Alfred Freiherr von Kremer (1828 ‒89) was an Austrian orientalist and diplomat. He studied law at the University of Vienna and classical oriental languages at the Oriental Academy (now the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna). Upon the completion of his studies, he was sent by the Imperial Academy of Sciences (now the Austrian Academy of Sciences) to Syria and Egypt in 1849‒51 to collect Arabic manuscripts. It was during this journey that he discovered Kitāb al-maghāzī (The book of conquests [of Prophet Muhammad]) by Muhammad ibn ʻUmar al-Waqidi (747 or 748‒823), one of the earliest Muslim historians and a judge in the court of Abbasid caliphs Harun al-Rashid and al-Maʼmun. Kremer later pioneered the cultural history approach to oriental studies and published his seminal work Kulturgeschichte des Orients unter den Kalifen (Cultural history of the Orient under the caliphs). In the book presented here, Über die südarabische Sage (On the South Arabian folk tales), Kremer attempts to shed light on the history of pre-Islamic Yemen, especially that of the Himyarite Kingdom, which flourished 110 BC–525 AD and was initially pagan, then Jewish for more than a century, before being overthrown by Christian Ethiopia. He does this by piecing together the ethnographic history of ancient Yemen under the different ruling dynasties, using Western and Arabic sources, as well as ancient Yemeni folk tales, their background and their evolution. Chief among these tales is “al-Qaṣīdah al-Ḥimyarīyah” (the Himyarite ode), which lists the names of the different kings of ancient Yemen. Also known as the “poem of the crowns,” it was composed by Nashwan ibn Saʿid al-Himyari (died 1178), a scholar, linguist and Yemeni historian who took particular pride in his Yemeni heritage.