Ethiopia and the World, 300-1500 CE (Prof. Krebs)

Article

1. The Emergence of the Aksumite Empire in Global Antiquity, Second–Fourth Centuries
2. As early as the fourth century, the term Aethiopia appears as a self-designating ethnonym in the ancient East African kingdom of Aksum, to which medieval and modern states identifying themselves as Ethiopia often trace their ancestry. Victory inscriptions dating to this century display the name of an Aksumite king and list the people groups under his control in two languages (Greek and Gǝʿǝz) and three scripts, with Gǝʿǝz written in both the Classical Ethiopic and the Pseudo-Sabaic scripts. The use of two different scripts of Gǝʿǝz (Classical Ethiopic and Pseudo-Sabaic) was a common feature of fourth-century Aksumite inscriptions. In such cases, the same text would appear in Greek, an unvocalized Gǝʿǝz version utilizing the more cursive fidäl script of Classical Ethiopic (written from left to right), as well as a version in the unvocalized musnad script of epigraphic South Arabian, this last often also featuring Pseudo-Sabaic elements such as mimation and the use of north-Semitic cognates for Gǝʿǝz terms (e.g. mlk as opposed to ngs for “king”). For more, see Hatke 2013, 69; Phillipson 2014, 58. The Greek term Aethiopia here translates the term hbśt (or hbšt in the PseudoSabaic script), the Semitic ethnonym variously used to refer to the people of Aksum, a larger group to which the Aksumites belonged, or subjects of Aksum residing in the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands (Munro-Hay 1991, 15–16). Confusingly, the label Aethiopia is not applied consistently in the source materials dating from the ancient and late antique periods. For example, although the term is given as the equivalent of hbśt in the ʿEzana inscription cited just now, thus ostensibly referring to the Aksumites themselves or kindred groups, other Aksumite inscriptions from that time utilize Aethiopia to refer to the Nubian kingdoms located to the northwest of them (e.g. RIE 186).

1. Contemporaneous Greek and Roman texts mirror this ambivalence in the use of the term. On the one hand, Aethiopia frequently refers to Nubia in ancient Greek sources, including those dating to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. On the other hand, Greek authors come to adopt the self-designation of the Aksumites, and they too begin to refer to them as Ethiopians perhaps as early as the fifth century, as indicated in the epitome of Philostorgius’s Ecclesiastical History (Phil. 3.6) (See Philostorgius 2007, 43).
2. In view of this background, the Aksumite appropriation of the Greek Aethiopia in the fourth century appears to have been a politically strategic move (Hatke 2013, 52–53). By identifying themselves as rulers of Ethiopia, the Aksumite kings were utilizing a readily fungible topo/ethnonym within the Greek lingua franca of the day. Today, Aksum is a city located in central Tigray, the northernmost region in the modern nation-state of Ethiopia, a region that also demarcates the southwestern border of Eritrea. Archaeological data shows that human settlements around this area go back as far as the Late Stone Age, c. 10,000 BCE (Phillipson 2003, 4). Several sites also indicate that settlements bearing striking resemblance to South Arabian cultures are established in areas near Aksum by around 800–700 BCE (Phillipson 2014, 22–40). These settlements are characterized by architecture similar to that found in South Arabia, inscriptions in Gǝʿǝz utilizing modified forms of Sabaean script, and religious symbols bearing close affinities to South Arabian religions (Munro-Hay 1991, 106–202). Aksum’s advantageous location in close proximity to the Nile Valley, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Peninsula contributed to its growth into one of the most influential regional powerhouses in the ancient world.

Aksum and International Trade in Antiquity

The earliest documentary witness to Aksum survives in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (or “The Circumnavigation of the Erythrean Sea”), the composition of which can confidently be dated to the middle of the first century (Bowersock 1971, 223). The title of the text is somewhat misleading, since, unlike earlier periploi that serve primarily as guides for sailors, the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (hereafter PES) is a guide specifically for merchants, providing a description of the various commercial goods bought and sold in the major port cities and emporia along the Erythraean Sea (translation: see Casson 1989). Furthermore, since the ancient designation literally means “Red Sea,” the text is sometimes mistakenly viewed as a guide for trade on the Red Sea alone. However, at the time of the text’s composition, “Erythraean Sea” referred not only to the Red Sea (which the text calls the Arabian Gulf [ὁ Ἀραβικὸς κόλπος]) but also to the Gulf of Aden and the western Indian Ocean (Casson 1989, 94). The international scope of the text’s purview, therefore, extends beyond the Red Sea region and provides an invaluable glimpse into the major trading centers active in the first century CE from India to the Mediterranean. The PES mentions Aksum in the context of discussing its major port city, Adulis, which lies a short distance inland from the Gulf of Zula on the East African coast of the Red Sea. The text indicates the significance of a given port in a number of different ways: one, by the number of times the port is mentioned; two, by noting the best seasons of the year to travel to said port; and three, by indicating the regulatory protocols governing trade at that location. In the first case, the PES mentions Adulis only a handful of times, in comparison to Barygaza of India, for example, which receives the most mentions at twentyeight (Casson 1989, 277).

The (albeit misspelled) reference to Aksum as the metropolis of Adulis indicates that the latter served as the major port for the former, similar to the relations linking Ostia to Rome (Bowersock 2013, 11). The anonymous author describes some of the products (e.g. wine, olive oil) as “limited in quantity,” other products (e.g. silverware and goldware) as goods purchased by the wealthy, and still others (e.g. unadorned clothing) as modest in price. In sum, the emporium available to the Aksumites is portrayed as a market for both the rich and those with modest means, who through Adulis had access to commodities from Italy, Greece, Egypt, Arabia, and India. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder confirms this view of Adulis as a key emporium by describing it as “the biggest port … of the Ethiopians” (6.173). As Lionel Casson has suggested, the designation of Adulis as an emporium nominon probably indicates that it was a “legally limited” port, meaning that all trade was regulated by the local governor or a trading office sanctioned by the ruler (Casson 1989, 276).

1. Aksumite Expansions in South Arabia
2. The earliest unambiguous reference to Aksumite expansions across the Horn of Africa and South Arabia appears in a now-lost victory inscription, which was once written on a commemorative throne but today survives only in the sixth-century Topographica Christiana of Cosmas Indicopleustes (see Wolska-Conus 1962). Cosmas is the medieval moniker given to an otherwise anonymous Nestorian Christian merchant who, in the sixth century, traveled to numerous places along the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. He also visited Aksum around 518 CE (Hatke 2011, 79–80). He then wrote an annotated geography of the places he had visited some twenty-five years after his travels. In his account, he relates that he came across a commemorative throne (diphros in Greek, as opposed to thronos), which had been enshrined “in Adulis … the name of the city of the Ethiopians that … serves as the port for the people of Aksum” (Top. Chr. 2.54). Cosmas’s description of the votive throne is commonly referred to in the literature today as Monumentum Adulitanum II, together with Monumentum Adulitanum I, the designation for his description of a nearby stele that had been carved from a black rock (most likely basalt). While the marble throne had been erected in front of the basalt stele at the same location in Adulis, and both bore victory inscriptions written in Greek, they were not erected by the same ruler as Cosmas had thought (Top. Chr. 2.54.6–18). Instead, they enshrined the accomplishments of two rulers who lived centuries apart. Cosmas’s surviving transcription of these victory inscriptions demonstrates that the black stele, or Monumentum Adulitanum I, was much older and recounted the accomplishments of the Hellenistic ruler Ptolemy III, who reigned in Egypt between 246 and 222 BCE.

This inscription reveals several important points about the earliest period of Aksumite imperial expansion, as well as Aksum’s relations with the other major powers of the ancient Mediterranean world. First, that the inscription was written in Greek indicates the Hellenization of Aksumite culture (at least across the more powerful levels of society), a process that may have begun as early as the third century BCE and definitely continued through to the Roman period, given the dating of the stele to the Ptolemaic period and the Aksumite throne to the second or third century CE. The unknown Aksumite king behind the Adulis throne here signals his command of Greek customs not only by mimicking the language of Ptolemy III as inscribed on the basalt stele but also by invoking Greek gods and describing himself as a son of Ares in terms that would have been widely intelligible to travelers acquainted with Greco-Roman religions and customs. Second, Monumentum Adulitanum II represents the earliest surviving evidence for Aksumite conquests in South Arabia, as presented in the following claims of the unknown Aksumite king: “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 made war from Leukê Kômê to the lands of the Sabaeans” (Top. Chr. 2.62.4–9).

1. Arguably of more significance are parallel attestations of Aksumite rule that have been discovered among the surviving epigraphic evidence in South Arabia itself. A number of inscriptions indicate that Aksumites alternately invaded or made alliances with key South Arabian kingdoms like Saba’ and Himyar during the first three quarters of the third century (Robin 1989). Several South Arabian inscriptions dating to this time period even provide the name of one Aksumite king, Gadara, leading some scholars to identify him as the ruler behind the throne inscription preserved in Monumentum Adulitanum II (Cuvigny and Robin 1996, 710–11). In addition, the epigraphic evidence demonstrates that the Himyarites regain control of South Arabia beginning in the final quarter of the third century. The Aksumites appear to have been completely driven out from the Arabian Peninsula at this point, and no evidence of their presence is attested again in South Arabia until the first half of the sixth century (Hatke 2011, 119–76). The first wave of Aksumite rule in South Arabia can thus be more narrowly dated to c. 200–270 with relative confidence (Hatke 2013, 44). Despite their expulsion from the Arabian Peninsula by the close of the third century, Aksumite rulers continued to make irredentist claims to the other side of the Red Sea all the way through to the sixth century.
2. Aksumite Expansions in Nubia
3. Third, Monumentum Adulitanum II also recounts Aksumite imperialist expansions northward from Aksum, from territories in the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands surrounding the city to “as far as the frontiers of Egypt” (μέχρι τῶν Αἰγύπτου ὁρίων) (Top. Chr. 2.6). In his victory inscription, the unknown king further claims to have built “the road from the places of my kingdom all the way to Egypt” (τὴν ὁδὸν ἀπὸ τῶν τῆς ἐμῆς βασιλείας τόπων μέχρι Αἰγύπτου) (Top. Chr. 2.6). These claims seem to suggest that by extending Aksum’s northern borders to Egypt, the Aksumite ruler had successfully invaded Nubia, which was located between his kingdom and Egypt. However, such a view is contradicted by the absence of any Nubian nations from the list of peoples he subjugated. Additionally, a number of Kushite inscriptions from around the middle of the third century suggest continued Nubian independence during this period (Hatke 2013, 48–59). The two inscriptions evince that a certain Aksumite king invaded the Kushite capital of Meroe sometime in the first quarter of the fourth century. The inscription located in Aksum, referred to as RIE 186, features Kush (Aethiopia in Greek) in the list of vassals under Aksumite control. In contrast to Monumentum Adulitanum II where Aksumite sovereignty extends only up to the borders of Nubia/Ethiopia, in RIE 186 Kush/Ethiopia is depicted as a part of the Aksumite state. Additionally, the fragmentary inscription found in Meroe, catalogued as RIE 286, makes mention of an invasion by an Aksumite king who boasts of the patronage of the god Ares and appears to have imposed tribute on the conquered Nubians (Burstein 1981, 49). Ousanas, demonstrates that he ruled Aksum during the first quarter of the fourth century (Hahn 2000, 290; Munro-Hay 1991, 15).

In summary, the surviving record of written, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence suggests that Aksumite rulers began to expand the territories under their control as early as the late second or early third century. In addition to conquests over large swaths of the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands and surrounding regions, the first stage of Aksumite expansions saw the short-lived annexation of South Arabia into the East African kingdom in the third century. This was followed in the fourth century by Aksumite invasions of Nubian kingdoms to the north of Aksum. The primary impetus for these campaigns was economic: in addition to extracting tributes from their subjects, Aksumite rulers sought to control key trade routes proximate to their capital city that flowed along the Nile Valley and through the crucial nexus between Africa and Asia along the Red Sea.

Aksum in the World of Roman Late Antiquity, Fourth Century

The early adoption of Christianity in late antique East Africa is perhaps more renowned than any other feature of ancient Ethiopian history. Debates continue over the question of whether or not Ethiopia should be considered the first Christian nation, with some arguing that it merits the title over Armenia (Portella and Woldegaber 2012). The traditional accounts of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Orthodox churches push the date of the Ethiopian adoption of Christianity even earlier to the first century, relying on the story of the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch as related in the New Testament. However, evidence from Greek and Roman sources suggests that in the first century the term Aethiopia more often than not referred to the kingdom of Meroe, the female rulers of which were known by the title given in Acts 8.27, namely Kandake (Gaventa 1986, 103). Consequently, most scholars interpret the allusion to Ethiopia in the Book of Acts as a reference to a Nubian kingdom, prior to the Aksumite appropriation of the term Aethiopia. In contrast to the lack of evidence for Aksumite Christianity in the first century, an unusually substantial number of written, epigraphic, and numismatic sources illustrate the increasingly widespread adoption of Christianity in the kingdom of Aksum beginning in the first half of the fourth century. The account of Christianity’s arrival in Aksum that appears in the fifth-century Latin Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus (c. 345–410) has become arguably the most famous version of the story (see J.-P. Migne, ed. Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiastical; Migne 1849, 478–80). See also the translation by Philip R. Amidon; Rufinus 1997, 18–23).

In his report, Rufinus never specifically mentions Aksum, or even Ethiopia, instead referring to the region as India, a common synonym for Aethiopia in ancient Greek and Latin texts. His account allocates all the agency behind the Aksumite conversion to Christianity to Frumentius, a Syrian refugee who ostensibly ends up in Aksum after being captured from a merchant’s ship. Rufinus claims that Frumentius “promoted the seed of Christianity in the country” by facilitating the construction of Christian conventicles throughout the kingdom (Hist. Eccles. 10.9–10). He further adds that after being designated the “bishop in India,” Frumentius converted “a countless number of barbarians” there to Christianity by performing “apostolic miracles” (Hist. Eccles. 10.9–10). Despite the confessional nature of his report, scholarship on the question of Aksum’s adoption of Christianity has been hampered by an overreliance on Rufinus’s account, as well as by a failure to incorporate the Aksumite turn to Christianity within a broader view of contemporaneous trends in the late antique world.

Models like pagan monotheism, henotheism, and megatheism are intended to capture the fact that around the same time as Aksum’s conversion to Christianity, various states were adopting and promoting monotheistic cults in places where polytheism was prevalent (Mitchell and van Nuffelen 2010, 16–33). These episodes reveal that as a local community or regional kingdom’s foreign relations become more critical to sustaining its economy and material conditions, supreme deities that can transcend the parochialism of local cults become useful totems for forging political bonds. During these moments, the formation of sociopolitical alliances across regional and/or national boundaries can be facilitated or even amplified by the governing powers. Both types of strategic use of religion are demonstrated in Aksumite inscriptions and coins dating to the fourth century, and it is possible to examine the links between state and religion through an analysis of Aksum’s first Christian king, ʿEzana. Fortunately for historians, a substantial amount of written, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence for the reign of ʿEzana has survived. In fact, no other figure in Aksumite history is attested more widely in the surviving record than the first ruler to adopt Christianity. Three of his victory inscriptions illustrate the significance of religious symbolism for Aksumite rulers who sought to legitimize their rules, unify the various tribes in their kingdoms, and consolidate their international alliances.

Military Cults in Aksumite Religious Statecraft

The first set of ʿEzana’s inscriptions under consideration here survives in both Gǝʿǝz and Greek and appears to have been inscribed prior to his adoption of monotheism and his conversion to Christianity. The opening words of these inscriptions reveal that, at the time of their composition, ʿEzana maintained the Aksumite custom of promoting a war god, who is enshrined in both Gǝʿǝz and Greek theonyms. This bilingual inscription, as preserved in RIE 185 and 270, shares some remarkable similarities with the strategies of legitimation employed by Constantine I during his military campaigns of the second and third decades of the fourth century, during which he fought to overtake the empire as sole ruler. Prior to his own famous conversion to Christianity, Constantine celebrated his military victories by minting coins in honor of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. By the fourth century, the cult of Sol Invictus had gained a large following among Rome’s armies, which had become much more powerful since they increasingly determined who would ascend to the throne during the so-called crisis of the third century. Constantine’s veneration of Sol Invictus followed on the heels of earlier Roman generals, from Aurelian (r. 270–275) to his father Constantius I (r. 286–306), both of whom promoted the cult of Sol Invictus in order to secure the loyalties of Rome’s legions (Stephenson 2009, 62–86).

1. Additionally, ʿEzana’s association of his reign with the more widely recognizable god Mahrem may have allowed him to transcend localized tribal traditions among his soldiers. That his army was organized along distinct clan lines is demonstrated by internal evidence from another one of his inscriptions, namely RIE 189, which provides a list of the different divisions within his army (Hatke 2013, 114–15). Given that the Aksumite military force was made up of coalitions from different tribes with ostensibly different religious traditions, ʿEzana’s veneration of a high god that could transcend local differences would have been quite useful as a strategy of religious statecraft. Although the evidence is much too sparse to allow reconstructing the Aksumite pantheon and cosmology, the surviving record suggests that high gods like Asthar and Mahrem appear to have been worshipped throughout the Horn region and in South Arabia by this time (Munro-Hay 1991, 196–98).
2. ʿEzana’s Invasion of Nubia
3. Cotton had also become an important commodity during the Roman period, by which point Nubians were using it for the production of textiles (Chowdhury and Buth 1971; Wild et al. 2007). The capture of tens of thousands of sheep, oxen, and camels described in RIE 189 further attests to the centrality of livestock for the regional economy, which aligns with the fact that the rich soil adjacent to the Nile would have allowed for the grazing of large herds. While they parallel one another in their descriptions of ʿEzana’s military campaigns in Nubia, RIE 189 and RIE 271 propagandize the resulting victories in two starkly different religious grammars. The first, RIE 189, espouses a generic monotheism (or megatheism) directed internally to Aksum’s nonChristian inhabitants. The second, RIE 271, promotes explicitly Christian beliefs aimed outwardly toward the newly Christian empire of the Romans. The contrasting religious grammars that characterize RIE 189 and RIE 271 indicate that ʿEzana sought to enshrine his military victories and declare his political ambitions in terms that would have simultaneously appealed to both a domestic and a foreign audience. Not incidentally, the first inscription is written in Gǝʿǝz, and the latter in Greek.