Sheba Revealed A Posting to Bayhan in the Yemen

Born in 1924 and educated at Haileybury and Magdalene College, Cambridge, Nigel Groom joined the Indian Army in 1943 and served in Burma. Recruited in 1946 into the Colonial Administrative Service, he was sent to Aden as a Political Officer in 1948, where his first posting was to Bayhan and is the subject of this book (he is pictured above during his time there). There followed service elsewhere in the Protectorate and then in the Aden Secretariat. He married his wife Lorna in Aden in 1952. In 1957 he was transferred to Kenya and was Defence Secretary in the East African High Commission until the East African territories became independent. From 1962 until his retirement in 1984 he worked in the Ministry of Defence in London. He was awarded the OBE in 1974. During his time in Bayhan - ancient Qataban - Nigel Groom discovered and brought to the notice of Western archaeologists many of its pre-Islamic sites and inscriptions, and encouraged Wendell Phillips to mount the well-publicised expedition of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, which studied and excavated them in 1950 and 1951. In 1981 he published Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade, which is now a standard work. He has also published books on perfume and many articles in academic journals on Arabian archaeologyGroom, Nigel is the author of 'Sheba Revealed A Posting to Bayhan in the Yemen', published 2002 under ISBN 9781900404310 and ISBN 1900404311.