Peter Costello
The complex architecture of ancient Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, reflects its complex history. Photo: Wikipedia images. The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam,
by G. W. Bowersock
(Oxford University Press, £45.50 / €38.00)
We all talk carelessly about “Muslim countries “, which is a way of rewriting the past, and forgetting that places like the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Yemen were not always Muslim. They were, before the rise of Islam, actually pagan, Christian, and surprisingly, Jewish.
This book is by an eminent American professor of history, formerly the head of the Classics department at Harvard University and the author of many books on the late classical world and the Middle East. The period covered is from 200 to 600 AD in the Red Sea interface of Yemen with Ethiopia.
Peter Brown, the leading classical scholar from Dublin who is the great authority on St Augustine, was full of praise for what he calls a “groundbreaking book”.
Revelation
It will be a revelation to many readers of the unusual politics of Southern Arabia and the Red Sea around 525AD, when the throne at Adulis was seen by trader Cosmas Indicopleustes, from his record of what was inscribed on the throne and on a stele standing behind it a whole world is exposed to view. It provides a case study of how a scholar goes about reconstructing the past from scattered and fragmentary inscriptions that in the absence of regular narratives provide the key to obscure periods of history.
Bowersock points out that Southern Arabia, with which his book largely deals, was on the edge of the Roman Empire, but also on the edge of the cultures beyond the imperial frontiers such as Persia and Ethiopia.
The book itself is a sort of detective story, which unravels the astounding history behind the inscriptions on the Throne of Adulis.
Comas wrote his account 549AD. This is a now vanished artefact, which first came to scholarly attention thanks to a translation of Cosmas published as late as 1897. Cosmas had some very curious ideas about the true shape of the world, but he was also well informed about the Arabian seas nevertheless. It was he who records the existence of the throne of Adulis which has now vanished.
Across the Red Sea Adulis was faced by the Kingdom of Himyar, which corresponds to what in recent times has been called Yemen, Aden and the Hadhramaut”
Adulis was a sea port on the Gulf of Zuma on the west coast of the Red Sea and a trade outlet to the inland Kingdom of Aksum. About 340AD the king of Aksum converted to orthodox Christianity and so became aligned with the Byzantine Empire.
Across the Red Sea Adulis was faced by the Kingdom of Himyar, which corresponds to what in recent times has been called Yemen, Aden and the Hadhramaut. But at this time it was a kingdom of Arabs who had converted to Judaism. The then king Yusuf massacred several hundred Christians in the city of Najran.
This led to an invasion of southern Arabia by Kaleb, the Christian king of Ethiopia – who had the support of Constantinople and the Byzantine regime there. With an army of 120,000 men, he crossed the Red Sea and eventually defeated King Yusuf, but Kaleb retired to a monastery, leaving the region in the hands of less forceful leaders than he had been.
Consequence
Eventually, however, it was the Sassanian Persians who gained the day, taking over Himyar, and later capturing Jerusalem in consequence.
But 570AD is the presumed date for the birth of Mohammed; 622AD the date of his flight from Mecca to Medina – the date from which Muslims date their era. Both Byzantium and Persia were now faced with a new riding power which swept out of Southern Arabia to eventually command the world from southern Europe to Indonesia.
On cultures so flexible in their beliefs, the prophet of a new religion easily imposed himself shortly afterwards on the Middle East”
When in the history of the Middle East we think of cultures having fixed positions, we might recall these events. In Iran, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, let alone Ethiopia, we are still seeing rulers grappling with matters of consequence that have their roots in the period that Prof. Bowersock describes in this short but powerfully revealing book. On cultures so flexible in their beliefs, the prophet of a new religion easily imposed himself shortly afterwards on the Middle East.
It also leads one to reconsider the very notion of what a Jewish state means. Not all Semites were Jewish, and not all Jews were Semites. It seems that for some adherence to Judaism was not a matter of race but of culture, despite the claims made by some.