Faculty Articles
Of Nubians and Nabateans: Implications of research on neglected dimensions of ancient world history
Jesse Benjamin (*)
Journal of Asian and African Studies, Nov 2001 v36 i4 p361(22)
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 E.J. Brill
ABSTRACT
The exploration of relations between the Nubians and the Nabateans opens new possibilities concerning the historical and historiographic linkages between ancient East Africa and the ancient Middle East. In large part, such an analysis speaks to the re-mapping of Ancient World relations and the role of anti-colonial historiography in the execution of such a task. Anti-colonial historiography has challenged the presuppositions of the modern political construction of these regions and their interaction. It has done so by posing critical questions concerning the re-reading of existing data and, therefore, the reconstruction of the historical record. The new direction into Nubian/Nabatean relations initiates a broader cultural analysis of the "Old World" in the "Classical Era."
I. Introduction
In this essay, I revisit historical analyses of ancient "East Africa" and the ancient "Middle East," roughly in the years between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E. Contrary to the bias of most Western scholarship on this subject, but in accordance with a growing critical scholarship, I suggest that cultural relations between these regions may have been endemic and pervasive. To show this, I suggest new readings of available sources, an expansion of sources currently considered, and the reading together of sources previously separated by disciplinary and/or ideological boundaries. In the cases of both Nabatean and East African cultures, historical and archaeological research tends to focus on debates within the respective regions, but not on global formations and cultural relations between regions. External social relations are rarely considered. My aim is to both provoke and stimulate reconsideration of these perspectives and to, thus, contribute to the decolonization of knowledge.
Historical questions regarding this region usually revolve around the opposed terms: "East Africa" and "the Middle East." These are little more than anachronistic post eighteenth-century Western designations that implicitly posit a pre-existing separation between these realms. More than actual historical events, Walter Rodney has suggested (1981), this sort of colonial historiography reflects the apartheid-style racial complex of the slavery-cum-colonial era in world history. The idea of Africa or "sub-Saharan Africa" being separated from the Middle East or Middle East/North Africa, works at an almost tectonic level in late-modern Western thought (Houston 1926; Mazrui 1986, 1992), based always on a supposed racial distinction between Arab-versus-Black inhabitants, terms which are as sociologically non-discrete as they are imprecise (Cabral 1973:84; Zeleza 1993; Bekerie 1997). In asking questions across this imagined divide, it is difficult not to ponder the contemporary meanings of this ubiquitous and racial "line in the sand."
At its zenith, Nabatean Civilization spanned all or part of contemporary Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, over a duration of more than a thousand years, two to three millennia ago. The core of Nabatean cultural history is usually seen as stretching from the second half of the last millennium B.C., to the first century A.D. After the first century A.D., Nabatea was gradually colonized by the Romans. Later still, it was Christianized and became Byzantine. Investigation of trade routes, evidenced in written records and also often traceable in archaeological and linguistic records, will form the bulk of this review, but the emphasis will be on working beyond the material level, to a broader cultural analysis of the "Old World" in the "Classical Era."
II. Origins of the Problem: Contexts of Contemporary Historiographic Research
1. Research on Nabatean History in the Context of Israeli Nation-Building
As a young college student, I had the opportunity to work and study at the Avdat experimental water-harvesting farm, reconstructed on the site of an ancient Nabatean farm in the shadows of the ancient city of Avdat (Oboda), in the central Negev Desert in contemporary Israel. The farm was re-started by Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, Naphtali Tadmor, David Mezig and others, in order to demonstrate that low-intensity water harvesting technology in this semi-arid climate was indeed possible, thereby supporting their hypothesis that this is what provided for the subsistence needs of the large cities and farms of Nabatean culture throughout the region more than two millennia ago. (Avdat farm is now a research site attached to the nearby Sde Boqer Desert Research Center of the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva.) At the time, my own interests, like those of many local researchers, focused primarily on the implications of low-tech solutions to water-harvesting and farming in the desert and their possible application to desert dwellers in various regions of the world.
One of my arguments at the time was that the emphasis of most Israeli scientists was on applying their "findings" to cultures elsewhere in the world, such as in Africa, but not to the local Bedouin cultures that continued throughout history to practice basic water-harvesting methods, much as were being "rediscovered" by scientists. This had much to do with local politics, which saw attempts to force the resettlement of the entire indigenous Bedouin population into planned urban centers near industrial parks, where it was hoped they would become low-paid laborers, and abandon their cultures. This was due to a combination of factors including Zionist assumptions, and the more widespread and, therefore, readily available myth that pastoralists are detrimental to the environment and/or agricultural civilization (Horowitz 1986; Horowitz and Little 1987). Thus, supposed concern for the environment served to justify mass relocations, which incidentally liberated huge tracts of land for the Israeli Defense Forces to practice war games and build airbases. This illogic went as far as the sad irony of Israel's Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel when they uprooted tens of thousands of fruit trees (demolishing homes, and confiscating livestock) in the process of forced evictions of Bedouin Palestinians from the desert. Over more than fifteen years, Ghazi Falah (1989) has been the most consistent, rigorous, and courageous critics of these practices.
When I studied the ancient history of Nabatean civilization, I found that it was almost always discussed, as was the fashion of the time, as a more or less coherent, corporate body, more or less in isolation from geopolitical events and cultures around it. Certainly, some attention was paid to the trade routes that sustained the Nabatean culture and economy (at least in part), and the fact that these routes connected it to vast and distant realms of the ancient world. There is even an important debate about how important a role trade played in the Nabatean economy as compared to agriculture, water harvesting, pastoralism, and other subsistence activities (Negev 1986). More attention, however, was paid to debates about what sort of corporate body or bodies the Nabateans formed. Were they a "tribe," an "ethnic group," a "federation of tribes," a "kingdom," or an "empire"? Negev (1986), and others have shown that Nabatean cities, surrounded by farms, hidden cisterns, and pasture lands, ranged from Avdat and numerous other cities in Israel's Negev Desert, to the storied and monumental capital city of Petra, carved from the red rock mountains of contemporary southern Jordan, as well as numerous outlying port cities on the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and even the Persian Gulf.
In short, other than brief allusions to trade connections, and debates about the centrality of trade in the Nabatean economy, scant attention is given to the inter-regional cultural, political, and economic relations which existed between Nabatean cultures and their neighbors in the ancient world. There is at least one good reason for this. Many of the scholars who first worked on Nabatean history or archaeology were actively seeking to counter prevailing myths and assumptions, referred to above, about desert dwellers and pastoralists in general, and in Israel in particular. When Evenari et al. (1982) first proposed that Avdat had been a city of tens of thousands of people, and even more livestock, they were greeted with skepticism by many scholars in Israel and the West (Evenari et al. 1982; Evenari 1989). It was widely accepted that overland trade formed the basis of Nabatean civilization, but this was not seen as sufficient to sustain huge urban settlements with their obvious water (and food) needs in such an arid climate, even in the face of excavations that revealed the extent of settlements and showed evidence of massive landscape alterations.
The low contour bunds (long, snake-like hills of earth), which criss-crossed the environment, were alternately described as religious in nature or mysterious and unexplainable, until the farm experiment at Avdat demonstrated that they were used to collect runoff water into fertile valleys capable of supporting agriculture, both fruit trees and annual cereal crops. The fertile valleys, estimated at about 5 to 10 percent of the Negev Desert's surface area, contained a special soil known locally as "loess," which contained high amounts of clay, thus allowing it to both retain water moisture well, and to attract crucial mineral nutrients due to its isotopic atomic configuration.
This was a most important research intervention on the part of Evenari and his colleagues, working ostensibly to overturn modern Israeli biases about the desert's indigenous peoples in the context of its own, seemingly overlapping, nation-building goals, articulated famously by the new nation's first head of state, David Ben Gurion, in the slogan: "making the desert bloom." Unfortunately, Evenari's insights have been applied only to ancient desert dwellers and not their successors, the Bedouin, who are being forcibly resettled even though they still practice many of the ancient water harvesting and husbandry techniques, which actually preserve these delicate ecosystems. This "oversight" was actually logically consistent if not necessary within the Israeli state's rhetoric, because it was specifically Jewish Israelis and settlers and not indigenous Muslim Bedouin or Palestinians who were intended by the state to "make the desert bloom." My point here is that this racial-state context is partially responsible for the focus on Nabatean culture as a bounded and isolated entity detached from wider events and contacts throughout the ancient world. This admittedly obscure case of the Nabateans is an important illustration of a much wider and well known phenomenon of Western epistemology and science, which, since at least the time of Linneaus, if not Descartes, has sought to divide the world into rigid and hierarchical categorizational units, culminating in the last two centuries in such everyday concepts as "the nation," and "ethnicity" (p'Bitek 1970; Mafeje 1971; Magubane 1971; Pratt 1992; Chatterjee 1993; Dussell 1995).
2. East African Historiography: Reading the International Component Through the Nexus of the Colonial Imaginary
Several years later, I had the further opportunity to live and conduct historical and social research on the coast of Kenya. Here too I came up against the limits of colonial knowledge production and the ways in which this context of history writing generally circumscribed the content and meaning of historical research and writing. This was a context in which Africa was explicitly denied history, from at least Hume and Hegel to the recent, authoritative and much commented upon diatribes of Hugh Trevor-Roper (p'Bitek 1970). Among other things, this was a manner of constructing an oppositional dichotomy whereby Europe possessed history, and then bestowed it upon "non-historical" realms via conquest and/or colonization. However, in the East African case, the Muslim world of Arabia came to occupy a distinctly middle position in this supposedly benevolent process of induction into the world of evolution, progress, and simple being. This was largely because the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans on the East A frican coast, had already encountered Muslim peoples in the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, and specifically because much of Europe had long been trying to circumvent Muslim control of the passages to the "Far East," which is why the "voyages of discovery" were undertaken in the first place. Thus, the "Arab" and Muslim worlds, while "Orientalized" (Said 1978), were still seen as somehow historical, particularly in relation to Africa.
Later, under nineteenth-century British military and naval dominance, and eventually formal British colonial rule in the twentieth century, Western scholars worked overtime to explain away abundant evidence of African cultural and historical achievements. Scholars and administrators alike could not fail to notice the monumental architecture at the coast and its immediate hinterlands throughout the Swahili world and as far south as Great Zimbabwe. When these structures and the cultures to which they were attributed were not ascribed to such implausible factors as aliens from outer space, they were generally explained by various diffusionist theories common to anthropology at that time. These issues have been discussed for Zimbabwe in Kuklick (1991), and for the East African, "Swahili" coast in Allen (1976a, 1976b, 1982, 1983, 1993) and Wilding (1984, 1987), before the recent summary in Pearson (1997). Two of the most famous of these ill-founded theories centered on "Middle Eastern" or "Arab" diffusions, involving in one case Islamic civilizations, and in the other case, the famed Hamitic thesis, both of which have been conclusively negated in recent decades (Du Bois [1946]1965; Moses 1998).
This has made for a complex situation, wherein African history has been consistently denied and explained, away as externally-originated and defined, something which has much to do with the brief hegemony at the coast of Busaidi Omani rule based in Zanzibar, and the later alliance between these ruling Swahili and Arab elites with the new British colonizers. The point for this inquiry, however, is that this over-emphasis of external factors in East African history has not necessarily led to an even exploration of the many world-wide contacts between the East African coast and surrounding areas such as India, Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Instead, the widespread diffusionism of colonial history has stressed a unidirectional relationship between Africa and the world, with other regions coming to Africa, bringing culture, and often conquering, but never moving in the other direction. Most of this contact is also ascribed to the post-eighth century era, both a denial of too great an antiquity in the region, and a centering of Islamic religion and civilizations, which again are accorded a certain historicity in the Western paradigm.
This has precluded the exploration of bi-directional relations between regions now designated as "African," and regions now designated as "neighboring" by virtue of being defined as Asian, or more specifically Middle Eastern. I suggest that such bi-directional and complex relations between and around Nabatea and Nubia should be explored more thoroughly. We should look at relations between Nabatea (together with its neighbors) and the wider East African coast and hinterland: Egypt, Nubia, Axum, the "Cinnamon coast," and the Azania/Shungwaya/Zanj/Proto-Swahili worlds further south, as well as the somewhat better documented ties with India and further East.
Since the exclusion of East Africa and East African agency has achieved the status of pervasive and hegemonic knowledge, but only since the recent vortex of colonial and imperial relations during the past 160 years, one would expect to find both pre-colonial as well as contemporary anti-colonial scholars making precisely the opposite assumptions and inferences, and indeed one does. In addition to numerous eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European scholars, see, for example, the general orientations to African relations with and/or presence in Arabia and neighboring realms of present-day Western Asia, in the works of Drucilla Dunjee Houston (1926, 1985), John G. Jackson (1939, 1970, 1985), and W.E.B. DuBois ([1946]1965). In addition, there is an increasing proliferation of more recent works to refer to, including Joseph E. Harris (1971, 1977, 1985), the diverse collection of essays in Ivan Van Sertima (1985), and Ayele Bekerie's (1997) linguistically based reflections on ancient Ethiopia in the world. These works expand the potential scope of contact contexts, and consistently go against the grain by failing to write Africa out of the bounds of potential historical agency.
III. The Grounds for Re-Evaluation: Mapping Ancient World Relations
The ancientness of the historical period under investigation lends itself to a material focus, based on trade and regional/local consumption patterns. This is due largely to our reliance on archaeological evidence. Even linguistic reconstructions and discussions in texts and histories of the era under investigation often refer directly back to the material record for corroboration and cross referencing. And in this regard, there is a good deal of accumulating data to strengthen the case of social and economic contacts and relations over vast amounts of both time and space. Yet, while this focus is a necessary and insightful dimension to this historiography, relatively less work has been conducted in the realms of cultural and social reconstruction for these periods. The cosmological and epistemological implications of such truly global commercial interrelations over so great a period of time remain to be critically engaged. In this brief essay, I will limit myself to sketching some of the known economic and political relations between neighboring and distant regions of the Old World, in the hope that this will be debated, added to, extended, and conjoined with other analyses of related cultural, religious, linguistic, social, and material relations and connections.
Evidence from the East African Coast
The anchors of the economic connections between Nabatea and East Africa were the trades in spices and incense. "Cinnamon" and "Cassia," in particular, were perhaps the most valued commodities during this period, and frankincense and myrrh were two of the most precious of the incenses and, therefore, also among the most lucrative and significant trade commodities of the time. All of these have been shown or persuasively suggested to have passed through the East African region, either originating within its territories, or being transshipped along its coast or through various overland routes, themselves the subject of debate and mystery even today. However, when they are discussed at all, it is almost exclusively in the contexts of their destinations: the Roman Empire and/or Western Asia.
I will limit my discussion here to a few of the major commodities, mentioned above, but numerous others also appear in historical and archaeological records, including ivory (rhino and elephant), tortoise shell, ambergris, balsam, iron, gold, and mangroves. Slavery is too often assumed to be the source of yet another commodity -- humans -- and is frequently described by scholars as an undifferentiated constant throughout much of classical history, oblivious of the various social relations within which it did exist, most all of which did not approximate the later Atlantic chattel slavery in any way. Other commodities, such as coffee, cowry shells, various technologies are much less studied. Cinnamon and cassia are difficult to relate to current sensibilities, first because of their coveted role in this period, and secondly because of the potentially confusing terminology used in ancient times. On the differences between these two varieties of what is today just termed cinnamon, see for example, the sixteenth-c entury text of Garcia da Orta, in Pearson (1996:1-20), as well as Miller (1969 passim), and Allen (1993:5568).
Another reference point in this analysis lies in the issue of comparative geopolitical associations. Where correlations can be made between the fortunes, ascents and declines of vast regions, empires and kingdoms, complex interconnections are partially illuminated. Often these may then be corroborated, contradicted and/or extended by linguistic and archaeological researches, as well as in written documents. I will develop both these points below.
To be sure, numerous scholars have discussed these regions in ancient historical contexts with intimate awareness of the global geopolitics of the era, but seemingly none more so than J. Innes Miller (1969), in his unprecedented, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire: 29 B.C. to A.D. 641. This is a work of unparalleled synthesis of ancient materials on this subject, which lays the groundwork for such later classics as Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974), The Modern World System Vol. I., Eric Wolf's (1982) Europe and the People Without History, and Abu-Lughod's (1989), Before European Hegemony, all of which discuss considerably later periods of (capitalist) world history. Several radical new interpretations are developed by the author, which continue to receive too little attention in scholarly discussions. One, in particular, is his "cinnamon hypothesis."
In short, historiographers throughout the ages have known and documented that the beloved cinnamon and cassia of the Mediterranean world originated in "Cinnamon land," also known variously as "The other Barbaria," "Trogodytica," or "Punt," but always indicating the area known today as "the Horn of Africa." However, the opinion that this was the origin of the crops has definitively been shown to be false based on ecological criteria. Allen (1993) has pointed out that ecologically, it cannot be grown in this area. The question has become: by what route did this important commodity reach this transshipment region from South Eastern Asia and the Islands of the Eastern Indian Ocean, contemporary Timor and Indonesia in particular, where it is "now" known to have been cultivable, and widely cultivated throughout antiquity.
The possibility that these spices reached Southern Arabia for transshipment north via India and/or neighboring regions of the subcontinent, seems intuitive but is in fact cast in doubt by its near total absence in contemporaneous literature, ships-logs, travel descriptions, navigation guides, etc. Miller marshals considerable evidence that cinnamon was instead transported directly across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and the South Eastern African coastline, eventually reaching the fabled entrepot Rhapta, before being further transshipped to "The Cinnamon Coast" just below where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean. The trade was carried on in sewn, double outrigger boats known as mtepe, which were found throughout the coast in ancient times and can still be seen in a modem variant, the wooden single or double outrigger maingalawa (ingalawa is the singular of this Swahili word). Miller (1969), and Allen (1993) even further, discuss the nature of secrecy and obfuscation used in trade during these times, in order to protect the sources of commodities, and to keep others at bay in their quests for circumvention. This helps to explain, as Allen (1993) put it, the "massive conspiracy by which all the Mediterranean consumers of cinnamon and cassia were for centuries deceived as to the real source of these products" (p.65).
The mtepe crafts have been shown to concentrate in the Lamu/Pate archipelago (Pins 1959; Allen 1993). This lends further credence to the position of Horton (1990) and Allen (1993), namely that Rhapta, mentioned in the anonymous first century A.D. Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, was in the region of this archipelago or near the mouth of the Tana River, rather than in contemporary central Tanzania, between the Pangani and Rufiji Rivers, as has often been assumed (Miller 1969, for example). On a related note, it is interesting that the outrigger sailing vessels known in Swahili as maingalawa are generally known and/or referred to as deriving from south of Kenya's borders. It is possible that this records a memory of the southern (and Indonesian-African) derived influence of this technology, and/or the fact that it emanated from a southern inception and production point.
While the search for the ruins of Rhapta still continues, Miller (1969) has also suggested, and with some substantial corroboration, that the transshipment from Rhapta and the East Coast of Africa followed several routes. While occasionally the route taken was the coasting trade around the Horn and into the ports of Aromata, Mosyllum, Mundus, Malao, and Avalites, the goods usually reached these entrepot ports via overland routes north from Mogadishu and Mombasa. It is even suggested that the Mombasa/Maji/Avalites route also diverged westward at Maji, to the Nile Valley routes from Juba and Malakal in Central Africa, northward to Egypt and its port, Alexandria.
The first two overland routes (from Mombasa and Mogadishu) would certainly have been in Nabatean hands as soon as they moved northward in the Arabian Peninsula toward various Mediterranean ports. The latter route, much less traversed and less constant over time, would have furnished an alternative route outside of the Nabatean monopoly. Such extensive attempts to circumvent the main trade routes further demonstrate the centrality of Nabatean stewardship of this trade between distant regions of the Ancient World. This is demonstrated by Rome's later annexation of Nabatea under the title, Arabia Petraea (Houston 1926:111-114; Miller 1969), in their efforts to confront the power of Petra as a pivotal entrepot between Africa and China, on the one hand, and the Mediterranean, on the other.
The late James Allen was perhaps the only major scholar of East African history to seriously engage the hypotheses and evidence of Miller. He proposed certain amendments and additions, and generally extended the argument in several directions. This is important because Allen is too often dismissed as a maverick or crank by scholars who have either left his various hypotheses uninvestigated or partially appropriated, even when they seem to warrant further consideration. For example, Pouwels' (1994) review of Allen (1994) is direct in discrediting his scholarship without rigorous engagement, and is a good example of a recalcitrant scholarly adherence to the notion of Islamic diffusion as the basis for Swahili culture and history. Special mention should be made here of the life work of Dr. Richard Wilding (1984a, 1984b, 1985, 1987, 1988, and others), a personal friend and teacher I was fortunate to know. He pursued investigations and theories very much in line with Allen and Miller, not only in his general interest to decolonise East African history, but also in his effort to include pastoral peoples in those histories, especially between the Swahili coast and Ethiopian highlands and lowlands, as well as the Horn, using his research into the archaeology (especially pottery) and cultures of the Oromo people of this region in the context of the Swahili world at large. His unfortunate and untimely death was a serious blow to such reconstructive efforts.
In particular, renewed archaeological interest in these regions and the questions Miller, Wilding, and Allen have raised, might definitively shed light one way or another on the presence and or centrality of these spices in various trade routes between regions. It is more than likely that, given the past in other areas, this potential element of the archaeological record was not looked for or noticed, and a new search for it might reveal that it was there all along. In a related case, for example, the bias toward external influences and the belief in diffusionist origins for urban architecture, together with a bias for urban and stone architecture in general over rural and/or thatch and mud architecture, led decades of archaeologists on the coast of East Africa to ignore both the numerous non-stone houses and the immense deposits of local pottery, which turned out to be complex, diverse, and more important than the thin layer of foreign wares found at each level, but had never been studied. After political de colonization, and amidst a new milieu of research, new questions began to be asked, often yielding innovative results in these fields, and proving beyond a doubt that indigenous architects, houses, and pottery reflected the predominantly indigenous nature of coastal societies throughout the past two millennia. Many scholars have provided breakthrough work in this area, particularly in archaeology, but a review is impossible here. Instructive, however, is the work of George Abungu, centering on the Tana River as a cultural conduit in ancient times between the Swahili world on one side, and further inside the continent on the other (Abungu 1990, 1991, 1994; Abungu and Mutoro 1993).
James Allen was one of the few scholars to discuss the ancient origins of the coveted incenses, frankincense and myrrh, which are often attributed to southern Arabia, but which are also, if not primarily, found in Eastern Africa in the arid regions immediately behind the coastal strip and further inland in what are today Somalia and Kenya, as far south as both banks of the Tana River. Since these latter regions, together with the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, are the principal regions of incense production, most if not all surrounding Old World societies which used these incenses in their culture and rituals must have had either direct or indirect contact with the regions of origin and production. In addition to the Nabateans, frankincense and myrrh were central to ancient Jewish and Christian societies, in the case of Judaism going back thousands of years before the Common Era as a significant commodity. Incense was also important in the Roman world, and within various African societies as well, alt hough the latter has not, to my knowledge, been widely investigated (but see Bekerie 1997:54).
Of course, it has been pointed out as well that the regions on both shores of the Red Sea, whether at the north or the south, share cultures across this body of water, which in many cases serves as a linkage rather than an obstacle, the earliest known sailing vessels in the world having emerged in this area. The Axumite kingdom is an excellent case in point. Being such an important example of African cultural development, a European myth of external (South Arabian) origins for this culture solidified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has taken on the quality of truth for most scholars even today. In fact, there is little evidence for this other than the powerful pull of ideology, which states that Africa cannot produce culture, civilizations, or history. Bekerie's (1997:31-60) recent summary of both the ideological external school of thought, and those who more recently examine the evidence and conclude otherwise, does much to set the record straight.
Historically, the bodies of water in this region, the contemporary "Red Sea" and "Indian Ocean," were subject (often by outsiders) to a large number of designations, often rather indiscriminately, such as the Tethys Ocean, the Erythrean Sea, the "sea at the end of the world," and so on. I have often questioned why the Indian Ocean should be termed exclusively "Indian," instead of African, for example, or Indo-African, or Afro-Timorese. Like others, I also noticed the unmistakable imprint and legacy of British colonialism in the name we currently inherit. Chandra Richard De Silva (1999) recently published a short essay on this subject and the related problem of other East African historical erasures. His focus on neglected commerce and alternative sources of information complements the work of this essay and further shows the potentially turning tide of anti-colonial historiography.
In a recent review of Casson's (1989) new translation of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, Horton (1990) takes the opportunity to comment again on several of the translation-based debates surrounding the various versions of the Periplus, originally written in Greek. One such debate concerns the dating of the document itself, and is resolved in part by recourse to the geopolitics of the time. Among his proofs that the Periplus was written in the middle of the first century A.D., Horton has shown that the Nabatean King Malichus II, who ruled from A.D. 40 to 70, was indeed the Malichus mentioned in the Periplus as ruling then in Petra. Many had previously argued that the Periplus was penned in the middle of the last century B.C. On Nabatean chronology in general, one might consult Negev's (1982) charts of silver content in coins during different monarchical reigns across the early, middle, and late Nabatean periods, as well as his later work (1986). Of course, the Periplus, like many ancient documents, likely represents an amalgamation of testimonies and accounts that may well span back further than its moment of final documentation, but we see clearly here that this Greek trading guide reflected a well defined set of trading and cultural relationships between extremely distant regions of the ancient world, and certainly between huge stretches of Eastern Africa, Nabatea, and the Mediterranean world.
Evidence from Nabatea
Picking up on this issue of geopolitical contextualization for ancient times, we see that the available literature on Nabatean history is, in general, only partially grounded in world events of the time. While Rome is mapped in relation with Nabatea, eventually annexing it after years of impenetrability, this is not so with comparable southern regions such as Axum, Nubia, the Hadramaut, "Arabia," the Swahili coast, and central East African interior, except in rare and limited cases, such as Miller's (1969) study of the spice trade in the Roman era. It should be remembered that Nabatean culture and its imperial reach stretched at their height from port towns on both the Red Sea (Leuke Kome, Suez, or Bernike) and the Persian Gulf (at Gerrha, on the water near the border of present day Saudi Arabia and Qatar), not to mention Rhinocolura (El-Arish), Gaza and Beirut, all on the Mediterranean Sea. (Bernike, or Bernice, is located in southern Egypt by Allen (1993:56), and at Eilat in Negev (1977), and Evenari et al. (1982).) In other words, non-Roman cultures were integrated into ancient commerce (with Rome) through Nabatean facilitation and, therefore, deserve to be considered as well.
Miller points out that frankincense and myrrh, which were so central to Nabatean commerce during the first two of its three major periods (Negev 1986), did not, as Herodotus and Strabo stated, derive from "no other country than Arabia." In fact, "frankincense came also from Africa, and Africa was the main source of myrrh" (Miller 1969:103). Further, we see that Egypt under successive Pharaohs and Dynasties, from 3000 to 1000 B.C., continuously maintained direct and/or indirect ties with the land of Punt, a term amorphously descriptive of much of the land to the south of various Egyptian writers, but perhaps most specifically referring to the modern Somali coast (Miller 1969).
Their sea-going vessels, in both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, are the earliest known to historians (Miller 1969), and they seem to have set out primarily in search of direct ties to the incense producing lands of later Nabatean commerce. Similarly, during the Nabatean period, more or less the same routes existed, either overland down the Nile from the northern Somali coast and or a predecessor of Rhapta further south, or through some combination of the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula routes before reaching Egypt and the Mediterranean. It is clear, therefore, that this trade has formed one of the most ancient and central geopolitical concerns of numerous successive powers throughout the region, all of which were concerned to gain direct or indirect access to the sources of the coveted products, or to monopolize this trade in relations with empires and markets further away.
It seems that Egyptian, Nabatean, Roman, Greek, Parthian, Phoenician, Himyarite, Axumite, Hadrami, Swahili, perhaps Meroitic, and even Indonesian cultures and/or empires were all, at one time or another, if not constantly, centrally concerned about their engagement with this region. It is also clear that the famous continental cross-roads so often postulated in Egypt and Israel by many modem writers, was as much or more rooted further south in the heavy traffic of world commerce around both sides of the Red Sea, and in both directions along the Indian Ocean coast toward Persia and India in one direction, and Azania and Madagascar/Greater Indonesia, in the other. Such a shift in view to the southern end of the Red Sea may be seen in Miller (1969:257), when he quoted Glaser on this matter, and more commonly in the Pan-African scholarship mentioned above. Houston's work, in particular, will be returned to below.
It is not clear how the Himyarites, mentioned for example in Miller (1969:178) as one of the greatest of entrepot societies, are distinguished from the Nabateans, for they seem to have occupied a similar economic and territorial niche at an earlier time. They are also credited with domesticating the camel, which Negev (1986) attributes to the Nabateans, who later became famed horse breeders. Were they symbiotic neighbors working the northern and southern Arabian regions, the same people under different names, overlapping and intermingled peoples, or something else entirely? The matter is further complicated by the fact that Negev (1986), perhaps the primary chronologist of Nabatean culture, has extended the Nabatean period by including proto- and post-Nabatean phases into the cultural sequence, thus, achieving a duration of roughly 1500 years in total, while Evenari et al. (1982:18), for example, maintain a more conservative duration of 800 to 900 years.
Joseph Patrich (1990) has argued that the Nabateans were in fact a state established when Arab traders from Himyaritic regions of southern and central Arabia "imposed their rule on the farmers of Transjordan," the "Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Arameans, and even Israelites -- that is, the peasants of Transjordan" (p.38). Looking in the other direction, and certainly more spectacularly, Ehret (1998:275) has just suggested that the Himyarites (Nabateans?) were the governors and establishers of the fabled entrepot of Rhapta which appears in the Periplus -- a profoundly wider trade scope than usually attributed to the Nabateans and/or their allies and partners. However, doubt may be cast upon elements of Ehret's thesis, particularly regarding the direction in which the balances of power might be assumed to have tilted.
Suspicion should first be raised by the fact that his seemingly unsubstantiated hypothesis follows closely the diffusionist Arabian-innovation-and-dominance formulae of the colonial historiography of East Africa critiqued above. Further, Ehret's conjecture is based on testimonies presumably collected second or third hand in the Periplus, which more likely than not reflect the location of the source(s) of the tale more than the actual trade and power relations of the time. In other words, this is probably a northern and peripheral version of events which were in fact centered for millennia to the south. Therefore, while I disagree with the way Ehret suggests a connection here, and the colonial teleology behind it, the idea of such connections is exciting and should be pursued in a more open-ended manner.
One need only look as far as Drusilla Houston (1926, especially pp.128-132), to find a scholar who does not bear such colonial assumptions as she explores the probabilities of cultural contacts between various regions of the ancient world. Not only does she explore the possibilities of the southern Red Sea as the primary locus of ancient world commerce, but some sixty to seventy years before Miller and Allen had seen frankincense and myrrh as African-Arabian products of world significance in trade. Houston has also offered a still unchallenged explication of the Himyarite's origins and importance, in the region of present day Yemen, and referred to Alexander the Great's views on the unparalleled stature of ancient Oman, which she says was "inferior to no country" and "a harbor of the ancient commerce." While she did not question south western Arabia as the production point of the coveted incenses, she did amass some evidence to argue that this area was under Black African control and culture, something which fits well with the fact that African lands were responsible for much of the wealth in this trade.
Returning to Ehret (1998), there is also reason to challenge his declaration that Africa's role in this "classical" era was as provider only of raw materials and that this shows a basis for "underdevelopment" as much as 2000 years or more before commonly accepted by most historians (p.19). First, this is clearly a pot-shot at anti-colonial and underdevelopment discourses, as exemplified by scholar/activist Walter Rodney (1969, 1972). Ehret tries to equalize processes of "underdevelopment" across thousands of years, when earlier trade relations appear to have had little or nothing in common with the European-centered relations of "under-development" and domination in the last 150 to 500 years of capitalist expansion for most parts of Africa. Even Abdul Sheriff (1976, 1987), one of the major historians of unequal economic relations in the history of Africa's East coast, raised doubts about pre-European relations as simply externally dominated.
More significantly, one could argue that the author anachronistically applies to the past, contemporary valuations of manufactured products above those which are "raw" and unprocessed or manufactured, when precisely the opposite may well have then been the case. Trade values for naturally occurring, abundant items in one area may have been worth vastly more than manufactured or artisanal goods from less endowed regions. Here, one might look to various critiques, as for example Frank (1990, 1997), of the luxury versus essentials trade dichotomy maintained by some scholars, such as Wallerstein (1974, 1978).
Interestingly, Miller himself, as Allen (1993) has pointed out, sometimes falls into the colonial bias against African presences in history by looking, in some instances, at Asiatic sources of explanation for phenomena under consideration. For example, he hypothesizes that the Himyarites were perhaps in touch "at an early date with southern India or Ceylon, because when the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon, she came "with very much gold and precious stones" (Miller 1969:178). While such trade may well have existed, it would be just as easy to imagine African sources not only of spices and incense, but also of gold and precious gems, which are well known to have been mined or excavated in much of central, eastern, and southern Africa, as he himself discusses at length in succeeding pages. However, regarding cinnamon, it is clear that the Indonesian route bearing supplies of the spice across the middle of the Indian Ocean on outrigger canoes, were probably constant throughout hundreds of years of history, from Herodotus and Strabo's times, when they thought it derived from the area of actual transshipment in East Africa, to Pliny's groundbreaking description of the trade as it must have truly existed across the ages (Miller 1969).
Numerous related questions remain, some of which might be raised briefly. Beyond questions of economic relations, which have still only been partially reconstructed, one could also look at the realm of cultural relations. For example, one could look at a proliferation of questions concerning cultural influences between neglected regions of Africa and the ancient "known world." This has much in common with the case of African roots in Greek culture, as explored by numerous scholars over the years, including but not limited to Diop (1960, 1963, 1981), and more recently Bernal (1987, 1991). Similar questions need to be asked concerning the "boundary" regions of all of ancient Africa, especially where it interfaced with what is today Asia (South Arabia). This is particularly the case, as we have seen, as one moves south along this supposed boundary, and into the centers of world commerce of that time.
Little has been done concerning potential African connections in Nabatean art, for example, but (Patrich 1990:126-127) points to potential connections between Nabatean and Nubian painted potteries which were contemporaneous in this period, as well as in the northern reaches of Jerusalem and Jericho. In a map drawn by Negev (1986:2), Leuke Kome, located on the middle Arabian Red Sea coast, is clearly the site of transshipment across the Red Sea - to and from the upper Egyptian/Nubian interior around the area of modern Idfu or Kom Ombo, just north of Aswan. This further strengthens the probability of socioeconomic ties between these regions. Moreover, what might be made of the "clay female figurines, which he [Glueck] considered to be the work of the descendants of the ancient populace of the country," (Negev 1986:38, n.51) and which strike a chord with African fertility and related traditions, well-documented throughout much of the continent? Houston (1926:132) also suggested that we should consider the simila rities between Himyarite and "Rhodesian" geometric patterns in various art forms. In light of recent research, this may not be as improbable as some might have protested. Malcioln (1996) suggests yet another artistic and cultural connection, when he ever so briefly describes the Phoenicians as follows: "People of Tunisia, descendants of Canaan; their relics show their Nubian neighbors on glassware" (p.330, n.2).
Finally, while many have recently referred to or inferred a "brotherhood" of the religions and cultures of ancient Israel, Nabatea, and other surrounding peoples, more direct African influences in this complex have not yet been satisfactorily investigated. Such questions are spurred on by the recent reversal of position by Negev (1996): "The Nabatean cult centre of Oboda [Avdat] did not, as envisaged by Avi-Yonah and myself in 1958-1959, consist of one temple, but rather comprises three or more shrines, dedicated to different deities" (p.233). Was this "polytheism" perhaps a sign of cultural and economic ties to the south and east of Nabatea -- the centers of African cosmological sphere(s) -- at the heartlands of world commercial traffic?
Assuming that similar, culturally African, pastoralist societies preceded the Nabateans in this region, could this, then, be one of the reasons that more marginal and subjugated groups such as ancient Israel and/or other agricultural neighbors to the north of Nabatea, later formed their distinguishing cults of monotheism? Bekerie's (1997) discussion of the centrality and sacredness of the divine term B'al, in both Ge'ez and Amharic languages (and therefore cultures), shows an important connection to the so-called idol worshippers of "Ba'al," mentioned in the Old Testament and elsewhere, as the predominant religion of Canaan/Palestine (pp. 70-73). There is simply too much evidence to overlook the African cultural basis of much of the ancient world, and even the monotheistic cult, which presumably emerged to distinguish it from the pervasive belief systems, is suggestive of an "African" cultural phenomenon.
Clearly, this is still in the realm of conjecture, and I am not trying to imply that "polytheism" was solely an African attribute -- it is well known to have been common throughout much of the entire ancient world in this period. Except for recent linguistic revelations about Cushitic languages (Greenberg 1973; Ehret 1998), which are considerably ahead of other disciplines in this regard, not enough attention has been paid to the possibility of continental African influences on the surrounding regions in the world, particularly in terms of culture and cosmology. The obvious exception to this Western scientific neglect is seen in various PanAfrican works, and those of Black Jews and Black Hebrews in particular (benJochannan 1983; Malcioln 1996).
IV. Tentative Conclusions
This article is an initial attempt to frame some possible new directions for future inquiry. Some of my suggestions may bear less weight than others, and certainly I may have neglected some relevant literature that could shed sharper light on the questions raised. It is hoped that I have at least demonstrated the wealth of information to be had regarding historical relations between regions which are not only usually considered in isolation from one another, but involving the agency of a region (Africa -- in this case East Africa) which is still generally treated as inert and utterly ahistorical by specialists working from outside the continent. Certainly, this debate mirrors some of the issues rehearsed in the best anti-colonial historiography, and gives us further reason to question the nexus between knowledge production and power. We might even ask how the subjectivity of the West is predicated upon just these sorts of diminutions and erasures of world history, in order to create a lack which only it can fill by its teleological presence.
Recently, Bernal (1991) attempted to join the long tradition of Afro-Diasporic writers (Redkey 1969; Moses 1998), who assaulted the borders and blind spots of the colonial imaginary, causing controversy from many directions. Most interesting for our purposes here is his suggestion of the existence of complex, regional interrelations in this area from a much more ancient period, near or at the very origins of the Neolithic revolution (in East Africa, not Mesopotamia!). In the introduction to his first volume of Black Athena, Bernal suggests that there is evidence, primarily archaeological and linguistic, to suggest that the original Neolithic revolution, centering on the domestication of crops and animals, may have occurred in Africa, on the Ethiopian/Nubian escarpment, linking highland and lowland/riverine cultures. Bernal suggests that the reason that this complex arrived so unexplainedly intact in the Sumerian and Babylonian end of the Fertile Crescent was due to travel by boats along the Indian Ocean coasts. Thus, one discerns a Fertile Circle rather than a Fertile Crescent, starting and ending in Africa, on opposite ends of the Nile. This is far from fully confirmed, as yet, but the fact that archaeology has never been used to investigate such possibilities raises the possibility that such insights have been overlooked in the rush to find Indo-Aryan roots to Western culture, in what is now the Middle East or South Asia.
This powerful and emerging hypothesis, drawing mainly on the insights of linguists, deserves critical investigation of the first order. In addition, the consistent Afro-Diasporic literature of the past two centuries also deserves to be engaged as scholars begin their investigations of these eras, for they generally consulted the classic and antiquarian texts directly, often without the same sort of specific investments in and affinity for the Western colonial sensibilities of eclipse and erasure. I have mentioned Houston, Du Bois and Jackson, but they are just the beginning of a much wider literature, relevant for the reconsideration of Classical historiography.
Relatively recent events in the world system have greatly shaped the questions which have been, and usually still are, asked about history and society in various parts of the world today. It is hoped that this essay will contribute to the process of developing new questions -- questions that might not only yield new insights about hitherto ignored problems, but in the end, might also call into question the very regimes of truth which organize most of the world today. I hope that by rewriting the past, we will rewrite the present as well.
(*.) Department of Sociology. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456, USA.
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