JEWISH TOMBSTONES IN YEMEN are the subject of an article ("Jewish Tombstones in Aden (Part 1)") by Professor Aviva Klein-Franke in the Yemen Times. Excerpt:

Discoveries of Hebrew epitaphs by travelers

Jacob Saphir was the first to copy Hebrew inscriptions in Aden’s ancient cemeteries and to publish ten of them. Looking for physical evidence supporting the legends of the Jews’ arrival in southern Arabia in biblical times, Saphir felt that he had made an important discovery. In his opinion the ages of the inscriptions which he had copied corresponded to the time referred to in the legends. The earlier dates among the inscriptions copied by Saphir fell between the first and the sixty-first year of the Contracts Calendar. Saphir believed that these dates related to the third century BC. He also documented other epitaphs from the end of the first millennium CE and from the beginning of the second millennium CE. He noted that there were inscriptions written in different styles, despite the fact that those inscriptions gave closed dates and the epitaphs were found side by side in the same area. Saphir discovered a group of epitaphs from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, which belonged to one family clan of H alfon, Bundar and Madmu n. According to Ben-Zvi and Goitein, Madmun in Hebrew means S emarya.

Saphir’s discoveries indicated that the cemetery was used by the community for many generations throughout the centuries and that individuals could own part of the cemetery for use by their families.

As a member of an Austrian scientific delegation, Heinrich David Mu¨ ller travelled to southern Arabia at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1889 Mu¨ ller brought to Vienna approximately 100 squeezes of Hebrew inscriptions. Among these was a group of inscriptions from Aden’s Jewish cemeteries. Most of them date to the years between 20 and 54 in the Calendar of the Contracts. Izhak Ben-Zvi travelled to Aden in January, 1950. He visited the ancient cemeteries, the local state archaeological museum and a private museum, belonging to Mr. Kaiky Muncherjee, an Indian merchant residing in Aden. Ben-Zvi claimed that there were hundreds of sepulchral slabs in the ancient cemeteries. The deeper he entered into the ancient cemetery the earlier were the dates on the epitaphs. He mentioned that many people had epitaphs in their homes and added that it would be difficult to estimate how many slabs with Hebrew inscriptions there were in total. All the inscriptions he examined were dated in relation to the Seleucid Era. For the first time, photographs of four of them were published.

There has been some controversy about the dating of the tombstones.