The Aksumites in South Arabia: an African Diaspora of Late Antiquity
Chapter 11 The Aksumites in South Arabia: An African Diaspora of Late Antiquity George Hatke 1 Introduction Much has been written over the years about foreign, specifically western, colo- nialism in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as about the foreign peoples, western and non-western alike, who have settled in sub-Saharan Africa during the modern period. However, although many large-scale states rose and fell in sub- Saharan Africa throughout pre-colonial times, the history of African imperial expansion into non-African lands is to a large degree the history of Egyptian invasions of Syria-Palestine during Pharaonic and Ptolemaic times, Carthagin- ian (effectively Phoenician) expansion into Sicily and Spain in the second half of the first millennium b.c.e, and the Almoravid and Almohad invasions of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. However, none of this history involved sub-Saharan Africans to any appreciable degree. Yet during Late Antiquity,1 Aksum, a sub-Saharan African kingdom based in the northern Ethi- opian highlands, invaded its neighbors across the Red Sea on several occasions. Aksum, named after its capital city, was during this time an active participant in the long-distance sea trade linking the Mediterranean with India via the Red Sea. It was a literate kingdom with a tradition of monumental art and ar- chitecture and already a long history of contact with South Arabia. The history of Aksumite expansion into, and settlement in, South Arabia can be divided into two main periods. The first lasts from the late 2nd to the late 3rd century 1 Although there is disagreement among scholars as to the chronological limits of “Late Antiq- uity”—itself a modern concept—the term is, for the purposes of the present study, used to refer to the period from ca.
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