Masrūq ibn Abrahah was the last of those kings. It was from his hand that Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan the Ḥimyarite seized the throne, leading the force he had brought from the court of Kisrā Anūshirwān, as will be detailed later.

The affair of the Elephant took place in Muḥarram of the year 886 of the era of Dhū al-Qarnayn—that is, the second Alexander, Alexander son of Philip of Macedon, whose dating the Byzantines employ. When Abrahah and his two sons died and Abyssinian rule in Yemen came to an end, the Qullays that Abrahah had built—hoping in his ignorance and lack of sense to divert the Arabs’ pilgrimage to it—was abandoned. It became a desolate ruin, empty of all life.

He had erected it above two idols, Kuʿayb and his wife, both of wood, each rising sixty cubits into the sky. Jinn attended them, so that anyone who tried to remove a single piece of the Qullays or its furnishings was harmed by them. It remained in that state until the time of al-Saffāḥ, the first caliph of the Banū al-ʿAbbās. When the caliph heard its story, and of the goods and the marble that Abrahah had carried there from the palace of Bilqīs in Yemen, he sent men who dismantled it stone by stone and took everything it contained of property and treasure. So relates al-Suhaylī—God knows best.

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Account of how the kingship left the Abyssinians and returned to Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan the Ḥimyarite, just as the two soothsayers had foretold to Rabīʿah ibn Naṣr al-Lakhmī

Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq—may God have mercy on him—said: When Abrahah died, the Abyssinians were ruled by his son Yaksūm, whose teknonym he bore. When Yaksūm died, their dominion over Yemen passed to his brother Masrūq ibn Abrahah.

He continued: When affliction weighed long upon the people of Yemen, Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan al-Ḥimyarī—Sayf son of Dhī Yazan son of Dhī Aṣbaḥ son of Zayd son of Sahl son of ʿAmr son of Qays son of Muʿāwiyah son of Jashm son of ʿAbd Shams son of Wāʾil son of al-Ghawth son of Qaṭan son of ʿArīb son of Zuhayr son of Ayman son of al-Humaysiʿ son of al-ʿAranjaj, of the Ḥimyar of Sabaʾ—set out; and Sayf’s teknonym was