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Phillips died in 1975, but his sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, has continued his work; she now heads the American Foundation for the Study of Man, which was the original sponsor of the current expedition. When the team arrived at Mahram Bilqis in 1998, most of the ruins were buried by sand drifts as deep as 26 ft. While none of the sanctuary's existing masonry dates to the Queen's time, much of its layout remains as she would have seen it. The main entrance is marked by the remains of a portico--eight limestone pillars, today half submerged in the sand--that stands in front of a peristyle hall whose high masonry walls are inset with false windows. This entrance hall in turn opens onto a vast ovoid, some 300 ft. across, that formed the sanctuary itself. The ovoid is enclosed by a thick, curving wall of limestone blocks covered with inscriptions, some of which are more than 40 ft. long. The AFSM team believes the remains of the wall, along with additional inscriptions, extend more than 30 ft. beneath the sand, and it is exploring the site using ground-penetrating radar and other high-tech tools.
The archaeologists' radar has already located the remains of other structures, part of a vast temple complex covering more than 15 acres. In addition to a thicket of buildings on either side of the hall, the radar has spotted a water well and what appears to be a grand causeway linking Mahram Bilqis with the ancient citadel of Marib, which rises above the desert about three miles to the north. A separate team from the German Archaeological Institute, meanwhile, has uncovered dozens of multistory mausoleums in a cemetery area southwest of the oval enclosure. "We have excavated less than 1% of the entire site," Glanzman marvels. "This is the largest and one of the most important pre-Islamic sanctuaries on the Arabian peninsula. It's really, really huge."
The excavations have also showed that the temple was a major pilgrimage center long before the Queen of Sheba was born. The evidence--inscriptions, wall paintings, fragments of bronze statues, pottery vessels, animal bones and 2,000-year-old pieces of frankincense that still retain their distinctive fragrance--indicates that the site was used continuously from at least 1200 B.C. until the 6th century A.D. The potsherds are particularly important, Glanzman says. "They may be the key to sequencing the archaeological history of the region. The technology is very sophisticated and shows a high level of civilization." References in the inscriptions reveal that the temple was dedicated to Almaqah, the southern Arabian god of the moon and of agricultural fertility.