Throne of Adulis

by Bowersock, G. W.

  The throne was made of white marble, but not, as Cosmas observes rather pedantically, of marble from the Greek island of Proconnesus. If Cosmas were sufficiently knowledgeable, he may perhaps have been aware that Proconnesian marble had, in fact, been extensively used at Adulis, as modern excavations and surveys have revealed. He tells us that the throne was located at the entrance to the city, on the west side and oriented toward the road to Axum. It had a square base and was supported by four small columns at each of the four corners, as well as by a fifth and thicker column in the middle of the base with a serpentine design. The seat itself was placed on the five columns, with a back standing behind armrests on the right and left sides. The whole was cut out of a single block, measuring a little over three feet in height (2½ cubits). The surface, according to Cosmas, was covered with the Greek inscription.

  The Adulis throne, as Cosmas describes it, bears a close resemblance to the thirty odd examples that have been discovered in Ethiopia, but the placement of the seat of the throne on top of pillars at the four corners of the base and one in the middle is altogether unexampled. The sides and back, however, appear consistent with examples that do survive, and the German excavators at Axum have proposed a drawing of the throne in a form comparable to those they discovered. 14 (Fig. 2) Since what Cosmas saw may have been made considerably earlier than any of the ancient thrones that the German excavators discovered, it is not impossible that his throne had a more archaic design.

  Cosmas goes on to report that behind the throne stood an inscribed stele in black stone, evidently basalt, which was slightly taller than the white marble throne itself. He calls this stele an eikôn, which would normally mean an image or statue, but, since the Greek word stêlê had, in late antiquity, already taken on the meaning of statue, the old word for statue seems to have replaced it to mean a stele.15 That this is what Cosmas meant is absolutely clear from the manuscript drawing, in which the stele appears exactly as he describes it with a triangular top “like the letter lambda” (Λ). He wrongly inferred that the inscription on the throne was a continuation of the inscription on the stele, which was broken at the bottom. No one now doubts that the throne inscription is a totally different document of a different date.16

  Figure 2. A reconstruction of the lost throne and stele at Adulis. This can be no more than a guess, but the inscriptions on the stele and on at least one side panel of the throne are plausible. Adapted from DAE p. 66.

  Cosmas reports that the negus himself had asked the governor of Adulis to have a copy made of the inscribed texts and sent to him, and the governor entrusted Cosmas with this chore, along with another trader, who, we are told, later became a monk. Fortunately for later generations, Cosmas kept a second copy for himself and decided to include it in his book on Christian topography.

  The two Greek texts at Adulis were manifestly far apart in date, but, as Cosmas copied and faithfully reproduced them, they show every sign of being authentic. They have been regularly incorporated into standard epigraphic collections alongside those texts that we know only from stones that survive today. The stele inscription is obviously the earlier one. It is a boastful account of the overseas conquests of Ptolemy III, who ruled the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt in the third century BC. By contrast, the throne inscription, though lacking its prescript and any identification of the person who caused it to be inscribed, derives without the slightest doubt from an Ethiopian negus in the Roman imperial period. His boasts are easily a match for those of Ptolemy and were probably inspired by them. Hence the throne itself, recording the achievements of an Ethiopian ruler in conformity with the indigenous tradition of dedicated and inscribed thrones that are documented in the archaeological record, must postdate the Ptolemaic stele by several centuries at least. Whether the stele was already set up at Adulis when the throne was put there is unclear but seems likely. It is just possible that the dedicant of the throne, or someone else at a later date, had it brought to Adulis, but the obvious imitation of the Ptolemaic inscription in the Ethiopian one makes this most unlikely.

  The Adulis throne, therefore, serves as an emblem of ancient Ethiopia in three distinct periods: the reign of Ptolemy III, the reign of the anonymous Ethiopian king under the Roman Empire, and, finally, the third decade of the sixth century when Cosmas transcribed the texts for a contemporary Christian king in Axum with imperialist ambitions. Cosmas reveals importantly that this king ordered the texts of these boastful inscriptions to be transcribed for him just as he was about to launch a campaign of his own against Ḥimyar on the other side of the Red Sea: “Ellatzbaas [i.e., Ella Asbeha] the king of the Axumites at that time, when he was about to go to war against the Ḥimyarites across the sea, wrote to the governor of Adulis to make an exact copy of what was written on the Ptolemaic throne and the stele, and to send it to him.” 17 Cosmas’ erroneous inference that the two objects contained parts of the same text obviously led him into the further error of thinking that the throne was Ptolemaic.

  The negus was manifestly looking for precedents and inspiration for the great expedition that he would soon be launching by ship in the Gulf of Zula not far from Adulis. His overseas campaign against the Ḥimyarites in South Arabia crystalized the irredentist claims of Ethiopia to its former territory in the Arabian peninsula. It brought the Christian Ethiopians into direct conflict with its current rulers, who happened to be, at that time, Arab converts to Judaism. These Arabian Jews had recently carried out a bloody pogrom against the Christians at Najrān in their territory, and this event provided precisely the provocation that the Christian ruler in Ethiopia was looking for. He would now launch an invasion with momentous consequences for the peoples on both sides of the Red Sea, and for nations far beyond them. Byzantium and Persia were ultimately both to join the struggle.

  2

  A CHRISTIAN TRAVELER IN THE RED SEA

  When Cosmas Indicopleustes introduced his account of Adulis and its throne he said that he had gone there as a trader together with other traders from both Alexandria and Elath (at the head of today’s Gulf of ‘Aqaba): “In Adulis, which is the name for the city of the Ethiopians that lies about two miles from the coast and serves as the port for the people of Axum, where those of us from Alexandria and Elath were engaged in commerce, there is a throne.…”1 This is not the only time when Cosmas identifies himself as a merchant in his Christian Topography.2 His other allusions to personal experiences leave no doubt that he operated in the area of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean as far as the Persian Gulf and Ceylon, although there is not the slightest reason to believe that he ever went to the Indian subcontinent. The word Indicopleustes, which means “sailor to India,” was attached to him in the Middle Ages. Cosmas, as we have seen, is a banal Christian name that was certainly not his real name. It suggests the kosmos (“world”), for which the design was of enormous interest to Cosmas.

  In fact, the full name Cosmas Indicopleustes does not appear anywhere in the work he actually wrote. The author identifies himself simply as “a Christian,” and it was not until the eleventh century that the manuscripts equipped him with the sonorous name by which we know him today, “Cosmas the sailor to India.” The reference to India in the epithet Indicopleustes can be no more than a reflection of the use of the geographical term “India,” both in Cosmas and elsewhere, to refer to a much wider region than the subcontinent that bears that name. Ancient writers applied it freely both to the east coast of Africa and to the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula. Cosmas reports that in sailing to the Horn of Africa he went to “inner India,” and he uses the same expression for the land of Ḥimyar in the Arabian peninsula.3 He sailed as far as Ceylon, which he correctly designates by its ancient name, Taprobanê, while locating the island as lying in “inner India.”4 The use of “inner” for “more remote” or “outlying” territories in relation to a designated region had a long tradition in ancient geographical writing in both Greek and Semitic languages.5

  It is clear that Cosmas viewed the
base of his operations as lying well to the west of Ceylon in what would have been understood to be a still more remote part of inner India. This can easily be seen from the title of a work ascribed to Palladius, “On the Peoples of India and the Brahmans,” in which the author has much to say about the Ethiopians in eastern Africa.6 Cosmas’ world lay in the waters on either side of Arabia, in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, as well as in the expanse of the Indian Ocean into which the Red Sea debouches through the Gulf of Aden. This part of the Indian Ocean touched both Somalia in Africa and the south coast of the peninsula from Aden eastwards.

  Not surprisingly, Cosmas passed by Socotra on his way between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. That island, together with its archipelago, lying off the coast of Yemen to the east of Cape Guardafui, had long been a station for merchants, as can be seen from the reference to it under its ancient name of Dioscourides in the Periplus of the Red Sea, which, as we remarked earlier, is now securely anchored to the mid-first century by its reference to the Nabataean king Malichus II (40–70 AD).7 Cosmas was under the impression that the island had been colonized by the Ptolemies in the Hellenistic period because, although he never put in there himself, he encountered inhabitants of the island when he was in Ethiopia and found that they still spoke Greek.8 Nevertheless, archaeological remains have failed to indicate any trace of Hellenic culture on Socotra, despite some extraordinary recent discoveries in the cave of Ḥôq on the island. These have revealed other settlements than Greek, including a colony of Palmyrenes in 258 AD, as well as, at an indeterminate date, settlements of Ethiopians and South Arabians. Graffiti in Ethiopic and South Arabian scripts and an inscription on a wooden tablet in Palmyrene Aramaic have been deciphered.9

  Cosmas was something of an autodidact. He claims to have learned everything he knew from a Christian, Mar Aba, called Patrikios in Greek, with whom he had once studied in Alexandria. That learned cleric ultimately went on to become the archbishop of all the Nestorian communities in Persia. He served in his post from 540 to 552, a time frame that fits perfectly with the apparent period of composition of the Christian Topography. Fortunately, this can be determined by Cosmas’ assertion that he was asked to furnish the negus with copies of the throne inscriptions at Adulis during the visit he made to the site twenty-five years earlier. The imperialist claims of these texts strongly imply that the negus was contemplating the great Axumite expedition to Ḥimyar of 525, and this ought to mean that Cosmas was present at Adulis between 523, when the first provocations for war occurred in Arabia, and 525, when the expedition was launched. It is true that Cosmas dates his visit to the “beginning” (archê) of the reign of Justin, who ruled as emperor at Constantinople from 518 to 527. But after a quarter-century Cosmas can hardly be expected to be very precise in recalling exactly when Justin came to power. We have to recognize that his work includes references to two solar eclipses that occurred in 547.10 Hence he could not possibly have been in Adulis before late 522 or early 523, which is the period when the provocations that aroused the Ethiopians began to occur. Accordingly, the various details in Cosmas deliver a date of composition of between 548 and 550, which falls precisely during the episcopate of Cosmas’ teacher Patrikios.

  As a merchant, Cosmas would naturally have called at the port of Adulis, where he was able to observe and describe the famous throne. Already in the middle of the first century AD this lay along the route of traders in the Red Sea, as the itinerary of the Periplus of the Red Sea makes plain. That anonymous work, cited for the location of Adulis in the foregoing chapter, provides a detailed, if not topographically precise account of the town, but its writer was clearly aware of its dependence upon the city of Axum in the highlands to the south. In addition, he alludes to an otherwise unknown king in a broad area that extended southwards another eighty miles or so along the coast from the Gulf of Zula. The king of that entire region in the Horn of Africa, which the Periplus calls generally Barbaria, greatly impressed the merchant author of the manual. Although the king’s realm probably included the Axumite territory, there is no reason to think that his capital was Axum. Barbaria seems to have been a much more extensive area, probably incorporating modern Djibouti and northern Somalia. The name itself had nothing to do with “barbarians” (the Greek term for non-Greeks) but reflects an indigenous appellation either for the people of Barbaria or conceivably for a divinity such as Barbar who had a temple on the island of Bahrain. The king, we are told, was named Zoskales. Although he is otherwise unattested, we learn from the anonymous merchant that he had a far from superficial knowledge of Greek. His mastery of the written language became evident to the writer in ways we cannot ascertain.11 But it is worth remembering this early attestation of Greek in the region when we consider the appearance of that language on the Axumite throne inscriptions and on other stones that survive to this day. It is reasonable to assume that Greek was conspicuously used, at least in the upper levels of local administration in East Africa, from the beginning of the Roman Empire and probably before.

  Only a decade or two after the Periplus was written, the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder also singled out Adulis (oppidum Adulitarum) as a great emporium frequented by traders in the region.12 His subsequent reference in the same passage to a sinus Abalitu, in connection with a Diodorus Island, seems not to have been properly understood. This bay (sinus) can only indicate the Gulf of Zula. The Periplus had explicitly connected it with an island of the same name, and Abalitu must therefore be a deformation of Adulitou. By his own acknowledgment Pliny was drawing on the scholarly writings of King Juba II of Mauretania for his information: “In this part I have decided to follow … King Juba in the volumes he wrote for Gaius Caesar concerning his Arabian expedition.”13 The allusion is to preparation for the campaigns of Augustus’ grandson in the East at the end of the first century BC.

  Since Juba, who was no less a scholar than a monarch, ruled in North Africa during Augustus’ reign and made use of earlier Hellenistic sources for a work that was designed to instruct the young prince, we can safely assume that Adulis was already important as an emporium in the first century BC. This is pertinent for the earlier of the two inscriptions on the throne with its record of the overseas exploits of Ptolemy III. But of course Cosmas, who remains our sole source for these documents, naturally had no sense of the chronological implications of what he had seen and transcribed. His mistaken belief that the two inscribed texts he saw were all part of a single document leaves no doubt about that.

  After his career as a merchant Cosmas went on to become, a quarter-century later, the Christian apologist that we know from his book. His travels had clearly instilled in him a profound interest in geography that bore fruit in a work, regrettably lost, in which he had described the entire known world. He refers to it in the prologue to his Christian Topography as a work of reference that any reader of the Topography should consult. He reports that it encompassed the entire earth and all countries:

  [It is] the volume we wrote for the Christ-loving Constantine, in which the whole earth has been fully described, both this one and what lies beyond the Ocean, as well as all countries: the southern regions from Alexandria to the southern ocean (by which I mean the Nile River and the adjacent regions and peoples of all Egypt and Ethiopia), and the Arabian Gulf with adjacent regions and peoples as far as this same ocean. Equally I include the land between the river and the Gulf, its cities, countries, and peoples.14

  Assuming his readers would have access to this earlier book, Cosmas devoted himself in his surviving Topography to a pious refutation of various cosmological claims advanced by pagans or supposedly misguided Christians, in particular the representation of the universe as a sphere. He had already written a book, now lost like his Geography, to describe the movement of the stars and, as he says in his prologue, his objective was “to destroy the error of pagan hypotheses.” The ninth book of the Topography is also devoted to this subject and presumably resumes what Cosmas had written in his earlier treatise. Most r
emarkably in the Topography Cosmas resumed his spirited defense of the idea that the Jewish tabernacle is an image of the world (kosmos). The supposedly apostolic author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Paul or someone else, had declared that Moses, after creating on Sinai the tabernacle that reproduced what he had actually beheld from God, transformed the single tabernacle into two by the interposition of a curtain or veil: one representing the world of mankind and the other the world to come. For Cosmas it was important to establish, from his Christian perspective, that the tabernacle as a whole was a representation of the world.15

  This meant that for him the universe was a rectangular solid, which he believed to be longer horizontally, from east to west, than it was wide, from north to south. He also believed that the section on the other side of the veil in the Mosaic image of the tabernacle comprehended the heavens, with a cylindrical cap on top. Cosmas considered the entire box that constituted the kosmos a kind of house (oikos) in the shape of a cube (kubos)—despite the differing length and width. The notion of a cube was borrowed from the Septuagint Greek text of Job, for which the original Hebrew offered no equivalent term. As the most knowledgeable modern exegete of the Topography has prudently declared, “Cosmas is not rich in geometrical accuracy.”16 Although it is hard to take his idea of the world seriously, particularly for an age in which the spherical representation of the world was commonly accepted, we have to be grateful that Cosmas’ preoccupation with this issue led him to write his Topography, including all the precious details of his travels. Even if Cosmas’ book was by design more a work of theological cosmology than geography, we may be grateful that he felt obliged to illustrate his argument with his geographical knowledge and his practical experience in commerce.