In his book, Wendell Phillips describes his sense of purpose in leading an excavation at Marib. “We were standing were no American or Englishman had ever stood and where no non-Moslem had been, to our knowledge, since 1889. We looked at the buried ruins of what had once been the largest and richest of the ancient cities of South Arabia, the center of a great culture almost three thousand years ago. And we were going to dig away the sand that covered it, push aside the veil of secrecy that had for so long hidden most knowledge of that civilization. We were going to excavate at this prize site where no scientific excavation had even taken place. If you had told me that the mound in front of us contained a gold mine at which I could help myself, I could not have been as excited, as deeply moved as I was by the prospect before us.”