The African Invasion of Arabia
A History of Mankind (344)
Nubia and the Horn of Africa, almost untouched by the Bantu expansion1, evolved in completely different directions. Although Christianity had only marginal impact on the more distant fledging city-states across the Somali coast — part of the Red Sea-Indian Ocean trading networks and far enough from Mediterranean cultural influences — it quickly spread through the smallish Nubian states from neighboring Egypt.
Aksum’s campaigns in Kush over the 4th century had been extremely destructive and led to the end of monumental inscriptions in Meroitic script by the Ethiopian invaders of Nubia. After the destruction of the old city of Meroe around 350, Nubia’s center of gravity clearly shifted from the north to the region south of the Nile’s Fourth Cataract around the former capital, markedly more fertile than others because of “seluka” land. This is land away from the Nile valley, with some rainfall every year, where irrigation channels can help drive water from Nile floods to grow crops on non-desertic soil already with some moisture2.
Despite the political decline, the development of crops of seluka land was greatly favored by the use of the saqia/saqiyah ox-driven water-wheels that are a typically Greek invention. The local economy was further boosted by the introduction of camels, replacing donkeys and mules for the transportation of goods3, which made trade with Egypt and the Red Sea coast, as well as the arrival of Christian preachers, much easier.
As in Egypt, the Nubian priesthood was extremely wealthy and powerful. The 1st century BC Greek Diodorus Siculus provided what he called a “most astonishing” example: the 3rd century BC Nubian court had long been accustomed to the tradition that priests might receive orders from their gods that kings had to die, and thus were forced to commit suicide. It only was a Nubian king with a Greek education, Ergamenes, who put an end to the tradition and the life of the particular priests who transmitted the news of Ergamenes’ upcoming death4.
What this meant in practice was that priests in the largest Kushite successor state of Nobatia, like those in Egypt who had embraced Coptic Christianity and turned it into their own church, had to be coopted so that they wouldn’t oppose the new religion arriving from the north. The task fell to envoys sent by Roman Empress Theodora after her husband, Emperor Justinian, closed down the temple of Philae on the border with Nobatia.
In 542, heartened by the support expressed for Christianity by Nobatia’s King Silko, Empress Theodora sponsored a mission by a Monophysite priest called Julian, that she apparently kept secret from her husband – to the point that later Chalcedonian envoys sent by Justinian were told their services were no longer required5.
Local Christianity was further reinforced by the worldly Longinus, a Monophysite Alexandrian who had been imprisoned in Constantinople, and who arrived in Nubia in 569. Over the next decade and change, Longinus had the time to convert Nubia, founding the country’s first church, returning to Alexandria to scheme against his rivals, being exiled to Arabia and bickering with Nubian Trinitarians. Years later, Longinus’ success was evident in a resumption of local inscriptions after centuries of illiteracy, now in the local language written in a modified Greek script.
For centuries to come, Nubia’s leading cleric, the Metropolitan, would seek consecration at the hands of the Patriarch of Alexandria, like his Ethiopian colleague. Nubians developed a tradition of mural-painting on the walls of ecclesiastical buildings, based on Eastern Mediterranean models, often Byzantine in origin and style, albeit with local variations. This explains why saints, the Virgin Mary and Christ were depicted as white, while the portraits of (living) Nubians and biblical figures believed to be either Asiatic or African were depicted with a dark-brown color6.
Besides Longinus’ charisma and drive, Nubians appear to have found the monastic side of Christianity especially appealing. Several monasteries were created particularly in the Nubian Kingdom of Makuria, along with Nobatia the larger of the states that succeeded Kush after its decline in the 4th century. This included, by the late 7th century, the great monastery at Ghazali, near modern Karima in the region where the Nile briefly flows northwards before bending back southwards in central Sudan. This monastery, abandoned in the 13th century when the Muslims overrun Nubia, is remarkable for its size and the discovery of tattooed human remains, a rarity among contemporary Christians, in its cemetery7.
In Aksum-Ethiopia, Christianity had a massive effect on the local culture. Because of geographic isolation from the Christian west, Ethiopian Christianity evolved in very particular, local ways, becoming in effect something closer to a folk religion than a foreign import. These circumstances explain the exotic ways of Ethiopian Christians, a source of puzzlement for other Christians for century to come.
As an example, the Book of Enoch, a controversial late addition to the Jewish Torah that appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls, tells the story of two hundred angels called the Watchers who conspired to wed the daughters of men. According to the book, the angels brought forth a race of giants and introduced sorcery, warfare, and luxury into the world, a notion so contradictory with others in the Torah that neither Jews nor western Christians recognize the book as canonical – but the Ethiopian church always did.
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Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s brief alliance with the fellow Christian power of Constantinople was extremely impactful in the future history of Eurasia. Abraha, an Ethiopian warlord, had built a cathedral in San’a, central Yemen, that unruly Quraysh tribesmen from Mecca – favorable to the Sasanians, who often employed them as mercenaries – soon defiled by peeing inside of it.
In response, Abraha led his armies to Mecca looking to demolish the ancient sanctuary of the Kaaba there; in 570, the traditional year of Muhammad’s birth8, his elephants-supported army (called “Men of the Elephants” by the Arabs) was defeated and sent back to Yemen9.
The rise of the Quraysh was influenced by this context of strife between pro-Jewish (and pro-Sasanian) Arabs and African Christians, as well as intense fear of African domination among the Arabs – a fear that triggered support for a Sasanian-financed uprising against the Aksum rulers of Yemen that ended with Himyar briefly recovering its independence, before it became a Sasanian province, as well as an all-out slaughter of South Arabia’s Ethiopian population that may have amounted to a genocide10.
Defeat in Yemen, and the loss of the valuable port of Aden, was the beginning of the end of Aksum’s golden era, and the kingdom collapsed over the next century, again replaced by smaller polities like those that followed the downfall of the N’mt state. A key difference is that most of these were Christian, and the successor Zagwes state that reunified most of Aksum lands in the 11th century had a strong Christian flavor, of the Ethiopian variety.
Aksum’s influence over the events that were soon to take place in Arabia, and shake the entire world, can’t be overstated. In particular, the interplay of slave-trading and slave-raiding with religiously tinged warfare in 6th century Arabia, driving close contact between Arabs and outsiders like Ethiopians and other peoples of the Levant and beyond, had significant future consequences. A very dubious Islamic tradition has it that Muhammad dispatched letters to what Arabs saw as the world’s three greatest leaders, inviting them to convert to Islam: the Emperors of the Romans and Sasanian Persians, and the King of Aksum11.
Centuries later, Muslim scholars sparred with each other, for example, over the exact physical appearance of their prophet Muhammad, and Qadi Iyad (d. 1149) famously quoted a companion of the 8th century Tunisian jurist Sahnun who thundered: “Anyone who says that the Prophet was black should be killed. The Prophet was not black.”12
There were historical reasons for the issue of Muhammad’s skin color to be raised. Antarah ibn Shabbah (525-608), perhaps the most famous Arab poet of the pre-Muhammad era13, was born the son of a Ethiopian woman who almost certainly was a sex slave, and grew up a slave himself until he won his freedom through military exploits – and he was just one of three Arabic poets of fame born of black slave women, “the three Arab ravens,” in an era that obviously saw a significant influx of African blood into the peninsula, with consent or otherwise14.
Antarah’s poetry is powerful, at once direct and arrogant and conscious that he’s not the first warlord ever to stroll the Earth; one can imagine his words recited in the campfire at night, scaring the spirits away from fierce Arab warriors:
Damn the ruins! Damn you!
Stop dwelling on the past again.
Damn you, stop all this talk – you
won’t ever get the sweet times back.
…
Death appeared.
I said to my men
“Whose up for a wager?
Who’ll face Death with me?
Turn your horses
the raiders are here.
Don’t let them win
the prize.” They met
warriors, not slaves
at al-Faruq.
We drive our horses
hard, their manes
matted like lice-ridden hair.
Come back for more
now that you know-
Time damns us all.15
Imru al-Qais (496-544), a mercenary who may have become a Christian late in life, and Zuhayr bin Ami Sulma (520-609) were the other two Ravens16. Like Antarah, they wrote about raiding, glorious encounters, the taste of battle. Amr ibn Kulthum (d. 584), another leading poet, famously wrote that, while others brought back treasure and captives, his own warband was more glorious for having enslaved kings.
This wasn’t a purely Arabian universe of tribesmen criss-crossing sandy deserts. By the 6th century, large numbers of Arabs driven out of the marginal lands of the Arabian Peninsula by a cooler, drier climate lived on the arid plains and farmland of Syria, Transjordan and Iraq. Many others had moved into Palestine; many became Monophysite or Nestorian Christians, joining Christian sects that shied away from the theological complexity of the Trinity and leaned towards recognizing the unique greatness and oneness of the Creator.
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Only a handful of languages of the Niger-Congo family, notably Koalib, are spoken in Sudan and Southern Sudan, by fairly small minorities.
Most of the population was probably living in villages in huts of wood and straw, and many of the inhabitants away from the river are likely to have been nomads, or at least semi-nomads, practising transhumance like many of the modern dwellers in the region, now called Butana. During the dry season they dwell close to the river, move away from it as soon as the rain begins to fall in June or July, and travel eastwards along a number of large wadis, planting sorghum as soon as sufficient rain has fallen. They also take herds of cattle up to the grazing grounds. Fage & Oliver, Op. Cit., p. 237.
Fage & Oliver, Op. Cit., p. 221.
Diodorus, who seemed somewhat confused about Nubia/Kush and Ethiopia/Aksum, added: “As for the custom touching the friends of the king, strange as it is, it persists, they said, down to our own time. For the Ethiopians have the custom, they say, that if their king has been maimed in some part of his body through any cause whatever, all his companions suffer the same loss of their own choice; because they consider that it would be a disgraceful thing if, when the king had been maimed in his leg, his friends should be sound of limb, and if in their goings forth from the palace they should not all follow the king limping as he did; for it would be strange that steadfast friendship should share sorrow and grief and bear equally all other things both good and evil, but should have no part in the suffering of the body. They say also that it is customary for the comrades of the kings even to die with them of their own accord, and that such a death is an honorable one and a proof of true friendship. And it is for this reason, they add, that a conspiracy against the king is not easily raised among the Ethiopians, all his friends being equally concerned both for his safety and their own. These, then, are the customs which prevail among the Ethiopians who dwell in their capital and those who inhabit both the island of Meroe and the land adjoining Egypt.”
Fage & Oliver, Op. Cit., p. 448.
For example, biblical figures such as the Magi (the Three Kings or Three Wise Men) and the shepherds from the nativity story, or the characters like Tobias are depicted as Nubians.
See “A rare medieval tattoo from Ghazali, Sudan,” by B. Szymanska, in “Polish centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw,” 18.10-2023. The Greek word “stigma” originally meant “tattoo” and the Bible’s Book of Leviticus contains the command “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead: you shall not tattoo yourselves.” In the Life of Brigid of Ireland, the island’s patroness who lived in the 6th century, there’s an incident in which she expresses displeasure at her followers’ tattoos and hopes that God will make it possible for them to remove their ‘diabolical signs’ (signa diabolica). See “Insular Celtic Tattooing: History, Myth and Metaphor,” by Charles McQuarrie, in “Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History,” ed. by Jane Caplan (Princeton UP, 2000). The taboo was later extended to Muslims: when the Arab governor of Ifriqiya, Yazu ibn Abi Muslim, ordered his Berber body troops to be tattooed, as was the custom with slaves, they killed him in 720. The taboo may have not always been respected: in “Inscripta in Fronte: Penal Tattooing in Late Antiquity,” (Classical Antiquity (1997) 16 (1): 79–105) W. Mark Gustafson “hypothesizes that the [early] Christians effected a transformation of the tattoo and subverted its original intent, so that, rather than being a sign of punishment, it became a sign of glory in which one could take pride,” by tattooing themselves, although evidence seems to be between scarce and non-existent. By the 6th century, Procopius of Gaza wrote (in his commentary on the Book of Isaiah) that Christians in the Holy Land sometimes had a cross or religious words tattooed on their wrists. It’s precisely Crusaders returning from the Holy Land who may have been the first non-Eastern Christians to systematically break the taboo against tattooing, by imitating local custom and marking their skin during their stay in the East; this lead to a slow acceptance of tattoos as acceptable religious symbols.
Chase F. Robinson (Op. Cit., p. 184) suggests Muhammad may have been born much earlier, perhaps in the 550s.
There’s historiographic controversy over Abraha’s exact intentions and whether his army did have elephants. It appears clear, however, that the Ethiopians were in conflict with the Quraysh, traditionally friendly with the Sasanians. Sura 105 of the Quran, written at least decades after the fact, is a key source for this event.
Historian Al-Tabari later wrote that the Arab leader Sayf “attacked the Ethiopians and began to kill them and ripped out (the fetuses) which their women had in their bellies, until he had annihilated all but a few wretched remnants of them, whom he seized as slaves.” After Sayf himself was killed by Ethiopians in revenge, the wretched remnants were disposed of, as well, by direct order of the Sasanian emperor: “He (i.e. Kisra, or Khosrau) commanded him not to leave in Yemen a black or the child of an Arab woman by a black without killing him, young or old; nor to let live a single curly- or crispy-haired man with whom the blacks had been involved.”
See Chase F. Robinson, Op. Cit., p. 192.
See “Anyone who says that the Prophet is black should be killed”: The De-Arabization of Islam and the Transfiguration of MuÈammad in Islamic Tradition,” by Wesley Williams, Michigan State University (2013).
His most famous poem is part of the The Muʻallaqāt, a group of seven long Arabic poems compiled by Hammad al-Rawiya in the 8th century. Antarah wrote in a form of poetry called qasida. Like many poetic forms dealing with what a society views as ‘high’ matters, it is an elaborate form with a single meter (per poem) and lines that all rhyme on the same sound – a kind of poetry was fundamentally oral when it began and was oriented towards performance, meaning recitation. The qasida revolved around the concerns of elite warrior-poets: manly virtue, honor, though also love and the fierceness of kin-bonds, and the elation of being in battle and surviving, of slaying the enemy and taking all he has. One needs to be very obtuse to not see in Antarah’s poetry the underlying warrior ethos and violent ideology on which Islam was constructed during his old age and after his passing.
See “The Crows of the Arabs,” published in the Vol. 12, No. 1, of “Race,” Writing, and Difference’ (Autumn, 1985), pp. 88-97, by Bernard Lewis.
Translated by J.E. Montgomery and R. Sieburth (“War Songs,” 2018). I owe the reference to Bret Deveraux.
Zuhayr was quoted in Jorge Luis Borges “Averroes’ Search,” a short story in his 1949 compilation “El Aleph.” The story begins in the shady Cordoban home of Ibn Rushd, later known in Europe as Averroes. The philosopher is at an impasse in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics: the words “tragedy” and “comedy” are everywhere in the Greek but opaque to the Arab, who has no notion of dramaturgy. At a dinner party that evening, a guest argues that the Bedouin verse of pre-Islamic times, the foundation of Arabic literature, is obsolete for poets living in sophisticated cities like Córdoba. When the 6th century poet Zuhayr compared destiny to a blind camel, the metaphor was arresting; now it seems absurd, the guest explains. Averroes disagrees. In perfectly Aristotelian fashion, he notes that poetry deals in universals: its purpose isn’t to amaze but to invent figures understandable by everyone.
Fascinating and impressively researched - thank you.