Aksum

The Auxōmîtai are the first people in the written record to bear the name of Aksum. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s handbook of the first century CE, describes the port of Adulis and the road inland, eight days’ journey, to “the metropolis of the Auxomites,” where the ivory of the interior was gathered, and names the king of the coast, Zoskales, a man well read in Greek. The spelling with the diphthong is the sailors’; Ezana’s own Greek inscriptions three centuries later write Axōmitôn without it, and Procopius, recording the embassy Justinian sent in the 530s, calls the capital Auxomis. Cosmas Indicopleustes, who copied the Greek inscription at Adulis around 525, knew the city as Axōmē. The name reached Greek from the Aksumites themselves, in whatever form the merchants heard it, and it kept its shape through five centuries of Greek writing about the Red Sea.

The entry is the oldest attestation on the page and the one that fixes the kingdom’s position in the world: a Greek-speaking king, a metropolis at the head of an ivory road, a port the Roman trade with India knew well. Greek was the language in which Aksum first spoke to the world and in which its kings carved their victories, so that this foreign ethnic was, for a long time, as close to an official name as the kingdom had abroad. On a page where the kingdom’s own word is overtaken by the Greek description Ethiopia, the Auxomites stand for the other possibility, the one Greek did not take: the Greeks had the native name first, and let it go.

ḥbs²tn, the Ḥabašat, is the name by which the Sabaeans called the people of the Aksumite highlands, and the headwater of the name that became Abyssinia. The same Jabal Riyām inscriptions that call Gadarat king of the Aksumites call him also mlk ḥbs²tn, king of the Ḥabašat, the two titles side by side around 200 CE; the Himyarite texts of the sixth century, when Aksumite armies had conquered Yemen, speak of the ʾḥbs²n as the occupying power, and Abraha, the Aksumite general who made himself king there, styles himself in the Sabaic of his own inscriptions an Ethiopian king. The origin of the word is unsettled, a South Arabian coinage for the highland peoples or, on one recent proposal, an Egyptian one; the Sabaic writing with the second sibilant is the earliest attestation there is.

The entry is where the page’s third name begins. Aksum was the kingdom’s word, Ethiopia the Greeks’, and Ḥabašat the Arabians’, and of the three it was the Arabians’ that had the longest run, through Ezana’s own titles, through the Arabic of the Hijra, and through Portuguese into every European language as Abyssinia. A name first carved by the kingdom’s enemies across the sea outlasted the kingdom by a millennium and a half, and it did so because the kingdom accepted it: Ezana put the Sabaeans’ word for his people into his own royal style, next to the name of his city.

ʾks¹mn, the Aksumites, is the oldest written form of the kingdom’s own name after the Greek sailors’, and it comes from the other side of the Red Sea. The inscriptions of the Sabaean kings ʿAlhān Nahfān and Shaʿr Awtar, carved at the temple of Taʾlab on Jabal Riyām around the turn of the third century, record first an alliance with and then a war against Gadarat, “king of the Aksumites,” mlk ʾks¹mn, the earliest Aksumite king known by name and the first to carry his arms into Arabia. The spelling is the city’s name with the suffixed article of Sabaic, the form the language gave every definite noun, and it names the people rather than the place, as the Sabaic and Greek ethnics both tend to.

The entry is the Sabaic end of the Aksum family and the first notice of the kingdom as a power rather than a port. The Periplus had known a king and a metropolis at the head of an ivory road; the Yemeni inscriptions know an army, a treaty, and a war, and they know them because the Aksumites had crossed the sea. For the three centuries that followed, Sabaic was the language in which Aksum’s Arabian ambitions were recorded, and the name the Sabaeans wrote was the native one, Aksum, not Ḥabašat: to the kings of Marib the enemy was the city on the highlands, named by its capital as they named themselves by theirs.

Aithiopía on this page is the Greek name of Kush in its second life. In the Greek versions of Ezana’s inscriptions the king’s title runs “king of the Aksumites and of the Himyarites and of Raeidan and of the Ethiopians and of the Sabaeans,” and the Ethiopians in that list are not the people of the Nile but the king’s own highland subjects, the Ḥabašat of the Geʽez version at the same place. The usage was established by the fourth century: the Greek inscription of an earlier king at Adulis, copied by Cosmas Indicopleustes, used the Ethiopian name for the conquered peoples of the highland and the coast, and the Greek-speaking world of the Red Sea, which had called the whole African shore beyond Egypt Ethiopia since Herodotus, let the Aksumite kings claim the word.

The entry is the hinge between the Kush page and this one. The Greek description that Homer and Herodotus had meant for the Nile became, in a translator’s choice on Ezana’s stones, the Greek name of the kingdom across the Red Sea, and because the Greek Bible used the same word for Kush, the choice carried scripture with it. From here the name goes into Geʽez as Ityoṗya and into the kingdom’s sense of itself. On the Kush page Aithiopía is a name the Greeks gave; on this page it is a name a king took, and the taking is the moment the modern map was made.

ʾAksum is the kingdom’s name for itself, the name of its capital city extended to the realm the city ruled. It stands at the head of every royal title the Aksumite kings carved: Ezana is nəguśa ʾAksum, king of Aksum, before he is king of Ḥimyar and Raydān and Sabaʾ and the rest, in the unvocalized Geʽez of his early trilingual (RIE 185) and in the fully vocalized script of his Christian inscription (RIE 189), where the spelling given here is read. The name is older than the writing: the Sabaic inscriptions of Yemen already call Gadarat king of the Aksumites around 200 CE, and the Greek Periplus knew the Axomite metropolis a century and a half before that. What the word meant, no one knows; it is not Semitic in any transparent way and may belong to the Cushitic substrate of the highlands.

The entry is the one native name on a page of borrowed ones, and its fate is the page’s lesson in reverse. Every other kingdom in this atlas whose endonym survives kept it as the name of the country; Aksum’s did not. The state’s own word shrank, after the tenth century, to the name of a town with a church in it, while the names outsiders had used, Ethiopia from the Greeks and Abyssinia from the Arabs, went on to name the country. The kings of the highlands did not stop reigning; they stopped reigning as kings of Aksum, and the word that had led their titles for six centuries became a place they were crowned in.

Ḥbśt, read Ḥabašat, is the fourth of the nine lands in Ezana’s royal title, between Raydān and Sabaʾ in the trilingual inscription of his pagan years (RIE 185). The Geʽez version there is unvocalized, four consonants in the bare letters of the script, and the atlas writes it so, with the reading carried in the asterisked transcription; the pseudo-Sabaic version writes ḥbs²tm with the South Arabian ending, and the Greek version, at the same place in the list, writes Aithiópōn, “of the Ethiopians.” The name is older than Ezana and foreign to his language in origin: the Sabaic inscriptions of Yemen had called Gadarat king of ḥbs²t a century and a half earlier, and whether the word began as a South Arabian name for the highlanders, or earlier still as an Egyptian one, is argued; what is certain is that the Aksumite kings took it into their own titulary as one of the things they were king of.

The entry is the Geʽez end of the name that became Abyssinia, and the stone it stands on is the Rosetta of this page. In a single inscription the kingdom’s three names sit in three columns: the Aksum of the city, the Ḥabašat of the Arabian neighbors, and, where the Greek translator had to render Ḥabašat, the Aithiopía of the Greek Bible, equated for the first time with the highlands rather than the Nile. Ezana’s scribes did not comment on the equation; they simply made it, and the Greek name of Kush became the Greek name of Aksum in the act of translating a royal title.

India ulterior, Further India, is what Rufinus of Aquileia called the kingdom of Aksum when he told, around 402, the story of its conversion. The philosopher Meropius of Tyre, sailing to “the further India, inhabited by many and various tongues and peoples,” was killed on the coast; his two young wards, Frumentius and Aedesius, were taken to the king’s court, rose in his service, and Frumentius, sent to Alexandria, was consecrated by Athanasius as the country’s first bishop. The country is Aksum and the king’s son is Ezana, as Athanasius’s own correspondence confirms, but Rufinus never calls it so: in the Latin and Greek of Late Antiquity, India was the whole monsoon world, every shore the ships from Egypt reached, and the Red Sea’s African coast was its nearer part. Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret copied the story from Rufinus, Indians and all.

The entry puts Aksum, for a century or two, inside the India family, and it does so by honest usage rather than error: Rufinus used the only word his geography had. The form shows how elastic the great names were at the edge of knowledge, where a Latin churchman could place a Christian kingdom in Africa on the far side of India and be understood. The Greek description Ethiopia would eventually settle on the highlands; the Latin church, for its part, first learned of the kingdom under the name of a subcontinent it was not in.

ʾItyoṗya is the Greek Aithiopía in Geʽez letters, taken into the language when the Bible was translated from Greek in the fifth and sixth centuries and standing wherever the Septuagint had written Ethiopia for the Hebrew Kush. The verse that mattered most was the Psalter’s: “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God,” which a Christian kingdom on the highlands, hearing the Greek word its own kings had used for themselves, took as a prophecy about itself. The spelling preserves the Greek consonants with the ejective ṗ for the Greek p, and the Geʽez Bible’s usage became the literary one: by the time the Kebra Nagast set down the national legend of the Solomonic line, Ityoṗya was simply what the country was called, and the Queen of Sheba was its queen.

The entry is the point at which a borrowed name became an identity. Ezana’s Greek scribes had equated Ethiopia with Ḥabašat as a translator’s convenience; the Bible made the equation scripture, and scripture made it destiny. Every mention of Cush in the Old Testament, the Cushite wife of Moses, the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts, the kingdom that would stretch out its hands, was now a mention of the highlands, and a kingdom with its own name adopted another’s because the holy book appeared to speak of it. The name of Kush had traveled through Greek to become the name of the kingdom that ended Kush; the Ethiopia of today is the living result, a country named by the Greek word for its ancient rival.

Kūšāyē, the Kushites, is what the Syriac writers of the sixth century called the Aksumites. The Book of the Himyarites, the Syriac account of the persecution of the Christians of Najran and of Kaleb’s expedition across the Red Sea to avenge them in 525, calls the king and his army Kushites throughout; Simeon of Beth Arsham’s letter on the martyrs, written as the news arrived, does the same, and John of Ephesus and the Syriac chronicles follow. The usage is the Peshitta’s: the Syriac Bible, reading the Hebrew, had kept Kūš for the land south of Egypt, and when a Christian kingdom became the great power of the Red Sea, Syriac applied the biblical ethnonym of that quarter of the world to it, exactly as Greek had applied Aithíopes.

The entry completes the transfer the page records. The two biblical names for Kush, the Hebrew one and the Greek one, both migrated to Aksum, each along the churches that read the Bible in that language: Greek-readers called the Aksumites Ethiopians, Syriac-readers called them Kushites, and in the one language of the atlas where the old name of Nubia kept any currency at all, it did so by naming the kingdom that had destroyed Nubia’s last capital. The kingdom that broke Meroë inherited both of Meroë’s names, and in Syriac it inherited the older one.

al-Ḥabasha is the Arabic name of the Aksumite kingdom and of the country that succeeded it, the South Arabian ḥbs²t with the Arabic article and the feminine ending, and it was the name in which Aksum entered Islamic history. Around 615 the Prophet sent a party of his followers across the sea to the Najāshī, the negus, of al-Ḥabasha, a just king in whose land, he told them, no one was wronged; the Meccans remembered the Abyssinian army of Abraha that had marched on their city with an elephant in the year of the Prophet’s birth, the subject of a sūra of the Qurʾān. The geographers kept the name for the highland kingdom and its Christian successors, and the collective ḥabash for its people, and the word is the Arabic name of Ethiopia still.

The entry is the name that reached Europe. Where the Greeks and their heirs said Ethiopia and the Syriac churches said Kush, Arabic alone of the great traditions kept the Arabian neighbors’ name for the highlanders, and the Arabic form, carried by the Portuguese and then by every European language, became Abyssinia, the name of the country in Western usage into the twentieth century. The oldest exonym on the page, first carved in Sabaic around 200, is thus the one with the longest run: two thousand years from the inscriptions of Marib to the newspapers of the twentieth century, with Arabic as the carrier for most of them.