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The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam G.W. Bowersock Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, Pp. xix + 181. ISBN 978-0- 19-973932-5
Glen Bowersock's study, deliberately designed as a "short book centred on the inscribed throne at Adulis," is intended to open up for students of the Roman Imperial period the remarkably vivid evidence for the political, military and religious relations between Axum (Ethi- opia) and Himyar (Yemen), and the sig- nificance of these for conflicts between Byzantium and Sasanid Persia, for the history of Judaism and Christianity- and, hypothetically, for the origins of Islam. I say hypothetically, because there is abundant evidence from within the Byzantine empire; very significant evi- dence in Syriac from within the Sasanid area; extraordinarily vivid and explicit evidence from Axum, including Bower- sock's starting-point, the Greek inscrip- tions from Adulis reported in the sixth century by Cosmas Indicopleustes-and an enormous, and ever-growing, mass of documentation in Sabaean from the kingdom of Himyar. But we have no contemporary evidence whatsoever from Mecca or Medina, and the story of the origins of Islam there depends either on brief Christian reports of the seventh and early eighth centuries, or on immensely long, and disturbingly detailed, Arabic narratives from the ninth century and after.
However, if the precise relevance to early Islam of the dramatic stories which Bowersock unfolds is a matter of debate, the evidence which he pres- ents is indeed of great significance, and serves to open up a "new frontier" for Late Antiquity. In outline, the story is that of Christian Axum, and of Juda- ised and then Christian Himyar, which centres on a violent episode of the persecution of Christians by a Jewish Himyarite king in the 520s, followed by an Axumite invasion and the res- toration of a Christian regime. The events are retailed in...