Recovering Submerged Worlds, by Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books, 11/7/2013//democracycrisis "This is where Bowersock begins—in Adulis (on the modern Gulf of Zula, in Ethiopian Eritrea) and in Axum, a royal capital set back from the coast, in the foothills of the mountains of Ethiopia. He studies a remarkable series of inscriptions. These inscriptions are in three languages—in Greek and in two languages that were outliers from the great Semitic languages of the Middle East: Ge’ez (Ethiopic) and Sabaic. Greek was then still a lingua franca beyond the territories of Rome. Looking beyond these unusual monuments, Bowersock draws on similar inscriptions from both sides of the Red Sea to add a whole new chapter to the history of the ancient world in its last century. He shows how, throughout the sixth century AD, the kingdoms on either side of the Red Sea—the Kingdom of Himyar in southern Arabia and the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum, just across the sea—were locked in conflict, with momentous consequences for their neighbors. Bowersock also shows how the two great empires of the north came to be embroiled in the conflict. The eastern part of the Roman Empire (“East Rome”) and the Sassanian Empire of Persia were driven by competition to reach ever deeper into the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea. Their representatives came no longer for giraffes, but in search of allies and, even, in support of coreligionists. For the Red Sea Wars in the sixth and seventh centuries quickly took on the explosive quality of religious wars. The kingdom of Axum (the future African Zion of Ethiopia) became Christian in around 340. A century later, “suddenly, remarkably, and inexplicably” the kingdom of Himyar adopted Judaism. The bitter fighting between the two powers became holy wars that pitted Christians against Jews. Each side was as brutal as the other. The memory of this spasm of holy violence was still vivid in the Hijaz in which Muhammad was born in around 570. In this way, “the tumultuous events in sixth-century Arabia may reasonably be called the crucible of Islam.” And so Bowersock’s excursion to the apparent fringes of the ancient world leads back to the ground zero of the detonation that created the Islamic world of medieval and modern times".
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 16:46:01 +0000
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