Throne of Adulis

by Bowersock, G. W.

  If Cosmas can be trusted in reporting that he was present at Adulis twenty-five years before he was writing, he was there in 523 or 524, precisely the years in which Symeon of Beth Arsham was doing his best to arouse support for the persecuted Christians in Ḥimyar after the pogrom at Najrān. It is therefore of the greatest interest that Cosmas reports that the Ethiopian negus, Ella Asbeha (Kālēb) was planning at that moment an overseas campaign against the Ḥimyarites. This can hardly be a coincidence. After all, it was Symeon’s intention to summon help for the surviving Christians in Arabia. What is particularly telling in Cosmas’ report is that Kālēb ordered the inscriptions on the Adulis throne and stele to be copied at that very time for his personal reference, and this suggests that he saw his forthcoming invasion in the context of earlier Axumite expeditions overseas.

  The most recent of these expeditions had been, as we have seen, Kālēb’s own just five or six years before. In that expedition he installed a Christian king in Ḥimyar, Ma‘dīkarib Ya‘fur. The background for this invasion in about 518 helps to explain the violence that broke out at Najrān in 523, and it needs to be looked at carefully. It has become apparent in recent years that Kālēb’s first intervention in Arabia was not an effort to subvert the Jewish monarchy in Ḥimyar, which had begun over a century before, but to reinforce a Christian presence that had somehow managed to supplant the Jewish rulers and assume control of the country in the early sixth century. Arabian inscriptions reveal a king called Marthad’ilān Yanūf in Ḥimyar between 504 and 509. There is no explicit evidence that he was Christian, but if he is identical with the Marthad, son of Abdkulāl, this might be inferred from the reported Christianity of his father Abdkulāl in Arabic sources. But such a tenuous inference is immensely strengthened by an intriguing fragment from the Byzantine chronicler John Diakrinomenos, who is cited in the Ecclesiastical History of Theodoros Anagnostes.1

  The fragment states that the Ḥimyarites, who are described as a client nation of the Persians and dwelling in the extreme south of Arabia, had been Jews from the beginning (anekathen in Greek) when the Queen of the South, who can be understood here, as in the New Testament, to be the biblical Queen of Sheba, went to visit King Solomon. This startling information shows yet again how the Queen’s visit to Jerusalem figured no less significantly in the Arabian tradition than in the Ethiopian, and it indicates a belief, however indefensible, that some Jews had been in the peninsula for a very long time, even before the expulsion from Palestine under Vespasian. John Diakrinomenos clearly believes that the Ḥimyarites had not only been Jews from time immemorial but were still Jews in the early sixth century, since the reigning emperor is identified as Anastasius. The chronicler states that it was in his reign that the Ḥimyarites became Christian, and that they requested a bishop. In a separate fragment he gives the bishop’s name as Silvanus. Inasmuch as the dates on the inscriptions of Marthad’ilān Yanūf (504 and 509) fall comfortably within the reign of Anastasius (491–518), the testimony of John Diakrinomenos seems entirely credible when assessed together with the Arabic reports about the king’s father.

  Marthad’ilān Yanūf’s successor appears to have been precisely the man whom Kālēb set up as king in the aftermath of his first invasion of Arabia in ca. 518, Ma‘dīkarib Ya‘fur. And that was the person whom the fanatically Jewish Yūsuf As’ar Yath’ar (Joseph) succeeded, as he said himself in the letter he sent to the Council at Ramla in 523, as quoted by Symeon of Beth Arsham: “The king that the Ethiopians put in charge of our country has died, and winter has come. The Ethiopians were unable to come against us, and I have taken power throughout the country of the Ḥimyarites.”

  All this means that the first invasion of Ethiopian forces in the sixth century was not designed to replace a Jewish king with a Christian one but in fact to reinforce a Christian presence that had been there for more than a decade. It is not impossible that the Christians at this time had been suffering some kind of persecution, as the surviving chapter summary in the Book of the Ḥimyarites appears to suggest,2 but if so this could only imply subversive Jewish activities against the relatively new Christian regime. Confessional solidarity would undoubtedly have impelled the negus at Axum to undertake this campaign, but the irredentism that had been at the core of Ethiopian foreign policy since the late third century must have been equally decisive. He wasted no time in boasting of his achievements even before readying the forces that he called together once Yūsuf’s massacres at Najrān and elsewhere became known.

  Kālēb publicly commemorated his first invasion of Arabia at Axum on an inscription in Ge‘ez in the South Arabian musnad script,3 clearly in imitation of the inscriptions that Aezanas had so conspicuously set up in Axum more than a century before with his bold, if empty, claims to sovereignty in southwest Arabia. Kālēb’s text about the first occupation of Ḥimyar identified his commander as a certain Ḥayyān, and it is thanks to the reappearance of this man’s name in the Syriac Book of the Ḥimyarites as Ḥyōnā in the context of that very expedition that we can be sure that the inscription refers to it.4 Kālēb’s text proudly asserts, “I built a shrine in Ḥimyar at ‘QN’L, zealous for the name of the Son of God, in Whom I believe, and I built His Gabaz and sanctified it by the power of God.” The location of the shrine in Ḥimyar has been tentatively identified with the port of Okelis, near the straits of Bāb el Mandab, although the correlation between the name in Ethiopic and the Greek name Okelis cannot be considered definitive, and some pious wordplay may be suspected in the word QN[’Y] “zealous” that follows the toponym ‘QN’L. What Gabaz or Gabaza (GBZ in the Ethiopic) was and where Kālēb built it is not perfectly clear, but it would appear to be the cathedral in Axum, which is known to have born this epithet, meaning “guardian” or “protector.”5 The text of the inscription refers to “His [God’s] Gabaz,” and this would only make sense as a reference to a great sacred building. We have already observed that Gabaza is also the name of the actual port where ships anchored in the Gulf of Zula for commerce that came through Adulis, although as a toponym this name would reflect the sense of “custodian.”

  The governor at Adulis had presumably provided the negus with information about the texts that could be read on the ancient throne at the site. This information must have piqued Kālēb’s curiosity to the point of ordering copies of the inscriptions to be made for him. His order will have followed the public inscriptions commemorating his first expedition to Arabia and reflected his awareness of the horrors that Yūsuf was by then inflicting upon the Christians in his kingdom.

  Although Kālēb may be presumed to have had his own expansionist reasons for launching the invasion in 525 in support of the Ḥimyarite Christians, the Greek narrative of the martyrdom of Arethas provides a full account of the diplomacy that led up to it as well as the details of the expedition across the Red Sea. Justin, the emperor at Byzantium at the time, asked Timothy, the archbishop of Alexandria, to intercede with the Ethiopian ruler to take action, and Justin even addressed a letter of his own to him. He observed that the Ḥimyarite king had put to the sword the Christians of Najrān, which, he points out, included not only Ethiopians but also Romans (meaning Byzantines) and Persians. Justin urged Kālēb, by the Holy Trinity, “to go forth, whether by sea or by land, against the abominable and criminal Jew.” He offered to supply troops of his own that he proposed to bring to East Africa for the purpose. He desired and anticipated complete annihilation and anathema for the Ḥimyarite ruler.6

  The author of the martyrology of Arethas appears to have had available many logistical details about the fleet that assembled for crossing the Red Sea. A force of 120,000 men was to be transported in ships from the coast of East Africa as well as from Aila (modern Aqaba) in the northern extremity of the Red Sea at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. A contingent from Barbaria, which evidently meant Somalia, perished on the way to the launching of the expedition. The ships were assembled at Gabaza, glossed in the martyrium, as we have already seen, as an anchorage
in the Gulf of Zula on the territory of Adulis. The map that has been transmitted in three manuscripts of Cosmas clearly indicates that the place known as Gabaza was located directly on the water of the Gulf of Zula. So the negus went up to Adulis and thence to the anchorage at Gabaza to lead his armada of seventy ships to the southwestern part of the Arabian peninsula.

  The coast of Arabia directly opposite the Gulf of Zula is full of reefs and unsuitable for a naval landing. So the armada presumably went somewhat towards the south on the coast. The martyrium of Arethas reports that Yūsuf and his Ḥimyarites built an iron chain, kept afloat by wooden planks, to prevent the Ethiopians from landing.7 Remarkably, this chain also figures in three South Arabian inscriptions, in which it is called the chain of MDBN, a name that is assumed to indicate its location. The letters are customarily rendered as Maddabān and are seen as cognate with Mandab, which is the well-known name of the closest point of contact between East Africa and Arabia in the southern part of the Red Sea. Obviously the chain cannot have been placed across the strait that is now called Bāb al Mandab, because it would have made no sense to block north-south traffic. But a barrier to access on the coast close by, possibly at Shaykh Sa‘īd, has found favor with many scholars. A thirteenth-century Arab writer, Ibn al-Mujāwir, citing a writer from the eleventh century, reports that when the Ethiopians came to invade Arabia with cavalry and infantry the Arabs stretched out a chain to block them.8 Whatever this chain was like and wherever it was placed, it was prominent enough to leave enduring traces both in the inscriptions of that time as well as in the later Arabic literary tradition.

  The success of Kālēb’s second invasion of Arabia was celebrated by the negus himself in a great inscription of which substantial fragments survive. It refers to the port (marsa) in which he arrived, although the name that followed has unfortunately been lost, and to the help of God in bringing him to shore—conceivably after finding a way through the chain. He boasts that he killed the king of Ḥimyar and burned the palace of Saba.9 The inscription with its celebration of Ethiopian victories in Arabia is extraordinary in many ways. First, it was not set up in Axum or indeed anywhere in East Africa, as the records of Kālēb’s earlier involvement in Ḥimyar and the campaigns of his predecessors had been. It was set up in the Arabian peninsula itself, at Mārib, a great city of South Arabia. Second, it was inscribed not in the Sabaic language of the region but in classical Ethiopic (Ge‘ez) with a fully vocalized script that is read, unlike the languages in Arabia, from left to right.

  Figure 4. The entire stele containing the inscription in figure 3. This stele displays texts in Greek, Ge‘ez in Sabaic script, and Ge‘ez in unvocalized Ethiopic script. Photo courtesy of Finbarr Barry Flood.

  So here in the Sabaean heartland we see Kālēb boasting of his conquests in the conquered land itself, and in his own language and script. Conceivably this text was meant for the edification of those Ethiopian Christians who remained behind when the negus had returned to Axum. Kālēb’s choice of language and script is a startling reversal of the policy of both Aezanas and of Kālēb himself when they had set up their inscriptions in Axum. There, in addition to Greek, the Ethiopic was written in the musnad script of South Arabia from right to left. It has never been clear just how many residents of Axum could have actually read these inscriptions, although they would certainly have impressed merchants and other visitors from the Arabian peninsula. But Kālēb used Ethiopic script for his own language when it appeared on his coinage (Fig. 5).

  Kālēb’s Mārib inscription is extraordinary in yet a third aspect. It is studded with biblical references, including a Gospel text. The fragments of the stone show an unmistakable echo of Matthew 6. 33 in the surviving words “seek first the righteousness” and “will be added to you.” Although these phrases imply a slightly different textual tradition from the texts of the Ge‘ez Bible, they are clearly based on “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”10 There are also notable citations from the Psalter. Psalms 67 [68]: 1 is invoked to show that God put Kālēb’s enemies to flight. The biblical text is “Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered,” for which the inscription fragment gives, “As the Psalm says, ‘He will rise up. … [ene]mies before him.’” Equally arresting are other paraphrases from the Psalms. For example, Psalms 65 [66]:17 reads “I cried unto Him with my mouth, and He was extolled with my tongue.” On the Mārib stone we find “I cried to Him with my mouth and shouted to Him with my tongue.” At another point we can see the language of Psalms 19 [20]: 7–8: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God. They are brought down and fallen. But we are risen, and stand upright.” The text of the inscription gives something very close to this: “Now they have horses and chariots, while we will be great by the name of God our Lord; they have stumbled and fallen but we have risen. …” To what extent these remarkable allusions and near-quotations inform us about the date of the earliest Ethiopic translations of the Bible remains an open question, but they leave no doubt whatever about Kālēb’s representation of himself as carrying out his mission in Arabia under biblical authority.

  Figure 5. A gold coin of the Christian Axumite king Ousanas in the second half of the fifth century AD. He appears with a turret-crown on the obverse, and, on the reverse, the headcloth traditionally associated with Ethiopian kings. The legends are in Greek on either side of a cross, with King Ousanas named on the obverse and “the grace of God” on the reverse. Nothing is known of this king beyond his coinage, but it influenced the issues and self-representation of Kālēb, who added Ethiopic script. Images courtesy of the American Numismatic Society, where the coin is 1973. 108.2 in the Islamic cabinet.

  Another passage in the Mārib text seems to provide a striking example of the legend of Ethiopia’s descent from the union of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, as it is fully told in the Kebra Nagast. Kālēb makes claim to “the glory of David” (kebra dāwīt). This epigraphic allusion to the house of David finds an echo in the literary text of the Arethas martyrium, when Timothy of Alexandria is said to have joined with a crowd of Egyptian monks in urging Kālēb to lead an expedition to Ḥimyar. The author of the narrative declares that Timothy urged him to go forth, “just as Samuel had urged David against Amalek.”11 Of course the biblical tradition (I Kings [I Samuel] 15:17–18) has Samuel sending Saul against the Amalekites, not David, but the error in the martyrium is a telling indication of the reliability and probable contemporaneity of the martyrium’s source. It reflects Kālēb’s own presentation of himself as a new David in the inscription at Mārib.

  Other parts of the Mārib stones with Kālēb’s triumphalist text about the invasion survived into modern times but have regrettably been destroyed. Even so, the fragments that we have afford a precious glimpse into the religious justification for the expedition of 525 in fulfillment of the long simmering irredentist ambitions of Axum. The biblical tone of Kālēb’s inscription accords well with his mission of avenging the deaths of many Christians at Najrān and of assuring the security of a new generation of Christians who would reside in Arabia.

  The building or restoration of churches in Ḥimyar was undoubtedly a part of Kālēb’s mission during the period of settlement after his victory and before his withdrawal and the designation of a certain Sumyafa Ashwa‘ as his chosen king—the man whose name Procopius hellenized as Esimphaios.12 Regrettably, much of the testimony for Kālēb’s building policy occurs in a late and highly unreliable source, the life of St. Gregentius, a nonexistent saint, who cannot be taken so seriously as some scholars are inclined to do.13 But there is no doubt that the Ethiopians built one or more churches in addition to the one provisionally ascribed to Okelis during the first expedition to Arabia. In his letter to Ramla, as we have it from Symeon of Beth Arsham, Yūsuf had reported that the Ethiopians had boasted of building a church “in our country” and that he had converted it into a synagogue after killing the Chris
tians who were guarding it.14 The new letter that has been ascribed to Symeon opens with the sanguinary details about Yūsuf’s attack on the Ethiopian church in Ẓaphār, and it includes an account of the murder of three hundred Ethiopian Christians and the burning of their church.15 Such a horrendous episode from a general persecution that is best known for the massacre at Najrān finds confirmation in three South Arabian inscriptions that document a massacre of Christians at Ẓaphār and the destruction of churches there in 523.16 There can be no doubt, therefore, that the Ethiopians had built at least one church in Ẓaphār during their first invasion, and, since the ecclesiastical historian Philostorgius knew of a church in that city that Theophilus of India had built in the fourth century, the Ethiopian one in the sixth century might possibly have been a restoration.17 This was clearly the building that Yūsuf attacked in 523. According to the martyrium of Arethas, Kālēb built a church at Ẓaphār after his defeat of Yūsuf,18 and we may suspect that this was another restoration of the previously restored church that had been demolished only two years before. The building and destruction of churches were palpable manifestations of the Christian and Jewish powers that confronted each other in Ḥimyar between 518 and 525.

  Two other buildings at Ẓaphār ascribed to Kālēb in the life of St. Gregentius (ch. 9) are beyond identification or credibility. Nevertheless, we are fortunate that so much of the surviving evidence for Najrān and Ḥimyar is early, from the middle of the sixth century, and it is manifestly in close touch with the events themselves. New excavations at Ẓaphār led by Paul Yule, who has pioneered the archaeology of late antique Yemen, may eventually provide a clearer picture of what was happening there in the first half of the sixth century.19

  Whether or not Kālēb himself retired to live in a monastery after he returned from Arabia remains an open question. The final chapter of the martyrium reports as much, and there are no documentary references to him after this, whether epigraphic or numismatic. Still less is there any proof that he sent his royal crown to Jerusalem to be displayed on the front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, although the martyrium reports that he did that too. What is clear, both from Procopius and the Ḥimyarite inscriptions, is that the king he installed in Ḥimyar when he withdrew was soon overthrown by other Ethiopian Christians who had remained in the region. Their revolt raised up a new and powerful Christian ruler who would be the last great Ethiopian king in Arabia.