The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea War on the Eve of Islam by G. W. Bowersock (review)

Ancient historians often hear the jest, “What’s new in ancient history?” This book by admired ancient historian Glen Bowersock presents to the American audience a number of new finds on the Late Ancient Eastern Roman Empire. Actually, there are many new things in ancient history and this book introduces some of those issues to a wide audience of the people interested in Roman, Byzantine, and Middle Eastern history. World historians would be well advised to pay attention to the emerging shifts in our understanding of the pre-Islamic Arabia and the cultural map of the whole region around the Red Sea, which is the area of focus of this book. Bowersock’s engagement with the Arabian Peninsula in antiquity is his lifelong commitment. First came his classic Roman Arabia, published in 1983, and it was followed by many more books and essays. Bowersock is in love with the Roman East and that comes out in all of his writings. This devotion to the late ancient Middle East is, in and of itself, a “new” thing in ancient history. Previously, scholars of the Roman Empire had largely been preoccupied with the West, the Germanic invasions and the changes that occurred with the formal end of the empire there. The eastern parts of the Roman world were either overlooked or less accessible to the general public. The public seem to have insatiable appetite for the readings about the “fall” of the Western Roman Empire. This book calls to public attention the less known issue of numerous peoples living beyond the eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire. Glen Bowersock’s book is an attempt to change the focus of Late Ancient studies and to turn our focus to the East.

The central point of this small but captivating book is the Ethiopian invasion of Southern Arabian Peninsula, what is today Yemen, which occurred around 520 c.e. The book is written as a commentary on an inscription called Monumentum Adulitanum, a text engraved on a commemorative throne, now destroyed, built by Kaleb of Axum (a king of what is today Ethiopia and Eritrea). Around the inscription Bowersock masterfully weaves his story. The inscription was recorded by a Byzantine monk and traveler, Kosmas Indicopleustes (literally, the one who sailed to India), who passed through the area and recorded king’s successful invasion across the Red Sea into Yemen. Yufus, the king of Yemen, who was the target of this punitive Ethiopian invasion, was an Arab convert to Judaism. Yusuf’s persecution of Christians in the southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula led to the Ethiopian involvement, the deposition of the Jewish king of Yemen, and his replacement with a pliant Christian substitute. Three decades ago, when Bowersock published his Roman Arabia, the conversion of Arabs in Yemen to Judaism was not taken seriously. This view has changed dramatically, and Bowersock’s book is the best testimony on how the periphery of the Roman world, the Arabian Peninsula and Ethiopia, gradually came to be the focus of our studies. Now, due to the work of many scholars, in particular Paul Yule and Christian Julian Robin, two European scholars who revolutionized the study of Arabia in Late Antiquity, the world of the Roman Middle East is becoming more and more comprehensible.

What is at stake in this area of study is our understanding of the origins of Islam. This is why Bowersock’s book is significant for teachers and students of world history. The crushing defeats of the Eastern Roman Empire, first against the Persians in 614 c.e. and then subsequently against the Arabs in the 630s, were the events that shaped world history in a much more profound way than the settlement of the Germanic tribes in the western Roman Empire. The traditional narrative of the origins of Islam, still popular in both religious and scholarly circles, did not link the Arabs (nor Islam...