Throne of Adulis

by Bowersock, G. W.

  Four centuries, more or less, must have passed between inscribing the basalt stele of Ptolemy III and the dedication of the Axumite marble throne in front of it. Nothing is known of Adulis in those years apart from the ivory trade that is documented in the Periplus, which confirms the continuation of elephant hunting in the highlands of Ethiopia. There is no further trace of Ptolemaic presence in the city. The later kings of Hellenistic Egypt would undoubtedly have found it inaccessible at a time when the kingdom of Meroë in upper Nubia, between the fifth and sixth cataracts and corresponding roughly to modern Sudan, became increasingly strong and aggressive as a power to the south of the Ptolemies. Meroë’s dominion went back to the seventh century BC, but it grew prosperous from caravan trading in metal, glass, and ivory. Although it had no outlet on the sea, it maintained a grip on products that found their way to the merchants on the coast.

  Even Augustus was obliged to turn his attention to Meroë, to which he sent an expedition under C. Petronius, the prefect of Egypt, soon after assuming sole authority at Rome as Princeps, and this happened very soon after he had already sent an unsuccessful expedition under Aelius Gallus, the previous prefect of Egypt, into South Arabia.12 He realized at that early time in his principate that the economic and political fortunes of both sides of the Red Sea were closely linked. The kings of Axum were soon to discover that the burgeoning Meroitic empire, encompassing the upper Nile as well as the Blue and White Nile, was as much of an obstacle for Ethiopia’s access to Egypt as it had been for Augustus in trying to organize Egypt as a Roman province. Like Augustus, the Ethiopian ruler had also eventually to turn his attention to South Arabia. We shall see that the Ethiopian king who celebrated his achievements alongside Ptolemy’s almost half a millennium later at Adulis boasted that he had to confront his northern neighbors along the Nile at the very same time as he laid claim to territories in the peninsula on the other side of the Red Sea. This was not only warfare on two fronts, but warfare on two continents. Bringing troops from one to the other involved crossing the Red Sea, and naturally for a king at Axum the best harbor lay in the Gulf of Zula near Adulis.

  4

  THE KINGDOM OF AXUM

  Although Cosmas Indicopleustes failed to recognize that the inscription he found on the Adulis marble throne was part of a totally different document from the one he had transcribed on the Ptolemaic basalt stele, no modern reader of the texts he preserves has had any doubt that the throne text is different and much later. Cosmas unfortunately says nothing about the shapes of the Greek letters on the stone, which might have helped with dating, but it is most unlikely that that the script was similar on the two inscriptions because their historical contexts are very different. Cosmas and his collaborator probably had to struggle so hard with deciphering the letters on these old blocks that it never occurred to them that they were transcribing two separate documents. The text on the throne points unmistakably to a great Ethiopian ruler, even if the ruler’s name is missing (as, fortunately, it is not on the stele inscription). The Ethiopian’s conquests had taken him not only to the territories north of his kingdom but also to the land of Ḥimyar in southwest Arabia on the other side of the Red Sea. Since we know from extant inscriptions that the principal deity of the pagan Ethiopian kings, Maḥrem, was always equated with the Greek Ares,1 the dedication of the Adulis throne to the god Ares, together with the traditional form of an inscribed votive throne, proves definitively that the anonymous dedicant was none other than the negus in Axum. The identification of Maḥrem with Ares presumably implies that he was some kind of war-god, as Ares was, and that he was invoked in gratitude for Ethiopian conquest. But this can be no more than speculation.

  About the general epoch of the throne and its dedication there can be no doubt. It must certainly be later than that of the king called Zoskales in the Periplus of the Red Sea. The territory of Zoskales, whatever its precise contours, did not extend to the Arabian peninsula, and it is far from certain that his royal seat was in Axum.2 But it is clear from the Periplus that he knew and used the Greek language with proficiency, and this was the indispensable prerequisite for the composition of the long inscription on the throne, as recorded by Cosmas. Even when the rulers in Axum later set up inscriptions in Ethiopic (Ge‘ez), they continued to use Greek as a kind of lingua franca. They did this on their coinage as well.3 Although much remains unclear, particularly in the interpretation of toponyms, it is certain that the text Cosmas saw is undoubtedly the earliest of all known Axumite royal inscriptions.

  Unfortunately its opening lines are lost. It is altogether unlike the Ptolemaic document, but, in conformity with all the inscriptions we know to have been set up by the kings of Axum, it is written in the first person. The first surviving words, which, in the original, must have followed a prescript with the identity and titles of the king who is speaking, allude back to unnamed events, after which the speaker “grew to manhood,” or perhaps “gained in strength.” The precise meaning of the participle andreiôsas, implying manhood or manly strength, cannot be determined. The inscription reads as follows:

  … afterwards I grew to manhood and bade the nations closest to my kingdom to keep peace. I waged war and subjugated in battle the following peoples.

  I fought the tribe of Gaze, then won victories over the Agame and Siguene. I took as my share half their property and their population. The Aua, Zingabene, Aggabe, Tiamaa, Athagaoi, Kalaa, and Samene, people who live beyond the Nile in inaccessible and snowy mountains, in which there are storms, and ice and snow so deep that a man sinks in up to his knees—these people I subjugated after crossing the river. Then I subjugated the inhabitants of Lasine, Zaa, and Gabala who live by a mountain with bubbling and flowing streams of hot waters. I subjugated the Atalmo and Beja and all the peoples of the Tangaitai with them, who dwell as far as the frontiers of Egypt. I made passable the road from the places of my kingdom all the way to Egypt. Then I subdued the inhabitants of Annene and Metine on craggy mountains.

  I fought the Sesea people, who had gone up onto the greatest and most inaccessible mountain. I surrounded them and brought them down, and I chose for myself their young men, women, boys, girls, and all their property. I subjugated the peoples of Rauso who live in the midst of incense-gathering Barbarians between great waterless plains, and I subjugated the people of Solate, whom I ordered to guard the coasts of the sea. All these people, enclosed by mighty mountains, I myself conquered in person in battle and brought them under my rule. I allowed them the use of all their lands in return for the payment of tribute. Many other peoples voluntarily subjected themselves to me by paying tribute.

  I sent both a fleet and an army of infantry against the Arabitai and the Kinaidocolpitai who dwell across the Red Sea, and I brought their kings under my rule. I commanded them to pay tax on their land and to travel in peace by land and sea. I made war from Leukê Kômê to the lands of the Sabaeans.

  I was the first and only king of any down to my time to subjugate all these peoples. That is why I express my gratitude to my greatest god, Ares, who also begat me, through whom I brought under my sway all the peoples who are adjacent to my land, on the east as far as the Land of Incense and on the west as far as the places of Ethiopia and Sasou. Some I went and conquered in person, others by dispatching expeditions. Having imposed peace on the entire world under me, I went down to Adulis to sacrifice to Zeus, to Ares, and to Poseidon on behalf of those who go under sail. Once I had brought together my forces and united them, I encamped in this place and made this throne as a dedication to Ares in the 27th year of my reign.

  This extraordinary document marks the beginning of our knowledge of the kingdom of Axum and provides a detailed account of the foreign policy of the anonymous king. The identification of many of the names for places and peoples remains uncertain and open to inconclusive debate,4 but some of the names can be linked with known toponyms and peoples so that a relatively clear picture of the king’s realm after his conquests can be worked out. The wars all co
ncern territories adjacent to Ethiopia. The sequence implies a geographical movement extending beyond the borders of the kingdom in all directions, and an overseas expedition across the Red Sea brought the troops of this ruler into conflict with the peoples on the western side of the Arabian peninsula. This obvious attempt to secure not only the borders of the African kingdom on all sides, but the coastal areas lying opposite on the Red Sea, suggests a concerted effort to establish Ethiopian control over East Africa and the trade that passed through its ports. The king’s boast that he opened up a land route all the way to Egypt reinforces the impression that his objectives were as much commercial as defensive.

  The register of conquests in the surviving part of the inscription begins with the territories that lay northeast of Axum. These include “the tribe of Gaze,” which can be located in the region called Agazi (Aga‘aze) in the plateau overlooking the sea north of Massawa. The king began his many wars with the tribe that was closest to home, just north of Axum itself, and he presumably launched his campaign directly from the capital. By his own report he then moved on against the Agame and Siguene, half of whose property and population he took over for his own. Agame was equally close by, to the north of Axum, and its name may possibly survive in the modern toponym of Adigrat. The location of Siguene remains a mystery, although there can be no doubt that it too was not far from Axum to the north. Littmann’s proposed identification with the modern Soguet, near Adigrat, is at least plausible.

  From the Eritrean plain the king appears to have extended his belligerent activities to the south into Tigray, and the site of Aua may indicate the modern capital of the region, Adwa. The Byzantine diplomat Nonnosus explicitly mentions Aua as lying on the way from Adulis to Axum. He was a traveler of infinite curiosity and took pains to record the remarkable scenes that confronted him as he made his way to Axum from the port at Adulis. The open territory at Aua greatly impressed Nonnosus and his companions because it contained a large number of elephants, “almost five thousand,” which were grazing in a vast space that the local inhabitants could enter only with difficulty.5 The names of the next conquests of the Axumite king, Zingabene and Aggabe, remain obscure to this day, and scholarly speculation has been impeded by an error in an ancient gloss that Tiamaa, which is the next name in the list, indicated the Takkaze towards the Nile to the northwest. This cannot be right, but the mistake has led to placing the no less obscure Athagaous in the same area. The king is evidently still referring to the tribal regions he invaded as he moved southwards into the Ethiopian highlands, as Littmann was again alert to notice.

  If Kalaa resists identification, however, Samene, which follows it in the list, does not. This is incontestably the mountainous territory of Simēn, which lies southwest of Axum to the east of the Atbara river above the fifth cataract of the Nile and rises to snowy heights that perfectly fit the king’s description of storms and deep snowdrifts. It is undoubtedly this river that he crossed before subduing the region, and when he refers to its inhabitants as living beyond the Nile he can only mean the Atbara offshoot of the Nile. In these opening campaigns the king thus secured control of the peoples that inhabited the borderlands both to the north and south of his capital city. This embraced a large swath of land from the Red Sea coast in the vicinity of Asmara and Massawa to the mountains of Simēn—a considerable achievement.

  Next the king targeted regions farther north, as far as Egypt itself. Although the territories along the way, Lasine, Zaa, and Gabala, are unknown, the reference to hot springs point to precisely such waters that can be found north of Axum at Mansa and Habab. Although the next stop at Atalmo is also unknown, Beja brings us into recognizable territory. The people there were well known in classical sources under the name of Blemmyes, occupying a broad area of the interior near the coast of East Africa and south of the Hellenistic port city of Berenice. The Tangaites, who appear next in the king’s register, were a powerful tribe of the Beja and confirm that the king’s wars now brought him into the land of East Africa southwest of Berenice. There is not the slightest reason to see him as campaigning farther west into the kingdom of Meroë, although it is more than likely that the strength of this powerful kingdom was, as we will see, a matter of concern to him. The sequence of wars described thus far readily prepares the reader of his inscription for the revelation that the Axumite king next established a land route between Axum and Egypt. It is this development, more than any other, that proves Axum was not merely interested in protecting its borders but also in the commerce that flowed through East Africa to the Red Sea.

  After the conquests that brought the king within range of the Egyptian frontier, he turned his attention to five other regions, Annene, Metine, Sesea, Rauso, and Solate. All are unknown, and guesses about the toponyms have hitherto been unproductive. Nevertheless, the descriptions of the intervening terrain allow, within the geographical framework of the king’s narrative, for reasonable speculation. Sesea includes an inaccessible mountain, Rauso evokes people “who live in the midst of incense-gathering Barbarians between great waterless plains,” and Solate is obviously close to the seacoast, which it is ordered to protect. That very high mountain can only lie southeast of the mountainous Simēn, where the king had already fought, and the allusion to waterless plains suggests that he moved yet farther to the southeast into Djibouti or Somalia. The incense-gathering barbarians must therefore be residents of the land called Barbaria, rather than simply savages, inasmuch as this region lay roughly in the area of Somalia. The city of Berbera on the Somali coast preserves the ancient name.

  In view of their harvesting incense, the barbarians of the inscription take us clearly to the Land of Incense that is mentioned near the end of the inscribed text under that name. This is certainly a reference to Barbaria, covering roughly Djibouti and Somalia. The area stretched out south of the Axumite kingdom precisely where the Periplus had located the domain of Zoskales. The king finally completed his tour of conquest by approaching the coast, perhaps on the Gulf of Aden at or below the Bab al Mandeb. There he established guard-stations wherever Solate may have been.

  His wars, as they are represented in his inscription, can be seen to have been systematically organized, beginning with the northern territories above Axum and extending towards Egypt on the north and the Red Sea on the east. After taking control there and securing a route into Egypt itself, the king swung southwestwards into the mountains below Axum, and from there moved further south and east into still higher mountains, to emerge at last into the incense-bearing plains of Barbaria and the coast.

  The king nowhere mentions the rival Nubian kingdom of Meroë under that name, but it was obviously much on his mind. His boast that he had opened up an accessible route to the Egyptian border from his own kingdom can only mean that he had found a way to reach Egypt by going around the Nubians on their eastern flank. Furthermore, when he concludes by saying that the western extremities of his realm reached Ethiopia, he obviously cannot be referring to his own kingdom under that name but must rather be referring to the Meroitic kingdom in Nubia, which, since the time of Herodotus, had traditionally been known as Ethiopia.6 No less traditional is the use of the name Barbaroi for the inhabitants of modern Somalia. As we have already seen, these are not barbarians in the Greek sense of non-Greeks but rather the eponymous people of the territory of Barbaria as we know it from the Periplus. Although the etymology of the name Barbaroi has nothing to do with the Greek barbaros, it is undoubtedly related to the ethnic name Berber, which, as we know from the great fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, arose in a way not unlike Greek barbaros.7 The language these people spoke sounded to a foreigner like bar-bar or ber-ber. The author of the Periplus of the Red Sea guarantees that the East-African Barbaroi were to be found in the region of Somalia, where King Zoskales was, according to the merchant manual, the ruler of lands “from the Moscophagoi [“calf-eaters” in the north] to the rest of Barbaria.”8 The existence of a temple of Barbar on the island of Bahrain in the Pers
ian Gulf raises the possibility that a divinity may have been associated with the name in Somalia.

  So the nomenclature of the throne inscription reflects the world that was already known to the author of the Periplus in the mid-first century of our era. It also maintains the very old Herodotean tradition of referring to Nubia as Ethiopia, a name that alludes to its dark-skinned people who had “burnt faces” (aithiopes). This etymology for Ethiopia continued to be in vogue throughout the second and early third centuries, as can be seen by references to the Ethiopians as blacks in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana—a work that also perpetuates the view that Nubia with its capital Meroë constituted Ethiopia.9 Gradually the kingdom of Axum assumed the separate name of Ethiopia as the kingdom of Meroë became conventionally identified by that name in Greek and by Kush in Semitic languages. Kush, however, also continued to designate the kingdom of Ethiopia, particularly in Syriac apocalyptic literature, exactly as the Greek name had done formerly.10

  The Adulis inscription looks very much as if it comes from the time of transition in the use of the name of Ethiopia. Philostratus was writing in the early third century AD about events in the late first century AD, and so this gives an approximate range of the second to the third century. Accordingly, a much neglected passage in an often cited work, the panegyric To Rome by the Greek sophist Aelius Aristides, becomes surprisingly relevant. In praising Rome’s administration of its empire, the orator says that wars have now passed and peace reigns, but this stands in contrast to recent troubles that he mentions explicitly: “the immoderate paranoia of the Getae, the misery of the Libyans, and the wickedness of peoples who live along the Red Sea.”11 Aristides’ speech belongs probably to 144, or possibly somewhat later, but the forties of the second century are clearly evoked by this modest list of international incidents. The episode with the Getae, who lived in Dacia (modern Romania), points to events precisely in 144, as does the misery in Libya (here used vaguely for North Africa), which must allude to disturbances in Mauretania at about the same time.12 The reference to the Red Sea, which has long been obscure to anyone who bothered to notice it, is now illuminated by a Latin inscription found in the Farasan archipelago in the Red Sea off the coast of Arabia. This reveals the presence of Roman legionary detachments—a vexillatio and auxilia—responding to some kind of crisis in the region. The titulature of the emperor Antoninus Pius establishes a date between late December of 143 and late December of 144.13 Of course there is no way of telling what the problem was, and the panegyrist would have us believe that it had been resolved. But we are not obliged to see this as anything more than an indication that the problem had been addressed, and if the Roman force was actually stationed in islands in the Red Sea it may be suspected that the disruptions involved naval activity of some kind.