Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

6. Conclusion

6. Conclusion What have we learned of Aksumite-Nubian relations? In fact, very little. For the period before the rise of Aksum, there is indeed good evidence of commercial and even political contact between Nubia and the Horn of Africa. By the turn of the first millennium BCE, however, the two regions seem to have gravitated toward two diferent axes: a Nile Valley axis in the case of Nubia and an Ethiopian Highlands–Red Sea axis in the case of Ethiopia. Thus for the Nubian kingdom of Kush, the most obvious point of contact with the outside world was Egypt, which had long ruled Nubia but which, for a few decades beginning in the late eighth century BCE, came to be ruled by Nubia. In later times Egypt continued to provide a cultural model for the Kushite ruling elite. For its part, Ethiopia, having long interacted with its Arabian neighbors across the Red Sea and having already adopted the Semitic speech of the latter, borrowed many aspects of South Arabian culture, such as writing, art, and monumental architecture, in the first half of the first millennium BCE. With the development of a maritime route linking the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea shortly before the turn of the Common Era, Ethiopia’s ties to the Red Sea—as opposed to its ties to the Nile Valley—were reinforced, the Aksumites deciding that trade by sea with the Roman Empire, South Arabia, and India was more profitable than overland trade with the middle Nile. It is hardly satisfying to the student of history to learn that two ancient states were merely aware of each other’s existence but, apart from some small-scale trade, a few isolated incidents of armed confict, and interregional travel by private individuals, never interacted much. But this is precisely how the history of Aksumite contact with Kush from the first to fourth century CE can best be summarized, and there is no indication that Aksumite relations with Kush’s successors in the middle Nile Valley in the sixth century changed this. Having examined in detail the archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence for Ethio-Nubian relations in antiquity, several important points do, however, suggest themselves. The first point is that ancient northeast 168 Aksum and Nubia Africa was not an integrated region politically, economically, or culturally. The Nubians were indeed involved with trade between Punt and the Nile Valley, modest trade goods did pass between Nubia and Ethiopia, and Aksum did indeed invade Nubia twice in the fourth century CE. But none of these factors were the bases for an interregional commonwealth, and so long as Nubia remained oriented towards the Nile Valley and Ethiopia towards the highlands of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, neither had reason to infringe on the other’s territory or vie for control of the other’s trade routes. Only when Kush began to falter in the mid-fourth century CE did Aksum intervene in Nubia. Judging from the records of ‘Ēzānā’s invasion of Nubia, a weak Kush meant an unprotected western frontier for Aksum. The second point is that political fictions played an important role in Aksumite royal ideology. No matter how tenuous Aksum’s political links with Nubia may have been even in periods following military intervention, the consistency with which Kush was named as a vassal in royal titles indicates that it had to have meant something to Aksum, if only as a symbolic western counterbalance to the South Arabian territories claimed by Aksum. There is nevertheless a disparity between South Arabia’s place in Aksumite royal ideology and Nubia’s place. Thus, while several Aksumite kings erected inscriptions in a script imitating South Arabian musnad, no Aksumite inscription takes Kushite monumental culture as a model. There is, for example, no Ge‘ez inscription written in the Meroitic script or in hieroglyphics. The third and final point is that, although the most important records for Aksumite relations with Nubia are royal inscriptions, it need not follow that Aksum’s invasions of Nubia in the fourth century were the end result of political relations at the highest level gone bad. During ‘Ēzānā’s reign at least, it was not confict between the ruling elites of Aksum and Kush, but rather confict between the peoples living in the frontier region separating the two states, that brought about war. Since the dearth of Nubian material in Ethiopia and Ethiopian material in...