Before 1500: Adal, Ajuran and the coast
Aksum and the 'frankincense country': the Adulis inscription and Cosmas on Barbaria and Sasu
A Greek inscription once at the Red Sea port of Adulis, copied by the merchant Cosmas around 525 AD, records the campaigns of an unnamed king of Aksum, in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. He claims to have conquered the Sesea and the Rhausi 'in the interior of the frankincense country' and to have set the Solate to guard the coast. Cosmas took the Sesea to be 'the nations of Barbaria', his name for the northern Somali coast. Nineteenth-century scholars linked the Sesea with the Issa and dated the king anywhere from about the 1st to the late 3rd century AD. Cosmas also describes Aksum's gold trade with a distant land called Sasu.
In short
Aksum, the kingdom centred in what is now Tigray in northern Ethiopia, traded through the Red Sea port of Adulis. Two texts from Adulis mention the land of frankincense south of the Bab el-Mandeb, which Greek writers called Barbaria (see Greek and Roman writers on the Somali coast). Both survive only because the Alexandrian merchant Cosmas, later called Indicopleustes, copied them into his Christian Topography around 550 AD. This page uses the English translation and notes of J. W. McCrindle (The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, Hakluyt Society, 1897, Book II, pp. 51–67).
How Cosmas came to copy it
Cosmas writes that "some five and twenty years ago", at the start of the reign of the emperor Justin I (518–527), Elesbaan, king of the Aksumites, was preparing an expedition against the Himyarites across the Red Sea. The king asked the governor of Adulis, named Abbas, for copies of the Greek writing on a marble throne and a stone tablet near the town. Cosmas and another merchant, Menas, made the copies (pp. 54–56). McCrindle's notes identify Elesbaan with the king also known as Kaleb, and date Cosmas' visit to about 525 (p. 55, note).
Two inscriptions, not one
Cosmas read the tablet and the throne as one text by the Egyptian king Ptolemy. McCrindle explains that they were separate (p. 59, note 2):
- The tablet records the campaigns in Asia of Ptolemy III Euergetes, who came to the throne in 247 BC (p. 57, note 1).
- The throne carries a different text, by an unnamed king who calls himself the son of the god Ares and writes that he was "the first and alone of the kings of my race" to make these conquests. Scholars have since read him as a king of Aksum (pp. 59–66).
What the Aksumite king claims
After conquests around Aksum and towards the Nile and Egypt, the king writes (pp. 62–64):
"My arms were next directed against the Sesea nation. These had retired to a high mountain difficult of access; but I blockaded the mountain on every side, and compelled them to come down and surrender… The tribes of Rhausi I next brought to submission: a barbarous race spread over wide waterless plains in the interior of the frankincense country. [Advancing thence towards the sea] I encountered the Solate, whom I subdued, and left with instructions to guard the coast."
He says he restored their lands "subject to the payment of tribute", sent a fleet against peoples on the Arabian shore, and ruled from "the country of frankincense" in the east to "Ethiopia and Sasu" in the west (pp. 64–65). He set up the throne at Adulis "in the twenty-seventh year of my reign" (p. 66).
Cosmas added a note to the line about the Sesea: "Here he indicates the nations of Barbaria" (p. 66).
Who says what about the peoples
These identifications come from 19th-century scholars quoted in McCrindle's notes. They rest on similarities of names:
- Vivien de Saint-Martin (1863) wrote that the king's campaigns reached "the country of Harrar and of the Somalis, which produces aromatics, and on to the coast region which is washed by the sea of Aden, and which terminates at Cape Guardafui" (p. 60, note 3). He suggested that the Sesea "ought to designate a part at least of the Somali people, of which one of the principal tribes bears still the name of Issa", and that the Rhausi might be the Rhapsii of Ptolemy, or the Arsi in the interior. He found the Solate "uncertain" (p. 63, note 1).
- On the date, the notes record four views: Saint-Martin, the 2nd century AD; August Dillmann, before Zoskales, the king named in the Periplus (that is, around the start of the Christian era); D. H. Müller, Zoskales himself; and Eduard Glaser, the end of the 3rd century AD (pp. 60, 65–66, notes).
Barbaria and the frankincense trade in Cosmas
Cosmas describes the frankincense country as lying "at the projecting parts of Ethiopia", inland but washed by the ocean. "The inhabitants of Barbaria, being near at hand, go up into the interior and, engaging in traffic with the natives, bring back from them many kinds of spices, frankincense, cassia, calamus, and many other articles of merchandise, which they afterwards send by sea to Adule, to the country of the Homerites, to Further India, and to Persia." Arabia, he adds, is "a couple of days" across the sea from Barbaria, and beyond Barbaria lies the ocean "called Zingion" (pp. 51–52). See Frankincense and myrrh.
The gold trade of Sasu
Cosmas describes how every other year the king of Aksum sent agents, with "upwards, say, of five hundred" other traders, to the land of Sasu, "near the ocean" and rich in gold mines. They brought oxen, lumps of salt and iron, fenced a camp with thorns, and laid out the goods. The local people came with gold "in nuggets like peas, called tancharas", put it on what they wanted and stepped back; each side added or took away until both were content, "because their language is different and interpreters are hardly to be found". The round trip took six months (pp. 52–54).
Where Sasu was is disputed in McCrindle's notes. One note puts it "near the coast, and only 5° to the north of the equator" (p. 51). Glaser first placed it near Hobyo, then argued that the inscription should read Kasu, a region far to the west near Meroe in Sudan. Saint-Martin placed it to the south-west, in the region of Kafa in Ethiopia (pp. 64–65, notes).
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