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The Eritrean insurgents dealt the Ethiopian military a humiliating loss at the battle of Shire on February 15–19, 1989—one that will go down in the annals of civil wars as the most unlikely of defeats. The guerrillas tenaciously and dexterously outmaneuvered the army and went on to secure an impressive and historic victory during the five-day battle, the culmination of fourteen years of armed conflict in Tigray. Multifold weaknesses and errors doomed the Third Revolutionary Army (TRA) less than a year after it was formed to fight insurgency. The government first launched Operation Adwa from June 19 to August 10, but it was Operation Aksum that would prove disastrous for the TRA. Dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam conceded that the defeat had drastically altered the military and political situation in Ethiopia.

This book explores the influence of warfare, commerce, and political fictions on the relations between two ancient African states, Nubia and the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum. Focusing primarily on the fourth century CE, it considers how the contact between Nubia and Ethiopia developed within very different regional spheres of interaction. Based on this interaction, the book argues that ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified area politically, economically, or culturally. It also suggests that the seemingly weak ties between Aksum and Nubia can be attributed to the geographical orientation of the Ethiopian Highlands and the middle Nile Valley. The book examines how Aksum and the Nubian kingdom of Kush coexisted in peace for most of their history before Aksum took up arms against the latter. This introductory chapter discusses evidence of Ethiopian–Nubian contact before the first century CE.

This chapter explores the question of Aksumite trade with Nubia during the period spanning the first and third centuries CE. It suggests that, despite the expansion of international trade during the Roman period, Aksum and Kush did not grow closer and instead had minimal contact. As far as long-distance trade is concerned, the economies of Kush and Aksum operated not very differently but independently of each other. The economy of Kush was intimately bound to the Nile Valley, the main route linking Nubia to Egypt. Aksum depended on agriculture in the Ethiopian Highlands, but its main outlet to the outside world was the Red Sea. This chapter also considers the extent to which Kush and Aksum maintained peaceful trade relations during the period.

This chapter examines Aksum's expansion towards the west and north, based on the testimony of the third-century Aksumite inscription Monumentum Adulitanum II (RIE 277). Although RIE 277 deals primarily with Aksumite military operations in northeast Africa, its references to similar operations in western Arabia provide evidence for a relative date of the inscription and substantiate the case for its authenticity as preserved by the merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes. This chapter argues that, in the course of the military campaigns described in RIE 277, the Aksumite army pushed as far north as the southeastern frontier of Roman Egypt and as far west as the modern Sudanese–Ethiopian borderlands, leaving Kush in peace.

This chapter examines the conflict between Aksum and Kush triggered by the former's invasion of Nubia during the fourth century CE. Drawing on evidence based on several Aksumite inscriptions in Greek and Ge'ez, all of which describe Aksumite military campaigns in Nubia, the chapter argues that two such campaigns took place: the first in the reign of Ousanas and the second in the reign of 'Ēzānā. These campaigns were launched in an attempt to curtail the power of the Noba people who threatened Aksum's western frontier. On both occasions, however, the Aksumites were unsuccessful in holding onto Nubia for long. This chapter also considers the question of the Aksum's role in the fall of Kush.

This chapter examines the political fiction of Aksum's rule of Kush that persisted into the sixth century. It first considers the extent and nature of Aksumite relations with Nubia during the reign of Kālēb and goes on to analyze texts in light of Aksumite relations with regions to the west of Ethiopia. It also discusses 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 argues that Aksum did not exercise any political control in Nubia during the sixth century, much less later.

This book has explored the history of Aksumite–Nubian relations based on the available archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence. For the period before the rise of Aksum, there is 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 different 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. The book concludes by raising three important points. First, ancient Northeast Africa was not an integrated region politically, economically, or culturally. Second, political fictions played an important role in Aksumite royal ideology. Third, it is not clear whether Aksum's invasions of Nubia in the fourth century were the end result of strained political relations between them.

The first wave of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha reached Eritrea and Ethiopia in the wake of the Christianization of the Aksumite kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century of our era. Their Ethiopian acculturation was a part of the process of translating the ensemble of the Scriptures, including “apocryphal” texts, from Greek originals into Gǝʿǝz, or Classical Ethiopic. As a result, the pseudepigrapha were copied for centuries in the same manuscripts as other biblical texts. After a long period of relative isolation, the re-establishing of regular relations with Egyptian Christianity, in the thirteenth century, led to a complete re-examination and revision of Ethiopian Scriptures and other religious texts. The pseudepigrapha were scrutinized, discussed, edited, eventually newly translated from the Arabic or, in a few cases, abandoned. The theological debates about the status of some of these texts played a major role in their active preservation in Ethiopian culture.

The sources examined here describe the conquest of South Arabia and Arabia Deserta by Ḥimyar, and the relationship between Ḥimyar and the tribes of Arabia. The chapter also considers the role of Ḥimyar in the conflict between Rome and Persia, and provides an epigraphic perspective on famous events such as the massacre at Najrān in 523. The texts also shed light on the form of Judaism adopted by the kings of Ḥimyar in the fourth century, on the conflict between Ḥimyar and Aksūm, and on the rule of the last great king of Ḥimyar, Abraha. A number of these texts appear here in English translation for the first time.

This chapter focuses on the role played by Arab militia generally, and the Jafnids and Naṣrids specifically, in the sixth- and early seventh-century phase of Rome’s competition with Persia, played out in Mesopotamia and in South Arabia. A number of the texts discussed here complement the epigraphic material in Chapter 3, as well as the Arabic and Persian texts in Chapter 8.