TheBorys — 27 November 2024
\nHave you ever asked yourself, “What is the size of Yemen?” A comment under a video claimed the commonly cited figure was wrong. Google and Wikipedia said ~555,000 km². Drawing the borders on Google Maps — including islands such as Socotra — yielded about 456,000 km². The missing area was roughly a quarter of the country.
\nThe oldest clear source found was the Statistical Year-book of the Yemen Arab Republic (Central Statistical Office, 1991), the first after unification. The text said Yemen stretched to the 20th North latitude — but the northernmost point under the border agreement with Saudi Arabia is at the 19th. Before 2000 the Saudi border was poorly demarcated; drawing to 20° (including Rub-Al-Khali) roughly reproduces the inflated figure.
\nThe CIA World Factbook (and World Bank / UN repeats) claimed 527,968 km² — still far from the map measurement. That number appears from 1991 as the sum of separate North Yemen (195,000) and South Yemen (332,968) Factbook entries.
\nNorth Yemen: 195,000 km² traces to a 1904 encyclopedia figure for the Ottoman Yemeni Vilayet (~75,000 sq mi), not independent North Yemen (map measure ~136,000). Sources repeated the vilayet size for decades without fact-checking.
\nSouth Yemen: Sources showed ~287,000 until the late 1970s, then jumped to ~332–338k. A 1976 World Bank report table of governorate areas double-counted Thamud (part of the Fifth Province), overestimating the total; later references copied the error.
\nUnrelated exaggerations for North and South were summed at unification into a still-wrong national figure. Consequences called out by the author: population density, UN size ranking, and “slightly larger than twice Wyoming” comparisons are all off. A century of unexamined geographic tables is hard to unwind — but the map measurement is clear.
\n","headings":[{"level":1,"text":"What is the size of Yemen?","id":"what-is-the-size-of-yemen"},{"level":3,"text":"Uncovering a century-old misinformation","id":"uncovering-a-century-old-misinformation"},{"level":2,"text":"Where 555k km² came from","id":"where-555k-km2-came-from"},{"level":2,"text":"Where 527k km² came from","id":"where-527k-km2-came-from"},{"level":2,"text":"Closing thought","id":"closing-thought"}]}}