Adulis

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Adulis is an archeological site in the Northern Red Sea region of Eritrea, about 30 miles south of Massawa. It was the port of the Kingdom of Aksum, located on the coast of the Red Sea. Adulis Bay is named after the port. It is thought that the modern town of Zula may be the Adulis of Aksumite times, as Zula may reflect the native name for the Greek "Adulis."

[edit] History

Pliny the Elder is the earliest writer to mention Adulis (N.H. 6.34), who misunderstood the name of the place, and thought its name meant that it had been founded by escaped Egyptian slaves. It is mentioned by the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a guide of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, which describes it as an emporium for the ivory, hides, slaves and other exports of the interior. It may have previously been known as Berenice Panchrysus of the Ptolemies.

Cosmas Indicopleustes records two inscriptions he found here in the 6th century: the first records how Ptolemy Euergetes (247-222 BC) used war elephants captured in the region to gain victories in his wars abroad; the second, known as the Monumentum Adulitanum, was inscribed in the 27th year of an unnamed king of Axum, boasting of his victories to the north and south of Axum.

A fourth century work traditionally (but probably inncorrectly) ascribed to the writer Palladius, believed to be the bishop of Helenopolis between 368 - 431, relates the journey of an anonymous Egyptian lawyer (scholasticus) to India in order to investigate Brahmin philosophy, he was accompanied part of the way by one Moise or Moses, bishop of Adulis.

Control of Adulis allowed Axum to be the major power on the Red Sea. This port was the principal staging area for Kaleb's invasion of the Himyarite kingdom of Dhu Nuwas around 520. While the scholar Yuri Kobishchanov detailed a number of raids Abyssinians made on the Arabian coast (the latest being in 702, when the port of Jeddah was occupied), and argued that Adulis was later captured by the Muslims, which brought to an end Axum's naval ability and contributed to Abyssinia's isolation from the Byzantine Empire and other traditional allies, the last years of Adulis are a mystery. Muslim writers occasionally mention both Adulis and the nearby Dahlak Archipelago as places of exile, the evidence suggests that Axum maintained its access to the Red Sea, yet suffered a clear decline in fortunes from the seventh century onwards. In any case, the sea power of Axum waned and security for the Red Sea fell on other shoulders.

[edit] Archeological excavations

Adulis was one of the first Axumite sites to undergo excavation, when a French mission to Abyssinia under Vignaud and Petit performed an initial survey in 1840, and prepared a map which marked the location of thee structures they believed were temples. In 1868, workers attached to Napier's campaign against Tewodros II visited Adulis and exposed several buildings, including the foundations of a Byzantine-like church.

The first scientific excavations were undertaken by a German expedition in 1906 under the supervision of R. Sundström, who worked in the northern sector of the site, exposing a large structure Sundström labelled the "palace of Adulis", as well as recovering Axumite coinage; their results were published in four volumes in 1913. R. Paribeni excavated in Adulis the following year, discovering many structures similar to what Sundström had found the previous year, but also a number of ordinary dwellings.

Over 50 years passed until the next series of excavations, when in 1961 and 1962 the Ethiopian Institute of Archeology sponsored an expedition led by Francis Anfray, which not only recovered materials showing a strong affinities with the late Axumite kingdom, but a destruction layer which prompted Kobishchanov to later argue that Adulis had been destroyed by an Arab raid in the mid-7th century, a view that has since been rejected.

[edit] Bibliography

• Stuart Munro-Hay. Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity. Edinburgh: University Press. 1991. ISBN 0-7486-0106-6
• Yuri M. Kobishchanov. Axum (Joseph W. Michels, editor; Lorraine T. Kapitanoff, translator). University Park, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 1979. ISBN 0-271-00531-9