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THE ARABIAN KINGDOM OF ABRAHA

THE WESTERN PART of the Arabian peninsula, extending southward from ‘Aqaba to the Indian Ocean, lay in the midst of a network of international power and trade. The territory of the Ḥijāz in the northwest corner, the low-lying strip of Tihāma along the western coast, the interior plateau of Najd with the oasis of al-Yamāma to the east, and Ḥimyar to the south, roughly encompassing modern Yemen, all faced a formidable array of powers on every side. These were, above all, Byzantium, which controlled Palestine and Syria to the north, and Sassanian Persia, which dominated Mesopotamia and Iran to the northeast. But there was also international commerce, originating and terminating in the Red Sea to the west. Its traders sailed in the Indian Ocean between the Persian Gulf on the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula and ports on the Egyptian and Ethiopian coast, and this meant that the two competing empires could not ignore the economic role of Arabia. Even before the opening up of commercial routes by sea in the Hellenistic period, western Arabia had provided overland routes through which the perfumes and spices of the Ḥaḍramawt made their way northward into Transjordan and Syria and westward to the Mediterranean.
The whole region was rich in history and traditions. Before either the Byzantines or the Sassanians, the Romans had endeavored to keep watch on what was happening there. Under the Antonine emperors they had set up a military garrison in the Farasān islands, off the western Arabian coast in the Red Sea, clearly to ensure that commercial links between Arabia and Egypt were kept open.1 The Ḥijāz in the north had once constituted the lower part of the old Nabataean kingdom, with its city of tombs at Madā’in Ṣāliḥ, which was a kind of lesser Petra, and it was only natural for the whole area to be incorporated into the province of Arabia that Trajan created out of the Nabataean kingdom. Farther south in the interior, an indigenous kingdom of the Ḥujrid tribe of Kinda had spawned an influential settlement at Qaryat al-Fāw, where sculpture and wall paintings revealed bold appropriations of Greek models.2 At the same time at Yathrib, Jewish settlers, who may have entered the peninsula in the aftermath of the revolt against Titus in Jerusalem, built up communities that eventually rivaled those of the tribe of the Quraysh, who were in charge at Mecca to the south. Still further south, a vigorous Christian community at Najrān was proof of the spread of Byzantium’s state religion into one of the key peripheral territories outside its empire.
The Ethiopians at Axum had occupied Ḥimyar in Southwest Arabia during the early third century when they were still pagans, possibly in response to rivalries that the Antonine garrison at Farasān had been designed to forestall. Inexplicably the same Ethiopians withdrew after a little less than a hundred years and retreated to their capital in the Horn of Africa. But their departure left the region prey to aggressive Arab tribes that converted to Judaism in the late fourth century and established a kingdom of their own in Ḥimyar.3 The adoption of Judaism and the name of Israel may have been the outcome of an all but invisible spread of monotheism earlier in the fourth century from Jewish settlements in the peninsula. But by an astonishing coincidence this dramatic development occurred just as the Ethiopians on the other side of the Red Sea were abandoning their old gods and converting to Christianity.4 Not surprisingly the young Byzantine empire, based in Constantinople, and the somewhat older Persian empire of the Sassanians, whose capital was at Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, eyed with concern these transitions in Arabia because they conspicuously intersected their own zones of influence.
The tribal character of the Arabian people posed diplomatic problems for any large imperial government that had a vested interest in the economic, military, and religious potential of a complex society that lay so close to its frontiers. Byzantium made an effort to reinvigorate the old Roman system of client kings by working through its chosen Arab allies, the tribal confederation of the Ghassānids, more accurately called Jafnids, after their ruling dynasty, which was based at Jabala in southern Syria. The Persians countered by supporting clients of their own, another tribal confederation known as Lakhmids, but more accurately called Naṣrids, after a ruling dynasty that was located at al-Ḥīra, close to the border between Arabian and Persian territory.5 A significant population of Christians in the Naṣrid capital might have been the descendants of earlier Jewish settlers, and the support of this community by the Zoroastrian Persians reflected not only the international political imperatives of the time but the willingness of the leaders of divergent faiths to cooperate against a perceived common enemy.6
This kind of long-range diplomacy at the edges of Arabia was hardly sufficient to monitor, let alone control, the turbulent events of the remote and fragmented tribal societies both in the steppe and along the coast. When the Jewish kings of Ḥimyar began to persecute the Christians in their kingdom, this gave those Christian Ethiopians who nourished irredentist sympathies exactly the opportunity they needed to attempt to recover the southwest realm of the Arabian peninsula that they had abandoned several centuries before.
In AD 525 the reigning king of the Ethiopians at Axum, who bore the local title of negus, decided to invade Ḥimyar after taking the biblical name of Kālēb in addition to his birth name of Ella Asbeha. This momentous enterprise represented the culmination of his claims to rule over much of Yemen, much as his ancestors had several centuries earlier. His decision sprang from a deep irredentist strain in Ethiopian culture that looked to occupying southwestern Arabia. By his invasion Kālēb succeeded in annihilating the Jewish regime that been associated with a fanatical ruler Joseph (Yūsuf), who had launched a massacre of Christians at Najrān in 523. This horrifying event had served as justification for the Ethiopians’ invasion.7 The Byzantine emperor played a role in encouraging the negus, even though the Ethiopians’ Monophysite Christianity was different from Byzantium’s Chalcedonian orthodoxy.
Kālēb’s victory in Ḥimyar brought a definitive end to Ḥimyarite Judaism and replaced it with Christianity. In the region the Ethiopians installed a new ruler of their own, Sumyafa ‘Ashwa‘. But he did not last long, and, after a brief period of uncertainty, an Ethiopian general by the name of Abraha, who reportedly came from a servile background in the port city of Adulis, arose from the ranks of the occupying army as the new Christian Ethiopian king of Ḥimyar, and he clearly had no desire to be a surrogate for Kālēb.8 The Ethiopian soldiers in Arabia much preferred the agreeable coastal climate of Yemen to their homeland, and that is presumably why they opted to elevate one of their own and stand by him. Although Kālēb had clearly expected Abraha to be his surrogate in Arabia, it turned out that the new ruler had far more ambitious plans of his own. He declined to act as a puppet of the Axumite government and proceeded to govern independently and forcefully for several decades.9
Abraha then greedily assumed the whole range of titles that the kings of Ḥimyar had displayed in the past, titles to which the Ethiopian rulers had long aspired even when they had no legitimate claim to them. Abraha’s titulature was an explicit realization of Ethiopian irredentism in the Arabian peninsula. He proudly declared himself king of Saba, dhū-Raydān, Ḥaḍramawt, Yamanat, and the nomadic Arabs of Tawd and Tihāma. But the title he actually bore as ruler is less clear. He was, in the usual understanding of the Sabaic words that stand on a magnificent inscribed stele of 547, a “viceroy” (‘zly), or “deputy-king,” but for someone as proud and active as Abraha this does not seem very plausible. It makes much more sense to interpret the word ‘zly followed by mlkⁿ ’g‘zyⁿ as a way of showing that he was a ruler who held the title of king. He was equipped with an equally puzzling epithet, Rmḥs3, which has been well explained as meaning “courageous” by comparison with Arabic words deriving from “lance” or “spear,” although less plausible interpretations, such as a form of the Greek Rhōmaios, have also been proposed.10 But Procopius’s report that Abraha was the ex-slave of a Byzantine trader hardly deserves that much credibility.11
Abraha’s refusal to be a surrogate for the Ethiopian negus in Axum had accorded well with the desires of the Ethiopian soldiery that had refused to go back home. Whether Kālēb died or retreated to a monastery, there is no doubt that Abraha was left to manage his Arabian kingdom on his own, and he set about making major changes that buttressed the religion he established in the region.
The Ethiopian conquest of Ḥimyar marked the end of Judaism as a state religion, and the Christianity that replaced it seems to have been closely allied to traditions in northwest Arabia that were strongly influenced by Syriac. The inscriptions of Abraha differ strikingly from those of his short-lived predecessor in their use of Syriac borrowings for Christian terms, such as ruḥ for Spirit as opposed to Ethiopic manfas, and conspicuously in the Aramaic borrowing in Sabaic byt for church. The Greek ekklēsia, from Hellenic Christianity, is also incorporated in the name of Abraha’s great church at Ṣan‘ā’, al-Qalīs, with a name formed directly from the consonants of the Greek word.12 The implication of this language is that the Ethiopian imposition of Christianity in Ḥimyar did not entail the imposition of Ethiopian Christianity. It evidently served to reinvigorate the Christianity that was already there and had survived in the region for several centuries. This presumably meant that it need not have been Monophysite (non-Chalcedonian) and may well explain Byzantine support for the new government.
The rule of Abraha was a time of great consolidation in Ḥimyar, with the building of churches and a famous repair of the great dam, which had burst in the city of Mārib. To signal his role on the international diplomatic stage, Abraha convoked a great conference in that very city in 547, precisely when the dam had burst and required repair, and he commemorated this conference and the repair of the dam in a magnificent inscription.13 He brought together the leaders of the most powerful nations in the eastern Mediterranean at that time. These included delegates from Constantinople and Ctesiphon, who represented the two great empires that the Persian shah Khosroes would later describe in a letter to the Byzantine emperor Maurice as “the two eyes of the world.”14 Abraha also included representatives of the Jafnid clients of Byzantium, the Naṣrid clients of Persia, Justinian’s Arab governor (phylarch) in Palestine, and the Ethiopian negus in Axum.
Abraha’s church at Ṣan‘ā’ was one of the wonders of Arabia, and the Arabic tradition reports that stones and marble had been transported from the palace at Mārib to be incorporated in the great new building. Magnificent mosaics were adorned with crosses in silver and gold. The plan of the church appears to have been distinctly Syrian and may have been based upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Arabic sources report that the emperor in Constantinople sent both marble and mosaics, as well as craftsmen to execute the work.15 The church was clearly intended as a pilgrimage center, and hostels were set up to accommodate the pilgrims. Most remarkably, one of the Arab sources, the great history by al-Ṭabarī, suggests that the Qalīs was envisioned as a rival to the Ka‘ba in Mecca for the tribes of Arabia. Such a direct competition with the supremacy of Mecca among Arab pagans would naturally have been unsettling to the custodians of the Ka‘ba, the Quraysh of Mecca, and there is some reason to think that these people launched attacks against Christians and even attempted to profane the church in San‘ā’ with excrement.16 Not many years would pass before Abraha himself undertook an expedition against Mecca.
Inscription of Abraha from Mārib, Corpus Inscriptionum Himyariticarum 541, courtesy of Christian Julien Robin, Jeremy Schieccatte, and Laila Nehme.
But he had first to confront other opposition to his rule. Not long before he decided to convoke his international congress and ostentatiously repair the dam at Mārib, he had to deal with a revolt in the interior to the east. The leader was none other than Yazīd ibn Kabshat, from a branch of the tribe of Kinda, whom Abraha had appointed as governor over the Kindites. It seems as if Yazīd was able to mobilize those local aristocrats who had formerly supported the Ḥimyarite Jews against the Ethiopians and saw an opportunity to regain their old authority. The revolt spread southward into the Ḥaḍramawt befor...