To the south of Egypt, between modern Aswan and Khartoum, a number of kingdoms flourished, the most well-known of which were Nubia (Nobadia), Makuria, and 'Alwa (Alodia), heirs to the ancient civilization of Meroe. Christianity gradually percolated into the region in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, and various Greek and Latin sources inform us about the activities of both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian missionaries in the sixth century. Arab forces were dispatched from Aswan around 650 to test the defenses of this land. Possibly it was meant as no more than an exploratory raid, but they received something of a bloody nose. Fighting was unexpectedly fierce and what particularly shocked the Arabs was the awesome velocity and accuracy that the Nubian archers were able to achieve, obliging the would-be invaders to retreat “with many wounds and blinded eyes.”11 The Arabs immediately requested a truce and the governor of Egypt at that time signed an agreement whereby the Nubians would provide one slave a day in return for various foodstuffs. In addition, merchants and messengers were to be allowed to go about their business without hindrance from either side and fugitives were to be returned.
Although the Arabs were repelled, their attack may have prompted the different kingdoms of this region to ally, for the next time we hear from this part of the world there is a “great king,” under whom are thirteen kinglets. He had been prevailed upon to come to the aid of the Coptic patriarch, who had been imprisoned by the governor of Egypt, and to make a show of strength to the Arabs of Egypt who were in the habit of kidnapping the Nubians and selling them as slaves. In 747 he marched out from Nubia with a huge army, accompanied by an equal number of horses, which, so an eyewitness tells us, were trained to fight with their forefeet and hindfeet in battle. They used them to good effect, killing and capturing a good few Arabs and taking much plunder; hearing of this, the governor of Egypt, not having any means of resisting, prudently decided to release the patriarch before the Nubians reached the capital. An Arabic papyrus of 758, issued by another governor of Egypt, was addressed to “the lord of Makuria and Nubia,” suggesting that these two kingdoms had fully merged.12 In both cases we get the impression that this distant realm wielded considerable influence and this is reinforced by the account of the grandeur of the visit of George, son of King Zachariah of Nubia, to the court of the caliph at Baghdad in 836, which caused much excitement among the local Iraqi Christian community. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, certain Nubian rulers even managed to extend their authority over Upper Egypt. And Nubian civilization continued to flourish well into the late Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the wide dissemination of Nubian-style pottery and documents in the old Nubian language, which is closely related to certain Nubian dialects still spoken in Sudan today.
The resilience of Nubia meant that the Arabs did not attempt to push farther southward to Ethiopia via an overland route. There was of course the option of attacking by sea, and one might have expected this to happen, for Ethiopia had been an important trade destination for west Arabians and it had invaded Yemen and ruled it for a time in the middle decades of the sixth century. Now there was a chance for the Yemenis to get their own back. Yet no major naval campaigns seem to have been launched from Arabia. In fact, the only incident we hear of is the attempt by a small Ethiopian fleet to raid the coast of west Arabia, which was repelled by a force hurriedly dispatched by Muhammad in 630 or, more likely, by the caliph 'Umar I in 641. It is tempting to connect this with the prophecy in a late seventh-century Christian apocalypse that the Byzantines would attack the Arabs “from the sea of the Kushites (Ethiopians) and inflict desolation and destruction on the wilderness of Yathrib (Medina),”13 but we have no way of verifying this. We are, however, informed by numerous Muslim sources that later Umayyad rulers used to exile those who incurred their wrath to the island of Dahlak, which was only a short hop from Adulis, the port city of ancient Ethiopia, in modern Eritrea. Presumably, then, an Arab raiding party had made it this far in the course of the seventh or early eighth century. We do not know why it did not establish a foothold on the mainland, but possibly because, as in Nubia, it faced strong resistance from the natives or else because the rewards were deemed insufficient, since the kingdom of Axum was by this time long past its prime.
World History
