Aksum and Nubia

Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

George Hatke

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780814760666
• eBook ISBN: 9780814762837
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

Aksum and Nubia assembles and analyzes the textual and archaeological
evidence of interaction between Nubia and the Ethiopian
kingdom of Aksum, focusing primarily on the fourth century
CE. Although ancient Nubia and Ethiopia have been the subject
of a growing number of studies in recent years, little attention has
been given to contact between these two regions. Hatke argues
that ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified area
politically, economically, or culturally. Rather, Nubia and Ethiopia
developed within very different regional spheres of interaction, as
a result of which the Nubian kingdom of Kush came to focus its
energies on the Nile Valley, relying on this as its main route of
contact with the outside world, while Aksum was oriented towards
the Red Sea and Arabia. In this way Aksum and Kush coexisted
in peace for most of their history, and such contact as they maintained
with each other was limited to small-scale commerce. Only
in the fourth century CE did Aksum take up arms against Kush,
and even then the conflict seems to have been related mainly to
security issues on Aksum's western frontier.
Although Aksum never managed to hold onto Kush for long, much
less dealt the final death-blow to the Nubian kingdom, as is often
believed, claims to Kush continued to play a role in Aksumite royal
ideology as late as the sixth century. Aksum and Nubia critically
examines the extent to which relations between two ancient African
states were influenced by warfare, commerce, and political
fictions.Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

1. Introduction

The Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum³ and the Nubian kingdom of Kush were two of the great African civilizations of antiquity. Both were expansionist polities linked to the outside world through long-distance trade and have left rich records of their respective histories in the form of monuments and inscriptions. Aksum dominated the northern highlands of Ethiopia from at least the turn of the Common Era down to the seventh century, Kush the middle Nile Valley as far south as the lower Blue Nile from the early ninth century BCE to the mid-fourth century CE. Thanks to these inscriptions, as well as to references in Graeco-Roman literature and foreign imports that have survived in the archaeological record, it is possible to reconstruct a fairly detailed history of how Aksum and Kush interacted with the outside world. Recent scholarship views foreign influences as playing a “continuing but fluctuating role” in Nubia,⁴ an observation which applies equally to Aksum and which has the benefit of acknowledging northeast Africa’s ties to the outside world without giving undue weight to the impact of foreign contacts, whether political, economic, or cultural, as agents of change. Unfortunately there is relatively little evidence of Aksumite contact with Kush. No mention of Aksum has yet been found in Kushite inscriptions, and though we find references to Nubia and its peoples in inscriptions of the Aksumite kings Ousanas (c. 310-330 CE) and ‘Ēzānā (c. 330-370 CE), such epigraphic material has long suffered from misinterpretation, in addition to which the extent and nature of Aksumite-Kushite relations outside this fourth-century timeframe remain obscure.

To the extent that conflict between the two kingdoms occurred, there seems to have been an imbalance of military power, for while what textual evidence does survive from the reigns of Ousanas and ‘Ēzānā records that the Aksumites invaded Nubia on two occasions, there is little evidence of Kushite military activities to the east of the Nile Valley. A far greater threat to Aksum than Kush was the Noba, a Nubian-speaking group already ensconced in Kush, who attacked Aksum’s western frontier in the fourth century CE. Overall, however, Nubia was never as important to Aksum geopolitically as Arabia. Despite the evidence of Aksumite military activities in Nubia, Aksum was always more interested in its Arabian neighbors across the Red Sea, and is known to have occupied much of present-day Yemen in the third century and again in the sixth under the leadership of the great warrior-king Kālēb (c. 510-540 CE). By contrast, no full-scale occupation of Nubia was ever attempted by the Aksumites. Nevertheless, the fact that Aksum was victorious in its confrontations with Nubia in the fourth century provided fertile grounds for developing the political fiction of rule over Nubia, a political fiction maintained by later Aksumite kings. It is no surprise, then, to find Kālēb and his son and successor Wa‘zeb (c. 540-560 CE) laying claim to Kush and the Noba in their royal titles, side by side with their parallel claims to vast tracts of territory in South Arabia.

The present study contends that the reasons for the seemingly weak ties between Aksum and Nubia can be explained by the geographical orientation of the Ethiopian Highlands and the middle Nile Valley. This is hardly reason to assume rigid geographical determinism, however, since Aksumite records of war with Nubia indicate quite clearly that the middle Nile Valley, though not as important to Aksum either politically or economically as South Arabia, was still by no means insignificant strategically to the Ethiopian kingdom. It will be argued that the main cause for conflict between Kush and Aksum in the fourth century had less to do with political or economic rivalry at the highest level, than with the security of the frontier region that separated them. Documentation for this conflict is provided by a series of Aksumite inscriptions in Greek and Ge‘ez from the reigns of Ousanas and ‘Ēzānā. Following the fourth century we no longer have the benefit of such documentation of Aksumite-Nubian relations. Indeed there is no evidence at all for Aksumite relations with Nubia in the fifth century, after the fall of Kush. In the sixth century it becomes possible to pick up the trail once more, since it is at that time that we find archaeological and literary evidence of contact between Aksum and the Nubian kingdom of Alodia. While this study makes no attempt to substantially rewrite the history of Aksumite-Nubian contact, it is hoped that it can at least clarify what we can and cannot say about relations between the two regions, as well as draw attention to the need for further archaeological research in the still understudied area between the Nile Valley and the Ethiopian Highlands.

The layout of this monograph is as follows. Chapter 2 focuses on the period between the first and third centuries CE and argues that, as far as long-distance trade is concerned, the economies of Kush and Aksum operated not very differently but independently of each other. That of Kush was intimately bound to the Nile Valley, which constituted not only the agricultural base of the Kushite state but also the main route—indeed the only regularly used route—linking Nubia to Egypt. Aksum, however, depended on agriculture in the Ethiopian Highlands but, while several tributaries of the Nile, most notably the Blue Nile, originate in these highlands, Aksum’s main outlet to the outside world was the Red Sea. In no way, then, can Aksum be classified as a civilization of the Nile Valley. During the period in question the region between Kush and Aksum remained a nebulous one, occupied by peoples with some cultural ties to Ethiopia but, as far as we can tell, of little significance as a crossroads for Kushite-Aksumite interaction. Chapter 3 focuses on Aksumite expansion towards the west and north, based on the testimony of Monumentum Adulitanum II (RIE 277), a third-century Aksumite inscription erected at Adulis which, though now lost, was copied in the sixth century by Cosmas Indicopleustes. It will be argued that, in the course of the military campaigns described in Monumentum Adulitanum II, the Aksumite army pushed as far north as the southeastern frontier of Roman Egypt and as far west as the modern Sudanese-Ethiopian borderlands, Kush was left in peace. Since the economy of third-century Kush does not seem to have depended very heavily—if at all—on either the Eastern Desert between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea or the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderlands, whatever territorial gains Aksum made at this time seem to have had no direct impact on Kush. With Chapter 4 we come to the first hard evidence of conflict between Aksum and Kush in the form of several Aksumite inscriptions in Greek and Ge‘ez, some from the town of Aksum and some from Meroë, all of which describe Aksumite military campaigns in Nubia. The case will be made that two such campaigns took place, the first in the reign of Ousanas and the second in the reign of ‘Ēzānā. While Ousanas’ campaign seems to have reached Meroë, and thus involved the Kushite state directly, the second campaign, waged by ‘Ēzānā, focused on curbing the power of the Noba, a people who threatened Aksum’s western frontier. Based on chronological details and Christological formulae in the Greek record of ‘Ēzānā’s campaign (RIE 271), it is possible to date the second Aksumite invasion of Nubia to 360. But in neither case did the Aksumites succeed in holding onto Nubia for long, and in fact the long-standing thesis that the kingdom of Kush was brought to an end by ‘Ēzānā’s invasion is open to serious question. Nevertheless, the political fiction of Aksumite rule of Kush persisted into the sixth century, as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. This chapter also examines the evidence, preserved in Syriac by John of Ephesus and supported in part by limited archaeological evidence, for sporadic Aksumite contact with post-Kushite Nubia. It will be argued that at no time in the sixth century, much less later, did Aksum exercise any political control in Nubia. But before embarking on this study of Aksumite-Nubian relations over a five-century period it is fitting to begin with a brief survey of the evidence of Ethiopian-Nubian contact before the first century CE, a topic with which the remainder of this introductory chapter is concerned.

1.1 Before Aksum and Kush

Commercial contact between the Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa pre-dates the earliest written records. Already in Late Predynastic times (c. 4000-3000 BCE) Egypt imported obsidian, whose nearest sources are in Ethiopia and Eritrea.⁵ That the northern Horn of Africa was the source for at least some of this obsidian is evident from a fragment of a vessel from Abydos which was made of obsidian from the northern Rift Valley of Ethiopia.⁶ The discovery of obsidian fragments in the course of excavations in the Gash (al-Qāsh) Delta of the eastern Sudan and in Nubia indicates that the middle Nile Valley and the desert to the east was also part of this network of trade.⁷ Initially much of the obsidian from the Horn of Africa probably reached Egypt through middlemen in the eastern Sudan, for it was only with the shift from reed or papyrus to wooden boats around the mid-fourth millennium BCE and the introduction of the sail c. 3100 BCE that the Egyptians would have acquired the ability to sail over long distances in the Red Sea⁸ and thus reach the northern Horn directly. There are also hints of indirect connections between the Nile Valley and the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea and the northern Horn of Africa from an early date. It is probable that the humped zebu (Bos indicus), a domesticate of Indian origin which began spreading westward c. 3000 BCE and is attested in an early second millennium BCE context at Laga Oda in Eritrea,⁹ reached the Nile Valley via the Horn.¹⁰ That Asian broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), attested in Yemen as early as c. 2000 BCE, appears in Sudanese Nubia by c. 1700 BCE¹¹ also suggests that Nubia felt the impact of Afro-Arabian trade to a limited degree. Indirect evidence for the maintenance of trade ties between Nubia and the northern Horn is provided by references in Egyptian inscriptions from the late third millennium BCE to incense obtained from Nubia,¹² which could only have come from regions further to the southeast, where trees producing aromatic gum are found.¹³ Nubian use of incense imported from the Horn of Africa is implied by the incense burners produced by the A-Group culture (c. 3700-2800 BCE), some of which contain residue of burnt substances which, though not yet subjected to chemical analysis, are likely derived from aromatic materials.¹⁴ To the Egyptians, the incense-producing region par excellence was the land of Punt, most likely located along the coast of present-day Su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Question of Aksumite Trade with Nubia
• 3. The Third Century CE: Monumentum Adulitanum II (RIE 277)
• 4. The Fourth Century CE: Aksum in Nubia
• 5. After Kush: Aksum and Nubia in the Sixth Century CE
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index
• Footnotes