinai, in the latter half of the 4th Century CE. Circa 375 CE, her husband al-Hawari, who was the king of the Tanukh tribe with Mavia as his co-regent, died. By the time she tangled with the Romans, she had already had to rebuff other male rulers who hoped to conquer a woman ruler’s lands easily. She became a force to be reckoned with and her cavalry had terrifying power on the battlefield. It is said that Mavia rode a horse very well and was a remarkable fighter.

When the Emperor Valens demanded auxiliary troops from her for his military campaigns in the area, her tribe responded with a revolt against the Roman Empire. She led her troops, riding at the head of her army into Phoenicia, Egypt and Palestine. The general of the Roman legions in Phoenicia, after confronting Mavia in battle, applied for assistance to the supreme commander of the eastern Roman army. Mavia responded to this threat by smashing the Romans in battle repeatedly. Rufinus says she laid provinces waste and “wore down the Roman army in frequent battles, killed many, and put the rest to flight” until the Romans sued for a safe retreat from her domains.

The Romans finally made a truce with her on conditions that she laid. According to the legends, she had met a native Saracen and Orthodox Christian hermit named Moses. She demanded that Moses be appointed bishop over her home area. Church records claim she converted to Christianity at this point, which infers that her tribe had not been Christian until after her peace was made with the Romans. To solidify the peace, Mavia married her daughter to Victor, a prominent military official under Valens, which put her in the center of the Roman-Byzantine administration. She must have proved a good ally, as the Romans later called upon her for assistance when being attacked by the Goths, to which she responded by sending a fleet of cavalry.

-excerpted from Archeology.org, ancient-origins.net, and the blog of https://amonamon2.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/arabian-queens/

Born c. 235 CE, her native Palmyrene name was Bat-Zabbai (written “Btzby” in the Palmyrene alphabet, an Aramaic name meaning “daughter of Zabbai”). Palmyra (modern-day Syria), which the ancients also knew as Tadmor or the “city of the palms,” was a bustling city-state which at least theoretically had been incorporated into the Syrian province of the Roman Empire about 114 CE under the Roman emperor Hadrian. The Romans allowed the Palmyrenes considerable freedom within the imperial structure. They collected their own taxes, and by the turn of the 3rd Century they elected their own senators who governed Palmyra under the Roman banner. In turn, the city-state recruited highly skilled archers who helped defend the elastic Roman frontier against the Parthian Empire in the east. Palmyra had an extensive trade network, and was at the time a sophisticated international city of wealth.

Bat Zabbai came from a privileged background. She was Arab, but claimed through her father Amru to be related to the Macedonian Ptolemaic monarchs of Egypt which included the fabled Cleopatra. Zabbai was well educated, having been tutored by a famous Greek, Cassius Longinus, whom she later kept as part of her court as both a teacher and a conversationalist. Further, she patronized Neoplatonist philosophers and compiled an epitome of the works of Homer and other renowned historians. She herself wrote a history of Palmyra, being literate at a time when writing was unknown to most people. Reputedly, she knew the Greek, Syriac, and Egyptian languages equally well and understood some Latin.

In the late 250s, Bat Zabbai married Odainat (Odenathus), a Syrian noble who was named consul of Palmyra in 258 CE. They were well matched, both ambitious and both raised to the toughness of the desert bedouins. They hunted, rode and camped in the wilds together, Bat Zabbai riding astride her stallion rather than in a more comfortable chariot. Present in the thick of a fight, she delighted in wearing armor and accompanying her husband on forays against their enemies.

When the Roman Emperor Valerian was murdered by Sapor I of Persia, Odainat had the diplomatic excuse he needed to expand Palmyra by attacking the Persians. Bat Zabbai commanded the army that laid siege to Sapor, and the couple overcame the Persians. They then turned west and won several victories that added sizable domains to the Palmyran city-state.

In 266/7 CE, the king and his heir (from a previous marriage) died under suspicious circumstances, and Queen Bat Zabbai assumed control of the Palmyran Empire, acting as regent for her young son Wahballat (called Vaballathus in Latin, Athenodorus in Greek). She immediately launched military campaigns of further conquest. In 269 CE, Egypt fell to her, and then she annexed what remained of Syria. In a few years under her leadership, her rule extended from Egypt to the Bosporus, and from the Mediterranean to India. After her troops took Antioch and eastern Anatolia, she made military alliances with Persia, Arabia and Armenia. She was in effect ruler of the eastern Roman empire, and declared herself independent of Rome, new controller of the Roman trade routes through the Arabian peninsula and the Near East.

She struck coins in her likeness, a particular snub to Rome, and spent lavishly to raise her court to the opulence of her hero and claimed ancestor Cleopatra. She also made her court a center for intellectuals, philosophers, scholars and artists of all kinds. Her ambition was to control the entire Roman empire and she even had a chariot of gold made for her victorious entrance into Rome. But at the end of 270 CE, Aurelius was crowned Roman emperor, and he was determined to take back all that had been lost. In 272, Aurelian’s army crossed the Bosporus.

He retook Egypt and moved on Ankara. Queen Zabbai staged her first direct engagement with the Romans in the Taurusian wilds outside Ankara. In a rearguard action, she hoped to cover the retreat of the main body of her forces north to Emesa, and she faced Aurelian with a line of Palmyran archers, the most feared in the East, flanked with infantry and heavy cavalry. The Romans were pushed back by Zabbai, who was regularly seen riding among her troops and communicating her commands through her general Zabdas.

The Palmyran cavalry charged the Roman lines, which broke before them. Losing discipline in what they thought was a rout, the cavalry pursued only to be drawn into a trap in which their support from the archers and infantry in the rear was severed. Aurelian regrouped his soldiers and slaughtered the Palmyran forces.

Queen Zabbai fell back to Emesa and prepared to defend the town, urging her men to stand strong as she rode among them in her battle armor, but Aurelian’s legions once more outfoxed the Palmyran cavalry. The Queen wrote a letter to Aurelian after this battle in which she boasted, “I have suffered no great loss, for almost all who have fallen were Romans.” She referred to the fragments of the Roman legions, once garrisoned in Palmyra, who had earlier joined her army.

Within days of the battle at Emesa, Queen Zabbai led a retreat through several hundred miles of desert as her armies withdrew to the stronghold of Palmyra for their last effort against the Romans. Aurelian’s war on the Palmyran queen was proving costly in time and lives. As he maneuvered through the unfamiliar desert, she sent her mounted archers, Parthian fashion to pick away at the advancing legions. Thus impeded, he could not catch the Queen before she attained her stronghold and prepared for the siege she knew was coming. She stripped the mausoleums outside the city of marble and granite to augment the walls of Palmyra and sent her ambassadors to neighboring kingdoms to request assistance.

On Aurelian’s first charge against the walls of Palmyra, he was wounded by a Palmyran arrow. The wound, coupled with the news that the senators in Rome were questioning why the great Emperor Aurelian was having such difficult fighting a woman, stirred him to write a famous letter, a testimony in to the martial prowess of Bat Zabbai. He addressed the senate:

“The Roman people speak with contempt of the war I am waging against a woman. They are ignorant both of the character and the power of Zenobia. It is impossible to enumerate her warlike preparations of stones, of arrows, and every species of missile weapons. Every part of the walls is protected with two or three balistae, and artificial fires are thrown from their military engines. The fear of punishment has armed her with a desperate courage.”

Aurelian had understood the military competence of Bat Zabbbai and brought with him the best of his legions and commanders. Still, the price she was forcing him to pay was seriously impacting his campaign. Rather than face her for many more months, he offered her generous surrender terms. She wrote in reply:

“It is not by writing, but by arms, that the submission you require from me can be obtained. You have dared to propose my surrender to your prowess. You forget that Cleopatra preferred death to servitude. The Saracens, the Persians, and the Armenians are marching to my aid; and how are you to resist our united forces, you who have been more than once scared by the plundering Arabs of the desert? When you shall see me march at the head of my allies, you will not repeat an insolent proposition, as though you were already my conqueror and master.”

Finally Queen Zabbai, realizing that Palmyra would be lost, mounted her fastest camel and with a small retinue retreated 60 miles across the desert to the Euphrates, where she hoped to find a boat that could take her eastward into the lands of her allies. She was captured on the river bank and returned to Aurelian, who transported her to Rome to march in his triumphal procession.

The parade in 273 CE presented to the Roman people 20 elephants, four Bengal tigers, several hundred exotic animals, ambassadors in their native dress, thousands of war captives (including a group of Goth women identified as Amazons), 1,600 gladiators who would later take part in ceremonial games, and kings, queens, generals and warrior elites whom Aurelian had bested in his reconquest of the Eastern Empire. Each captive bore a plaque around their neck identifying them for the populace. Zenobia was spared such indignity, as it was assumed that everyone would know who she was. She was so heavily weighed down with her famous gold and jewels that she required a slave to help her walk. As a final mockery, the golden chariot in which she had planned to enter Rome victorious, followed behind her, riderless.

Queen Bat Zabbai, called by the Romans Septima Zenobia, lived the remainder of her life in grand style, albeit a captive of Rome. Her fame and wit gained her the sympathy of a number of Roman senators, including one who married her and gave her a villa near the present-day city of Tivoli. Her salons, with the literati of the day in attendance, became a principal feature of Roman cultural life.

excerpted from David E Jones, “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X

Samsi (also Shamsi) reigned for over 20 years in the 8th century BCE, the chosen successor of Queen Tabibe who abdicated in her favor. At the time of her succession, she continued Zabibe’s oath of allegiance to the Assyrians, but she later changed her mind. The Assyrians again sought to intimidate Samsi without engaging their armies, but she was unimpressed. The Queen made an alliance with Rakhianu of Damascus, and they fought the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser in 732 BCE.

According to the Assyrian records, Pileser attacked many Arab tribal areas and defeated Samsi in the neighborhood of Mount Sa-qu-ur-ri. The Assyrians took many prisoners of war, 30,000 camels, and more than 20,000 oxen as booty. An inscription records that 9,400 of her soldiers were killed, and in addition 5,000 bags of various types of spices, altars of gods, armaments including an ornamental staff of her goddess, and her estates were seized. As she fled to the desert, Pileser set fire to the remaining tents at the battle site. Later, she went to Assyria to pay tribute to the king and was permitted to reign, under official Assyrian supervision. Samsi is Arabic for “my sun.”

-excerpted from Retso, “The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads.” ISBN 978-1-136-87282-2, and the blog of https://amonamon2.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/arabian-queens/

One of a line of queens, Zabibe (also transliterated Zabibi, Zabiba, Zabibah) was a queen of Qedar (in the area of modern-day southern Iraq) who ruled between 738 and 733 BCE. Both she and her successor Samsi tangled with the Assyrian prince Tiglath Pileser IV, who sought to expand his domain in Arabia. He first sought to intimidate the Queens into submission, but each of them in their turn were unimpressed.

To appreciate the enormous skill and courage of the resistance offered by both Zabibe and Samsi, we must remember that the Assyrians possessed the greatest military machine to date. Their tens of thousands of troops were well-supplied with metal armor and fine quality bladed weapons. Some of the finest generals in the world commanded engineers, catapults, battering rams and a variety of missile weapons. When Queen Zabibe refused to accede to Pileser’s demands for tribute, the Assyrians brought the war machine to bear on her. According to Assyrian historians, she rode at the head of her army, which included large numbers of women.

Although she was not victorious against Pileser and was forced to accept vassalage and pay tribute, she had a long string of other military victories during her 5 year reign. The title accorded her is queen of both the Qidri (“Qedarites”) and the “Aribi” (“Arabs”). Israel Eph’al writes that until the time of Assurbanipal the title “queen of the Arabs” in Assyrian manuscripts was a general one accorded to nomad leaders in the Syrian desert. Zabībah is an ancient Arabic name, likely derived from zabīb, meaning “raisin.”

-excerpted from David E Jones “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X and the blog of https://amonamon2.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/arabian-queens/

The daughter of Queen Jezebel, Queen Athaliah controlled Jerusalem around 840 BCE. Many times Athaliah directed her soldiers in defense of the city until the day her only son fell in battle to the sword of a warrior of the house of David. The event turned the Queen from her efforts to enhance Jerusalem’s prestige to obsession with vengeance for her deceased son. Athaliah swore that she would destroy all the descendants of the house of David, and she nearly succeeded in her war. Before the daughter of Jezebel was finished, she had killed most members of the Jerusalem branch of the family she held accountable for her son’s death.

-excerpted from David E Jones “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X

The battle queen Hind al-Hunud met the prophet Mohammed in battle in the 7th Century. The Hind was a member of the Quarish tribe of the kingdom of Kindah, and is described by the chroniclers of the fight as “brandishing a broadsword with great gusto.” After victories, she stood atop heaped enemy corpses and rhapsodized about her martial prowess. When her husband surrendered Mecca to Mohammed against her wishes, she argued for his death as a just reward for his cowardice and treason. 

-excerpted from David E Jones “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X

Two related themes interweave the complex tapestry of Arabian history – warfare and the associated cult of the battle queen. As trade moved across set routes, both the defense and the raiding of the valuable goods being moved were a bedouin’s prime occupation, favored sport, lucrative business and unabashed passion. Arabian women in pre-Islamic times often possessed considerable power, and the presence of women in martial encounters was not uncommon. The traveler and historian Sir Richard Francis Burton noted as late as the 19th Century that among the Homerite tribes customary law stated that wives should avenge in battle the deaths of their husbands and mothers their sons. He singled out the Sulliote women who “rivaled the men in defending their homes against Osmanli invaders.”

The emotional center of traditional Arab tribal warfare, the cult of the battle queen was derived from the earliest roots of Arabic culture, evolved through time, and still existed in the 20th Century. It expressed in myth, ritual, song and action the bedouin concepts of the sacred and profane roles of women in warfare.

The battle queen typically emerged from the higher levels of nomad society, a custom that was possibly a vestige of the earlier historical reality of warrior queens in ancient Arab history. She formed the center of the cult, the members of which included ranking women of the tribe, who functioned to incite fiery patriotism, iron resolve, and battle fervor in male warriors. Prior to a raid or battle, the women of the battle queen’s court gathered before a shrine, which had been erected on ground considered sacred to the spirits of their tribe, and sang songs that celebrated valor and the warrior spirit. When the warriors were stirred to a frenzy, the battle queen mounted her camel and led them into battle.

Sometimes the battle queen functioned as a combination cheerleader, symbolic commander in chief, and war goddess. At other times, however, she served as a weapon-wielding combatant or a field general.  The center of the battle was always occupied by the battle queen in her litter with her accompanying retinue. She acted as a visual and spiritual rallying point for her soldiers.

In all historical periods, ancient and modern, allowing the battle queen to be taken by the enemy brought terrible shame to an Arab warrior. Her fighting spirit was sacred, as was the camel litter, the hoodah, that bore her into battle. The Rwala, a major tribe of the bedouin, treasured a battle queen ark called the Abu Duhur. They believed that their seers could predict the outcome of battles from the movement of the feathers decorating it.

The women warriors of Arab antiquity burst into history about the 2nd millenium BCE at the time the Arab desert cultures confronted the high cultures of the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean. The highly literate enemies of the Arabian battle queens often recorded the queens’ names, nations, and battles on monuments, tombs, statues and buildings.

–excerpted from David E Jones, “Women Warriors” ISBN# 1-57488-106-X