THE THRONE OF ADULIS
EMBLEMS OF ANTIQUITY
Font of Life
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GARRY WILLS
Medusa’s Gaze
The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese
MARINA BELOZERSKAYA
The Throne of Adulis
Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam
G. W. BOWERSOCK
THE THRONE of ADULIS
RED SEA WARS ON THE EVE OF ISLAM
G. W. BOWERSOCK
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bowersock, G. W. (Glen Warren), 1936–
The Throne of Adulis : Red Sea wars on the eve of Islam / G. W. Bowersock.
p. cm.—(Emblems of antiquity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-973932-5
1. Himyar (Yemen)—History—6th century. 2. Jews—Yemen (Republic)—Himyar—History—
6th century. 3. Arabian Peninsula—History—To 622. 4. Aksum (Kingdom)—History 6th century.
5. Red Sea Region—History—6th century. 6. Judaism—Relations—Christianity—History—6th century. 7. Christianity and other religions—Judaism—History—6th century. I. Title.
II. Series: Emblems of antiquity.
DS231.B69 2013
939.49—dc23 2012023593
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Maps and Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Timeline
PROLOGUE
Chapter One
THE THRONE
Chapter Two
A CHRISTIAN TRAVELER IN THE RED SEA
Chapter Three
PTOLEMY’S ELEPHANTS
Chapter Four
THE KINGDOM OF AXUM
Chapter Five
CHRISTIANITY COMES TO AXUM
Chapter Six
JUDAISM COMES TO ḤIMYAR
Chapter Seven
THE ETHIOPIAN INVASION OF 525
Chapter Eight
ENTRY OF THE GREAT POWERS
Chapter Nine
RECKONING
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Maps and Illustrations
Map 1. Late Antique East Africa, map based on William Y. Adams, Nubia. Corridor to Africa (Princeton, 1984), p. 384.
Map 2. Late Antique Southwest Arabia, map based on I. Gajda, Le royaume de Ḥimyar à l’époque monothéiste (Paris, 2009), p. 139.
Fig. 1. Drawing of the Adulis Throne in Ethiopia as given in three manuscripts of Cosmas Indicopleustes, from W. Wolska-Conus, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographie Chrétienne, Vol. 1, Sources chrétiennes no. 141 (Paris, 1968), p. 367. 13
Fig. 2. Cosmas’ throne as imagined in DAE, p. 66. 19
Fig. 3. RIE Vol. 1, no. 185 bis, text II face B, (Axum). Photo courtesy of Finbarr Barry Flood.
Fig. 4. RIE Vol. 1, no. 185 bis, complete stele.
Fig. 5. Gold coin of the Christian Axumite king Ousanas, fifth century AD.
Fig. 6. Marco Polo’s reception by Kublai Khan atop four elephants, as shown in L. Oeconomos, Byzantion 20 (1950), 177–178 with plate 1.
Fig. 7. CIH 541, RdA p. 90.
Fig. 8. The Axum Stele. Photo courtesy of Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.
Preface
The idea of a short book centered on the inscribed throne at Adulis first occurred to me over thirty years ago when I read an article that A. F. L. Beeston published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 43 (1980), 453–458. His arresting title was “The Authorship of the Adulis Throne.” Because I had long recognized that anything from the pen of Freddy Beeston deserved careful attention, I read his article, which touched upon work that I was doing at the time on Roman Arabia, with particular interest. Some ten years before that, Freddy had attended a lecture I gave in Oxford on Roman policy in the Near East, and his conversation was then, as it always was, convivial, instructive, and memorable. We met again occasionally after that, but his work was never far from my desk. Freddy had rightly identified the inscription on the Adulis Throne as a still unsolved problem. Although he was not concerned with the other, and much earlier, inscription on the stele that lay beside the throne, his reflections on the throne text showed his legendary mastery of South Arabian language and epigraphy.
Like most scholars today, I cannot accept the hypothesis that Freddy advanced, albeit with due caution, as an interpretation of the throne inscription, and at this late date there is no point in trying to engage with it or refute it. His notion that a Ḥimyarite king put up the throne and its inscription cannot now withstand the powerful evidence of the Ethiopic epigraphy at Axum or of the many other thrones for which traces survive. But Freddy saw clearly that the throne at Adulis, which first received widespread attention only when J. W. McCrindle published his English translation of Cosmas Indicopleustes in 1897, could be a fundamental document for understanding the complex wars and religious struggles that played out in the Red Sea area in the three or four centuries before Islam. Freddy’s article in 1980 was pathbreaking.
When I published my Roman Arabia in 1983, the Jewish kingdom of converted Arabs in Ḥimyar had seemed to me perhaps the most extraordinary of all the nations of the late antique Near East. As this kingdom lay outside the territory of Roman Arabia, I had contemplated a complementary volume entitled Jewish Arabia, but at that time it seemed that such a title might bring more misunderstanding than enlightenment. The documentation then was considerably more exiguous than it is now. But with all that we have learned in recent years, the story of the Jews of Ḥimyar, in the context of their relations with Ethiopian Christians across the Red Sea, has become much more accessible. This is what I have attempted to explore by examining the manifold implications of the Adulis Throne from the Ptolemies to Muḥammad.
I have had the good fortune of working with a former Princeton graduate student, George Hatke, who had similar
ly discovered, entirely on his own, the fascination of the Ḥimyarite–Ethiopian confrontation. I was delighted when he invited me to serve as a reader for his thesis, directed by my friend and colleague Michael Cook. Hatke successfully defended his work in November 2010, and I hope very much that the thesis will be published in the near future. It currently bears the title Africans in Arabia Felix: Aksumite Relations with Ḥimyar in the Sixth Century C.E. and will be an invaluable resource for scholars who wish to do further research on this topic.
Finally, some of the issues I have raised in my final chapters in connection with the struggles between Ethiopia and South Arabia overlap the first of three lectures that I delivered in Jerusalem in April 2011 in memory of Menahem Stern. These lectures, Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity, carry forward the Byzantine–Persian conflict and the rise of Muḥammad into the seventh century. They examine the Persian capture of Jerusalem in 614 (second lecture) and the collapse of the Persian empire (third lecture). With my head full of this material, I responded with enthusiasm to Stefan Vranka’s imaginative idea for a series of volumes on emblematic objects or events in history by reviving the excitement I had felt long before in reading Freddy Beeston’s demonstration that the Adulis Throne evoked the whole complex world of Red Sea imperialism and religion. Hence I owe no less to Stefan than to Freddy for making this book happen. It will be obvious to any scholar in the field how much I owe to the pioneering work of Christian Julien Robin and his colleagues in Paris. The recent growth of South Arabian epigraphy, of which Robin is a master, has provided welcome confirmation of traditions and suppositions that have been discussed for centuries. As so often in the past, I am deeply indebted to Christopher Jones of Harvard, my friend and colleague of more than fifty years, for a critical reading of these pages.
G. W. Bowersock
Princeton, August 2012
Abbreviations
BSOAS
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (London).
BASOR
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
CAC
Catalogue of the Aksumite Coins in the British Museum, ed. Stuart Munro-Hay (London, 1999).
CIH
Corpus Inscriptionum Himyariticarum: Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, Pars Quarta inscriptiones himyariticas et sabaeas continens.
CRAI
Comptes-Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris).
DAE
Deutsche Aksum-Expedition (Berlin, 1913). Vol. 2, Daniel Krencker, Ältere Denkmäler Nordabessiniens. Vol. 4: Enno Littmann, Sabäische, griechische und altabessinische Inschriften.
FGH
Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Jacoby).
FHG
Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, ed. C. Müller.
FHN
Fontes Historiae Nubiorum. Vol. 2: From the Mid-Fifth to the First Century BC, and Vol. 3: From the First to the Sixth Century AD, ed. Tormod Eide, Tomas Hägg, Richard Holton Pierce, László Török (Bergen, 1998).
JRS
Journal of Roman Studies.
JSAI
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam.
MarAr
Le martyre de Saint Aréthas et de ses compagnons (BHG 166), ed. Marina Detoraki with translation by Joëlle Beaucamp (Paris, 2007).
RdA
Routes d’Arabie. Archéologie et Histoire du Royaume d’Arabie Saoudite, ed. Ali Ibrahim Al-Ghabban et al., Catalogue de l’exposition au Louvre (Paris, 2010).
RIE
Recueil des Inscriptions de l’Éthiopie des périodes pré-axoumite et axoumite. Vol. 1. Les documents and Vol. 2 Les planches (Paris, 1991). Vol. 3 Traductions et commentaires. A. Les inscriptions grecques (Paris, 2000).
SEG
Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum.
TAPA
Transactions of the American Philological Association.
Timeline
246–241 BC
Third Syrian War of Ptolemy III Euergetes
27 BC
Foundation of the Roman Empire under Augustus
All dates below are CE/AD.
ca. 50
Composition of the Periplus of the Red Sea
ca. 200–270
First Ethiopian occupation of Ḥimyar
ca. 330–380
Reign of Aezanas at Axum in Ethiopia
ca. 340
Conversion of Aezanas to Christianity
ca. 380
Conversion of Ḥimyar to Judaism
ca. 450
MḤDYS negus in Axum, imitator of Constantine
ca. 470
Martyrdom of Azqīr in Ḥimyar
491–518
Anastasius Emperor in Byzantium
502
Embassy of Euphrasius to Kinda
518–527
Justin Emperor in Byzantium
ca. 517–533
Kālēb (Ella Asbeha) negus in Axum
522–525
Yūsuf, Jewish king in Ḥimyar
523
Massacre of Christians at Najrān
524
Embassy of Abraham to Naṣrid al Mundhir and Conference of Ramla
ca. 524
Visit of Cosmas Indicopleustes to Adulis
525
Ethiopian Invasion of Arabia and death of Yūsuf
527–565
Justinian Emperor in Byzantium
528
Embassy of Abraham to Kinda
530
Embassy of Nonnosus to Kinda and Axum
531
Embassy of Abraham to Kinda
ca. 527–565
Ethopian Abraha King in Ḥimyar
548
Conference at Mārib
ca. 549
Cosmas writes the Christian Topography
552
Abraha’s campaign into northern Arabia
ca. 565
Sassanian Persians take control of Ḥimyar
ca. 570
Traditional date for the birth of Muḥammad
602–610
Phocas Emperor at Byzantium
614
Capture of Jerusalem by the Sassanian Persians
622
Hijra (migration) of Muḥammad from Mecca to Medina
610–641
Heraclius Emperor at Byzantium
Map 1. Late Antique East Africa, map based on William Y. Adams, Nubia. Corridor to Africa (Princeton, 1984), p. 384.
Map 2. Late Antique Southwest Arabia, map based on I. Gajda, Le royaume de Ḥimyar à l’époque monothéiste (Paris, 2009), p. 139.
THE THRONE OF ADULIS
PROLOGUE
In the southwestern part of Arabia, known in antiquity as Ḥimyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century AD, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. After that for just over a century its kings ruled, with one significant interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecution of its Christian population. The record has survived through many centuries in Arabic historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts of martyred Christians. For a long time incredulous historians had been inclined to see little more than a local monotheism overlaid with language and features that had been borrowed from Jews who had settled in the area. It was only toward the end of the last century that enough inscribed stones turned up to prove definitively the veracity of these surprising accounts. We can now say that an entire nation of ethnic Arabs in southwestern Arabia had converted to Judaism and imposed it as the state religion.
This bizarre but militant kingdom in Ḥimyar was eventually overthrown by an invasion of forces from Christian Ethiopia on the other side of the Red Sea. They set sail from East Africa, where they were joined by reinforcements from the Christian emperor in Constantinople. In the territory of Ḥimyar they engaged and destroyed the arm
ies of the Jewish king and finally brought an end to what was arguably the most improbable, yet portentous upheaval in the history of Arabia before Islam. Few scholars, apart from specialists in ancient South Arabia or early Christian Ethiopia, have been aware of these events, but a vigorous and talented team led by Christian Julien Robin in Paris has recently pioneered research on this Yemenite Jewish kingdom.
No one can look at the kingdom of Jewish Arabia without constant reference to its neighbors—the Ethiopians at Axum in East Africa, the Byzantines in Constantinople, the Jews in Jerusalem, the Sassanian Persians in Mesopotamia, and the Arab sheikhs who controlled the great tribes of the desert. Soon after 523 all these powerful interests had to confront a savage pogrom that the Jewish king of the Arabs launched against the Christians in the city of Najrān. The king himself reported in excruciating detail to his Arab and Persian allies about the massacres he had inflicted on all Christians who refused to convert to Judaism. News of his infamous actions rapidly spread across the Middle East. A Christian who happened to be present at a meeting of an Arab sheikh at which the Jewish king reported on his persecution was horrified and immediately sent out letters to inform Christian communities elsewhere. When word of the pogrom reached Axum in Christian Ethiopia, the king who had his capital there seized the opportunity to rally his troops and cross the Red Sea in aid of the Arabian Christians.
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