Throne of Adulis

by Bowersock, G. W.

  This anonymous person, bearing a banal Christian name that was not his own and obsessed by representations of the world (kosmos), could hardly have been more different from the austere merchant-captain who put together the Periplus of the Red Sea some five centuries before. For Cosmas Indicopleustes, Adulis was no more than the place where an inscribed throne and an adjacent inscribed stele happened to pique the curiosity of an Ethiopian negus who happened to be planning to launch an overseas war. The fact that this negus was himself a Christian doubtless moved Cosmas to comply with his request for copies of the inscriptions. On the other hand, he showed no curiosity whatever about the provocations for that Ethiopian war or indeed about the Axumite kingdom itself.

  By contrast, the author of the Periplus was clearly attentive to the culture he encountered and delivered a precious, if laconic account of it. His observations serve to illuminate the chronological space between the two inscriptions on the Adulis throne. The author’s own world was the Roman Empire of the Julio-Claudians, later than the Hellenistic Ptolemies and earlier than the unidentified pagan king at Axum. Adulis, according to the Periplus, was a legally recognized trading center, an emporion nomimon (legal emporium), on a deep bay extending southwards for about 200 stades (ca. 20 nautical miles) from the open sea. As we have already seen, this is the Gulf of Zula, the former Annesley Bay. What exactly a “legal emporium” might have been has long been subject to debate, but since the author applies the phrase to only three trading centers out of the thirty-seven that are named in the manual the odds are, as Lionel Casson has argued, that it was a place in which trade was allowed and regulated under the authority of the local ruler and was not simply an open souk or bazaar regulated by some kind of international law.17 In other words, it was neither a market town legally established as such by the Roman government, nor was it a place that was simply “law-abiding,” which would have presumably applied just as well to the thirty-four other ports.

  The author of the Periplus states clearly that the metropolis of Adulis was Axum, which he calls Axômitês. This certainly implies that what went on there was subject to the authority of its metropolis. Ivory was the chief commodity in Adulis’ trade, and the Periplus reports that all the ivory “from beyond the Nile” came into Axum and was transported from there to Adulis. The writer goes on to add, “The mass of elephants and rhinoceroses that are slaughtered all inhabit the upland regions, although on rare occasions they are also seen along the shore around Adulis itself.”18 It is therefore not surprising that, as we shall see, the earlier inscription on the site, dating from the reign of Ptolemy III in the third century BC, explicitly refers to elephants in the area.

  The vast territory of East Africa, which would appear to have included modern Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia, had been under the rule of the king Zoskales, whose knowledge of the Greek language had so much impressed the author of the Periplus. Hence it is not unlikely that this was the ruler who controlled the trade at the “legal emporium” of Adulis in the first century AD because the Periplus describes him as “fussy about his possessions and always enlarging them.” But, for all that, he was said to have been otherwise a fine person and, of course, steeped in Greek culture. The Hellenic character of this local monarchy in the Julio-Claudian age of the Roman Empire may well have been rooted in prior contact with the Ptolemies, to which the earlier Adulis inscription bears witness. It certainly underlies and explains the continuing use of Greek in the region across the five centuries between the Periplus and Cosmas.

  Even as the Ethiopic language began to be used in its classical form of Ge‘ez, the rulers continued to use Greek to advertise their exploits on the inscriptions they set up alongside parallel texts in Ethiopic. But in the centuries down to Cosmas’ day the Ethiopic texts were, on occasion, also inscribed in the alien script of South Arabian (Sabaic), which had to be read from right to left rather than, as in Ethiopic, from left to right. Curiously, it was Greek that served as the link to Ethiopia’s more distant past while, at the same time, it provided access to the lingua franca of the entire eastern Mediterranean world. Even on the royal coinage of Axum Greek normally appeared together with Ethiopic.

  Cosmas’ transcription of the Ptolemaic stele therefore carries us back to an era of Greek and ivory, long before the notices of Juba II of Mauretania that were subsequently picked up by the elder Pliny or the visit of the author of the Periplus to the port city of Adulis. If Zoskales’ realm was as extensive as it seems to have been, the Ethiopian component, with Axum as the metropolis of Adulis, must have been only part of a much larger territory. The rise of the Axumite kings of Ethiopia and their expansion across the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula would have altered significantly the distribution of power in the lands of East Africa to the south, where Djibouti and Somalia are today. But, as the Ethiopians enlarged their conquests in Africa, they looked increasingly to the north, as well as to the south, and they had good reasons for doing so. A vibrant Nubian civilization centered at Meroë in the territory of the middle Nile posed a major threat to Ethiopia’s northern frontier and potentially controlled both the sources of the Nile and access to Egypt, not to mention the ivory that the Periplus trader saw at Adulis. This region was destined to threaten and provoke the Ethiopians for several centuries until they brought an end to the Meroitic kingdom.

  But the Ptolemaic inscription that Cosmas found and transcribed, although clearly connected in some way with his later text, took his readers much farther back in time than either he or his first readers could possibly have imagined. It evoked a vanished world, the Horn of Africa in the Hellenistic Age, several centuries before Zoskales.

  3

  PTOLEMY’S ELEPHANTS

  Behind the votive throne dedicated by an unnamed Axumite negus lay an imposing basalt stele inscribed in Greek, as Cosmas Indicopleustes observed when he went to Adulis in the sixth century AD. The language of the inscription has been universally agreed to be authentic, and so the text transports us back into a remote and unfamiliar epoch in the history of ancient Ethiopia. The subject is the military prowess and overseas conquests of a Hellenistic king, whose name, given with full family details, guarantees that he is Ptolemy III of Egypt, also called Euergetes, who ruled from 246 to 221 BC. The royal house of Egypt took its origins after the death of Alexander the Great from one of his successors called Ptolemy, whose father Lagos supplied the traditional dynastic name of Lagid for all the Ptolemies who ruled Egypt. The inscription is written in the third person but presumably reflects the public image of himself that Ptolemy wished to project, and it boasts of extensive campaigns abroad from Thrace to Mesopotamia. Cosmas’ transcription of the text naturally does not provide any indication of the line divisions of the original, but he observed that the stele was broken off at the bottom and thus lacked its concluding part. But, as we have noted earlier, Cosmas was under the mistaken impression that the text inscribed on the stele had been continued into the Greek text that he found written on the throne that stood in front of it.

  The Ptolemaic inscription provides a tantalizing glimpse into the extravagant claims of Ptolemy III in foreign policy—claims that need to be understood in the context of his administrative and personal struggles in Egypt. It furnishes details, many of questionable veracity, concerning his conflict in Asia Minor and Syria with the king Seleucus II, whose royal line represented another of the successors of Alexander. Ptolemy’s war with Seleucus is generally known as the Third Syrian War. In addition, and most remarkably, the inscription reveals the exploitation of Ethiopia to secure local elephants for military use abroad. Here is what Cosmas read on the basalt stone:

  Great King Ptolemy, son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe, who are brother and sister gods, themselves the children of King Ptolemy and Queen Berenice, who are savior gods, a descendant on his father’s side from Heracles, son of Zeus, and on his mother’s side from Dionysus, son of Zeus, having assumed from his father a royal dominion of Egypt, Libya, Syria, Phoenicia, Cyp
rus, Lycia, Caria, and the Cyclades islands, led an expedition into Asia with a force of infantry, cavalry, a fleet of ships, and elephants from Troglodytis and Ethiopia. These animals his father and he himself first hunted out from these places and brought to Egypt for use in war. Having become master of all the land west of the Euphrates—Cilicia, Pamphylia, Ionia, the Hellespont, Thrace, and of all the armed forces in those lands as well as Indian elephants, and having brought the monarchs in all those places into subjection to him, he crossed the Euphrates river and subdued Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Susiana, Persis, Media, and all the remaining territory as far as Bactriana. He recovered all the holy objects that had been carried away from Egypt by the Persians, and he carried them back to Egypt with the rest of the treasure from the region. He sent his forces by way of canals that had been dug. …

  The text breaks off abruptly after these grandiloquent claims to world conquest, from Thrace on the western shore of the Bosporus all the way to the heartland of the Persian empire as far as modern Afghanistan (Bactriana). It is tempting to believe that Ptolemy wanted this commemorative inscription erected in such a remote spot as Adulis both because this was a region in which he and his father had hunted elephants for military use, and also because he could thereby stake a claim to such a remote territory by frightening off others who might wish to control the area. Certainly the Nubian lands that extended southwards from the Thebaid and the first two cataracts of the Nile could not have been formally subject to the Lagid rulers of Egypt, but they were clearly accessible to them, most probably from the Red Sea but possibly, for seafarers in the Indian Ocean, from the east coast of Africa opposite the Gulf of Aden. Hellenistic settlements on the Red Sea coast at Philotera and Ptolemaïs Thêrôn (“of the Hunts”) are both connected with the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the father of Ptolemy III, and although their foundation cannot be dated with precision, both were clearly designed to facilitate the hunting of elephants.1

  There remains, of course, the possibility that the Adulis stele was brought to the south at some later time from another place farther to the north, but there can be little doubt that it was already located on the site where Cosmas saw it at the time when the Axumite throne was constructed. This is because the Ptolemaic inscription on the stele so obviously inspired the later text on the throne. Although Adulis is wholly unknown to the historical record for the time of Ptolemy III, it would be perfectly reasonable, in view of its importance for the ivory trade in the Augustan age and later, as reflected both by Juba II and the author of the Periplus, to imagine elephant hunting as widespread in the region during the third century BC.2

  The titulature and filiation of Ptolemy on the inscription, including the names of his incestuous parents (they were brother and sister) as well as the names of their own divinized parents, is exactly as contemporary convention prescribed. Similarly conventional is the use of the adjective megas, “great,” with Ptolemy’s name. This self-aggrandizing adjective deserves special emphasis here because it was not forgotten later by the Ethiopian rulers in the region, who revived it. The cultic designations for brother-sister gods (theoi adelphoi) and savior gods (theoi sôtêres) are no less accurate than Ptolemy’s titulature in reflecting contemporary usage. They properly convey the cultic honors that were given to the royal family at the time. Egyptian rulers appear to have practiced incest without embarrassment and to have celebrated this liaison in deification after death.3

  The more remote divine ancestry that the inscription provides for Ptolemy—descent from the mythological gods Heracles and Dionysus—may well explain a puzzling item in Cosmas’ account of the throne. There he reports that on the back behind the seat, two male images appeared, presumably of divinities and connected in some way with the inscribed text. Cosmas identifies them as Heracles and Hermes, whom his companion interpreted to be symbols of power and wealth, but Cosmas himself speculated most unconvincingly that Hermes ought rather to be understood symbolically as a representation of the divine Word.4

  The two figures on the back of the throne might at first be thought to represent Heracles and Dionysus because they are the two that were named on the Ptolemaic inscription. But that text had, after all, been inscribed at least three or four centuries before the throne. It still remains possible, however, that the two figures were put there to represent a parallel claim to divine ancestry on the part of the king at Axum, whose inscription is the one that actually appears on the throne. When we turn to that text in the next chapter, it will become apparent that the Axumite ruler must have had the boasts of Ptolemy in mind, because we know that the pre-Christian rulers of Axum had Greek equivalents for their own pagan gods. So the images of two gods on the back of the throne could well owe their origin, in a remote way, to the two who are named in Ptolemy’s inscription.

  The emphasis on elephants in this text seems to reflect its placement in a part of East Africa where both elephant hunts and trade in ivory were common. That does not of course mean that Ptolemy and his father, or their surrogates, necessarily did their hunting in the immediate vicinity of Adulis. The reference to Troglodytis (more correctly Trogodytis) as well as to Ethiopia indicates that the hunting went on across a very large territory well to the east of the Nile in East Africa.5 The territory of Trogodytis first appears in the fifth century BC in Herodotus, who called its inhabitants Troglodytes, “cave dwellers,” known for running fast, eating snakes, and squealing like bats. He located them vaguely in Ethiopia, but four centuries later the geographer Strabo placed them clearly between the Nile and the Red Sea, and it was in the intervening period between these two writers that Ptolemy III made his allusion to Trogodytis as a region for elephant hunting.6 The name of Ptolemaïs of the Hunts, which lay on the west coast of the Red Sea, presumably reflects the activity and roughly the chronological period to which Ptolemy refers. In the days of the Periplus, a little less than a century after Strabo, the elder Pliny wrote that the Trogodytes, “who live on the border of Ethiopia,” made their living exclusively from hunting elephants.7

  A few documentary texts on papyrus provide tantalizing glimpses into the elephant industry of this period and the compensation paid to those who worked in it. Two are dated to the last years of the reign of Ptolemy III, and one explicitly mentions elephant ships at Berenice, including a ship that had sunk—presumably from its heavy load. An old canal was reopened linking the Nile and the Red Sea to facilitate contacts across the region, and conceivably this was the canal to which Ptolemy alludes in the enigmatic last words that survive from the inscription on the Adulis stele.8

  The register of overseas territories that Ptolemy inherited from his father, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, is impressive and, to a large extent, supported by textual evidence: Libya (i.e, Cyrenaica), Phoenicia, Syria (so-called Coele or “Hollow” Syria adjacent to Phoenicia), Cyprus, as well as Lycia and Caria in Asia Minor, and the islands of the Cyclades from which Mediterranean piracy could be held in check.9

  Surprisingly, the inscription returns to elephants in its account of Ptolemaic control of Thrace, where the writer takes care to distinguish the elephants found there as Indian, which were markedly larger animals than the so-called forest elephants that the Ptolemies hunted in Africa. In fact, a decree from Samothrace, honoring a Ptolemaic general, confirms Egyptian control of the Hellespont and Thrace, although it makes no reference to elephants.10 They presumably arrived there with Alexander’s army on its way back from India under Antigonus the One-Eyed during his brief hegemony over Asia Minor and Greece at the end of the fourth century BC.

  The occasion for inscribing the stele that Cosmas describes can be determined with considerable precision. Ptolemy’s titulature at the beginning lacks the epithet Euergetes (“benefactor”), which we know to have been attached to his name no later than September of 243, whereas the war that took him into Mesopotamia began soon after the death of Antiochus II in 246. Antiochus had been married to Ptolemy’s sister Berenice, but not long before he died he divorced his Egyptian
queen in favor of the Syrian Laodice. The new queen was established in Ephesus, while the former one remained at Antioch in Syria. Hence, when Antiochus died and was succeeded by Seleucus II, Ptolemy took the opportunity to launch a war to avenge the repudiation of his sister and to weaken Seleucid control in the East wherever possible. Ptolemy arrived in 246 at Seleuceia, the port of Antioch, to great fanfare, according to a famous papyrus document that describes the ceremony, and we know that he then made his way as far as Babylon, where he had to turn back. The invasion of Mesopotamia and the arrival in Babylon are not only attested in ancient literary texts but in a cuneiform document, now in the British Museum, that is a fragment from a Babylonian chronicle.11 Ptolemy’s retreat to Egypt appears to have been, at least in part, caused by sedition at home, but he was certainly back in his kingdom well before he received the title of Euergetes.

  Accordingly the events in the Adulis text must be placed between late 246 and 244 BC. There is every sign of gross exaggeration in celebrating Ptolemy’s war. The references to Lagid control in Asia Minor do not represent conquests of Ptolemy III himself, but of his predecessors in the third century, and the same can be said of the Ptolemaic presence in the Hellespont and Thrace. Nothing in the ancient tradition, including the new Babylonian chronicle, justifies the claim of reaching Afghanistan.

  The Adulis text is thus highly tendentious, possibly one of many efforts to fortify the Egyptian monarchy in the face of the uprising that forced Ptolemy to return to Egypt. By asserting himself in Ethiopia he may have seen a means of securing his southern frontier as well as his control of ports on the Red Sea. The basalt on which the inscription was cut presumably came from the highlands around Axum, which is rich in this volcanic stone, and it argues strongly against any suggestion that the inscription might have been brought to Adulis from somewhere else.