Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.
What is the size of Yemen?
Uncovering a century-old misinformation
TheBorys — 27 November 2024
Have 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.
Where 555k km² came from
The 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.
Where 527k km² came from
The 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.
North 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.
South 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.
Closing thought
Unrelated 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.