The Provinces of the Roman Empire 40

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 40

The east coast of Egypt presented to the development of general traffic

a problem difficult of solution. The thoroughly desolate and rocky

shore was incapable of culture proper, and in ancient as in later times

a desert.[250] On the other hand the two seas, eminently important for

the development of culture in the ancient world, the Mediterranean and

the Red or Indian, approach each other most closely at the two most

northern extremities of the latter, the Persian and the Arabian gulfs;

the former receives into it the Euphrates, which in the middle of its

course comes near to the Mediterranean; the latter is only a few days’

march distant from the Nile, which flows into the same sea. Hence in

ancient times the commercial intercourse between the East and the West

took preponderantly either the direction along the Euphrates to the

Syrian and Arabian coast, or it made its way from the east coast of

Egypt to the Nile. The traffic routes from the Euphrates were older

than those by way of the Nile; but the latter had the advantage of the

stream being better for navigation and of the shorter land-transport;

the getting rid of the latter by preparing an artificial water-route

was in the case of the Euphrates excluded, in that of Egypt found in

ancient as in modern times difficult doubtless, but not impossible.

Accordingly nature itself prescribed to the land of Egypt to connect

the east coast with the course of the Nile and the northern coast by

land or water routes; and the beginnings of such structures go back to

the time of those native rulers who first opened up Egypt to foreign

countries and to traffic on a great scale. Following in the traces

apparently of older structures of the great rulers of Egypt, Sethi I.

and Rhamses II., king Necho, the son of Psammetichus (610-594 B.C.)

began the building of a canal, which, branching off from the Nile in

the neighbourhood of Cairo, was to furnish a water-communication with

the bitter lakes near Ismailia, and through these with the Red Sea,

without being able, however, to complete the work. That in this he had

in view not merely the control of the Arabian Gulf and the commercial

traffic with the Arabians, but already brought within his horizon the

Persian and the Indian seas, and the more remote East, is probable, for

this reason, that the same ruler suggested the only circumnavigation of

Africa executed in antiquity. Beyond doubt thus thought king Darius I.,

the lord of Persia as well as of Egypt; he completed the canal, but,

as his memorial-stones found on the spot mention, he caused it to be

filled up again, probably because his engineers feared that the water

of the sea, admitted into the canal, would overflow the fields of Egypt.

 

[Sidenote: The Egyptian eastern ports.]

 

The rivalry of the Lagids and the Seleucids, which dominated the

policy of the post-Alexandrine period generally, was at the same

time a contest between the Euphrates and the Nile. The former was in

possession, the latter the pretender; and in the better time of the

Lagids the peaceful offensive was pursued with great energy. Not only

was that canal undertaken by Necho and Darius, now named the “river

of Ptolemaeus,” opened for the first time to navigation by the second

Ptolemy Philadelphus († 247 B.C.); but comprehensive harbour-structures

were carried out at the points of the difficult east coast that were

best fitted for the security of the ships and for the connection with

the Nile. Above all, this was done at the mouth of the canal leading to

the Nile, at the townships of Arsinoe, Cleopatris, Clysma, all three in

the region of the present Suez. Further downward, besides several minor

structures, arose the two important emporia, Myos Hormos, somewhat

above the present Kosêr, and Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes,

nearly in the same latitude with Syene on the Nile as well as with the

Arabian port Leuce Come, the former distant six or seven, the latter

eleven days’ march from the town Coptos, near which the Nile bends

farthest to the eastward, and connected with this chief emporium on the

Nile by roads constructed across the desert and provided with large

cisterns. The goods traffic of the time of the Ptolemies probably went

less through the canal than by these land routes to Coptos.

 

[Sidenote: Abyssinia.]

 

Beyond that Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, the Egypt proper

of the Lagids did not extend. The settlements lying farther to the

south, Ptolemais “for the chase” below Suâkim, and the southmost

township of the Lagid kingdom, the subsequent Adulis, at that time

perhaps named “Berenice the Golden” or “near Saba,” Zula not far from

the present Massowah, by far the best harbour on all this coast, were

not more than coast-forts and had no communication by land with Egypt.

These remote settlements were beyond doubt either lost or voluntarily

abandoned under the later Lagids, and at the epoch when the Roman rule

began, the Trogodytic Berenice was on the coast, like Syene in the

interior, the limit of the empire.

 

[Sidenote: The kingdom of the Axomites.]

 

In this region, never occupied or early evacuated by the Egyptians,

there was formed--whether at the end of the Lagid epoch or in the first

age of the empire--an independent state of some extent and importance,

that of the Axomites,[251] corresponding to the modern Habesh. It

derives its name from the town Axômis, the modern Axum, situated in the

heart of this Alpine country eight days’ journey from the sea, in the

modern country of Tigre; the already-mentioned best emporium on this

coast, Adulis in the bay of Massowah, served it as a port. The original

population of the kingdom of Axômis, of which tolerably pure remnants

still maintain themselves at the present day in individual tracts of

the interior, belonged from its language, the Agau, to the same Hamitic

cycle with the modern Bego, Sali, Dankali, Somali, Galla; to the

Egyptian population this linguistic circle seems related in a similar

way as the Greeks to the Celts and Slaves, so that here doubtless for

research an affinity may subsist, but for their historical existence

rather nothing but contrast. But before our knowledge of this country

so much as begins, superior Semitic immigrants belonging to the

Himyaritic stocks of southern Arabia must have crossed the narrow gulf

of the sea and rendered their language as well as their writing at

home there. The old written language of Habesh, extinct in popular use

since the seventeenth century, the Ge’ez, or as it is for the most part

erroneously termed, the Aethiopic,[252] is purely Semitic,[253] and

the still living dialects, the Amhara and the Tigriña, are so also in

the main, only disturbed by the influence of the older Agau.

 

[Sidenote: Its extent and development.]

 

As to the beginnings of this commonwealth no tradition has been

preserved. At the end of Nero’s time, and perhaps already long before,

the king of the Axomites ruled on the African coast nearly from Suâkim

to the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. Some time afterwards--the epoch cannot

be more precisely defined--we find him as a frontier-neighbour of the

Romans on the southern border of Egypt, and on the other coast of the

Arabian Gulf in warlike activity in the territory intervening between

the Roman possession and that of the Sabaeans, and so coming into

immediate contact towards the north with the Roman territory also in

Arabia; commanding, moreover, the African coast outside of the Gulf

perhaps as far as Cape Guardafui. How far his territory of Axômis

extended inland is not clear; Aethiopia, that is, Sennaar and Dongola,

at least in the earlier imperial period, hardly belonged to it; perhaps

at this time the kingdom of Nabata may have subsisted alongside of the

Axomitic. Where the Axomites meet us, we find them at a comparatively

advanced stage of development. Under Augustus the Egyptian commercial

traffic increased not less with these African harbours than with India.

The king had the command not merely of an army, but, as his very

relations to Arabia presuppose, also of a fleet. A Greek merchant, who

was present in Adulis, terms king Zoskales, who ruled in Vespasian’s

time in Axômis, an upright man and acquainted with Greek writing;

one of his successors has set up on the spot a memorial-writing

composed in current Greek which told his deeds to the foreigners;

he even names himself in it a son of Ares--which title the kings of

the Axomites retained down to the fourth century--and dedicates the

throne, which bears that memorial inscription, to Zeus, to Ares, and

to Poseidon. Already in Zoskales’s time that foreigner names Adulis a

well organised emporium; his successors compelled the roving tribes

of the Arabian coast to keep peace by land and by sea, and restored a

land communication from their capital to the Roman frontier, which,

considering the nature of this district primarily left dependent on

communication by sea, was not to be esteemed of slight account. Under

Vespasian brass pieces, which were divided according to need, served

the natives instead of money, and Roman coin circulated only among the

strangers settled in Adulis; in the later imperial period the kings

themselves coined. The Axomite ruler withal calls himself king of

kings, and no trace points to Roman clientship; he practises coining in

gold, which the Romans did not allow, not merely in their own territory

but even within the range of their power. There was hardly another land

in the imperial period beyond the Romano-Hellenic bounds which had

appropriated to itself Hellenic habits with equal independence and to

an equal extent as the state of Habesh. That in the course of time the

popular language, indigenous or rather naturalised from Arabia, gained

the upper hand and dispossessed the Greek, is probably traceable partly

to Arabian influence, partly to that of Christianity and the revival

connected with it of the popular dialects, such as we found also in

Syria and Egypt; and it does not exclude the view that the Greek

language in Axomis and Adulis in the first and second centuries of our

era had a similar position to what it had in Syria and Egypt, so far as

it is allowable to compare small and great.

 

[Sidenote: Rome and the Axomites.]

 

Of political relations of the Romans to the state of Axomis hardly

anything is mentioned from the first three centuries of our era, to

which our narrative is confined. With the rest of Egypt they took

possession also of the ports of the east coast down to the remote

Trogodytic Berenice, which on account of that remoteness was in the

Roman period placed under a commandant of its own.[254] Of extending

their territory into the inhospitable and worthless mountains along

the coast there was never any thought; nor can the sparse population,

standing at the lowest stage of development, in the immediately

adjoining region have ever given serious trouble to the Romans. As

little did the Caesars attempt, as the early Lagids had done, to

possess themselves of the emporia of the Axomitic coast. There is

express mention only of the fact that envoys of the Axomite kings

negotiated with the emperor Aurelian. But this very silence, as well as

the formerly indicated independent position of the ruler,[255] leads

to the inference that here the recognised frontier was permanently

respected on both sides, and that a relation of good neighbourhood

subsisted, which proved advantageous to the interests of peace and

especially of Egyptian commerce. That the latter, especially the

important traffic in ivory, in which Adulis was the chief entrepôt for

the interior of Africa, was carried on predominantly from Egypt and

in Egyptian vessels, cannot--considering the superior civilisation of

Egypt--be subject to any doubt even as regards the Lagid period; and

in Roman times this traffic probably only increased in amount, without

undergoing further change.

 

[Sidenote: The west coast of Arabia.]

 

Far more important for Egypt and the Roman empire generally than the

traffic with the African south was that which subsisted with Arabia

and the coasts situated farther to the east. The Arabian peninsula

remained aloof from the sphere of Hellenic culture. It would possibly

have been otherwise had king Alexander lived a year longer; death

swept him away amidst the preparations for sailing round and occupying

the already-explored south coast of Arabia, setting out from the

Persian Gulf. But the voyage which the great king had not been able to

enter on was never undertaken by any Greek after him. From the most

remote times, on the other hand, a lively intercourse had taken place

between the two coasts of the Arabian Gulf over its moderately broad

waters. In the Egyptian accounts from the time of the Pharaohs the

voyages to the land of Punt, and the spoils thence brought home in

frankincense, ebony, emeralds, leopards’ skins, play an important part.

It has been already (p. 148) mentioned that subsequently the northern

portion of the Arabian west coast belonged to the territory of the

Nabataeans, and with this came into the power of the Romans. This was

a desolate beach;[256] only the emporium Leuce Come, the last town of

the Nabataeans and so far also of the Roman empire, was not merely in

maritime intercourse with Berenice lying opposite, but was also the

starting-point of the caravan-route leading to Petra and thence to

the ports of southern Syria, and in so far, one of the centres of the

traffic between the East and the West (p. 151). The adjoining regions

on the south, northward and southward of the modern Mecca, corresponded

in their natural character to the opposite Trogodyte country, and were,

like this, neither politically nor commercially of importance, nor yet

apparently united under one sceptre, but occupied by roving tribes. But

at the south end of this gulf was the home of the only Arabic stock,

which attained to greater importance in the pre-Islamic period. The

Greeks and the Romans name these Arabs in the earlier period after

the people most prominent at that time Sabaeans, in later times after another tribe usually Homerites, as, according to the new Arabic form of the latter name, now for the most part Himjarites.