Aksum An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity Stuart Munro-Hay



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these legends, and it seems that Ku`bar's position must remain a mystery for the time 
being. It is almost certainly not Aksum, but could conceivably be some other major 
Aksumite town which, for various reasons, was considered to be a more suitable spot for 
the capital; possibly in the eastern region where many towns were built along the north-
south route west of the escarpment.  
We thus have Arab authors writing of Jarmi from before 833AD to well into the 
fourteenth or even fifteenth century, and of Ku`bar from the later ninth century until 
c1259AD. There seem to be three possibilities here.  
One is that the two cities were in fact one and the same. It is very unlikely that any of the 
later writers did anything more significant than simply copying the older works, and one 
might propose that this town, wherever it was, lasted as capital of Ethiopia only from the 
transfer from Aksum (between c616-630?), or later if there was another capital between 
this time and the first mention of the new one in Arab sources, until the fall of the 
kingdom to the Queen of the Bani al-Hamwiyya in the mid-tenth century (see below). 
This would credit the work of al-Ya`qubi and al-Mas`udi, who generally seem well 
informed.  
The second possibility is that there are two cities in question. If the name Jarma were an 
epithet for the capital, perhaps from the Ethiopic word girma, which means something 
like venerable or revered, it would seem likely that Jarmi was Aksum, to which this 
epithet was well- suited. Some authors would have simply repeated the outdated 
information that it was still the capital, and continued to do so even after Ku`bar had 
taken over that status, in spite of the more up-to-date reports of the better informed 
writers such as al- Ya`qubi and al-Mas`udi. In support of this theory, according to Vantini 
(1975: 380, n. 1) it appears from al- Tusi's own map that Jarmi corresponds to Aksum. 
However, the version of the map in Yusuf Kamal (1930-35: III, 1045r) as reconstructed 
by Lelewel, shows `Dziarmi' considerably south of Aden following al- Tusi's longitude, 
and Kammerer (1929: 48) noted that "la carte de Ahmad el-Tusi est un croquis 
élémentaire".  
The third possibility seems the most likely; that Jarmi has nothing to do with Abyssinian 
Ethiopia, but is in fact Ptolemy's town of Garami, metropolis of the Garamantes in Libya. 
Arab geographers would have taken Garami in `Ethiopia' (the broad term used of all the 
area occupied by dark-skinned peoples) as the capital of the `Habash', used as a similarly 
general term. Jarmi is thus no longer a rival to Ku`bar as the post-Aksumite capital.  
Other names for capitals are mentioned in the sources. An anonymous treatise of 
982/3AD, written in Persian, the Hudud al-Alam, notes about the country of the Habash 
that  
"This country has a very mild climate. The inhabitants are of a black complexion. They 
are very lazy and possess many resources. They obey their own king. Merchants from 
Oman, Hejaz and Bahrain often go to that country for trade purposes. Rasun, a town on 
the sea coast, is the residence of their king, while the army dwell in the town of Suwar: 


the Commandant-in-Chief resides at Rin, with (another?) army. In this province gold is 
abundant".  
Rasun, it has been proposed, could stand for Jarmi through miscopied Arabic, though the 
coastal setting is unusual, and Minorsky proposed Aydhab and Zayla` for the other two 
(Minorsky 1937: 164, 473-4; Vantini 1975: 173).  
An Ethiopian legend mentions that king Degnajan, who is supposed to have lived at the 
period just before Gudit's attack, left Tigray and made Weyna Dega his capital, 
apparently a place in Begemder east of Gondar (Sergew Hable Sellassie 1972: 203, n. 
115; 231, n. 98). Al-Idrisi, the famous geographer at the court of the Norman king Roger 
II of Sicily, writing before 1150AD, called the greatest of all the towns of the Habasha 
`Junbaitah' (and variants), which seems likely to come from the Ethiopic phrase `jan-biet', 
or king's house (Vantini 1975: 278; Conti Rossini 1928: 324). Another interpretation 
identified the three Ethiopian towns mentioned by al-Idrisi (which Kammerer (1929: 54) 
thought were `toutes trois fantaisistes') with present-day villages; Miller (1927) decided 
that Gunbaita (Junbaitah) was Genbita near Kassala, Markata was Hanhita near Gondar, 
and Kalgun was Aganiti about half- way between Aksum and Ankober.  
Al-`Umari (1300-1348AD) was aware of the antiquity, and even the (more or less) 
correct name of Aksum. He was employed in the chancery of the Egyptian sultan, and 
knew the protocol to observe when writing to the haty or king (Munro-Hay, The 
Metropolitan Episcopate of Ethiopia and the Patriarchate of Alexandria 4th-14th 
centuries, forthcoming), and perhaps had access to rather better archival material than 
many other writers. He states that a certain wadi  
"leads to a region called Sahart, formerly called Tigray. Here there was the ancient 
capital of the kingdom, called Akshum, in one of their languages, or Zarfarta, which was 
another name for it. It was the residence of the earliest najashi, who was the king of the 
entire country. Next is the kingdom of Amhara, where is the capital of the kingdom 
nowadays, called Mar`adi; next is the territory of Shewa . . ."  (Vantini 1975: 509).  
Amda-Tseyon's (1314-1344) chronicler confirms that his court was located at Mar'adé, 
apparently in Shewa (Taddesse Tamrat 1972: 274).  
Finally, we have the town of `Arafa or Adafa. This is mentioned in the History of the 
Patriarchs as the `city of the king' of Ethiopia in 1210, with the additional note that the 
king was called Lalibela (Atiya et al: III, iii, 192). The town is called Adafa in the Gedle 
Yimrha-Kristos (Taddesse Tamrat 1972: 59), and was the capital of the Zagwé dynasty. 
This presumably means that those Arab writers who continue to mention Ku`bar after 
about 1200AD are simply repeating earlier information without updating.  
3. The History of the Patriarchs and Ethiopia. 
Beyond the brief descriptions of the country in Arabic historical or geographical works, 
we have almost no other information about events in Ethiopia except from the History of 
the Patriarchs of Alexandria (Evetts 1904 and Atiya 1948) and the Ethiopian Synaxarium 
(Budge 1928). The biographies of the Coptic patriarchs of Alexandria, spiritual heads of 


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