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

1. Introduction

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 infuences as playing a “continuing but fuctuating 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 sufered from misinterpretation, in addition to which the extent and nature of 3 It is certainly true that the ancient kingdom of Aksum encompassed not only northern Ethiopia but also much of what is now Eritrea. By referring to Aksum as an Ethiopian polity the author does not wish to imply that modern Eritreans have any less claim to the Aksumite legacy than modern Ethiopians. Rather, Ethiopia is simply employed in the present context as shorthand for the northern Horn of Africa, including the area of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea but excluding Djibouti and Somalia, much as one might classify the Harappan civilization as Indian, even though it was based in the Indus Valley of today’s Pakistan. 4 Connah 2001: 63. This perspective is to a large extent a reaction to earlier difusionist theories about Nubian, particularly Kushite, infuence on the rest of Africa. On Kushite civilization as an amalgam of diferent infuences, rather than a center of cultural difusion across Africa, see Haycock 1971: 30. 12 Aksum and Nubia Aksumite-Kushite relations outside this fourth-century timeframe remain obscure. To the extent that confict 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...