S2 E5: The Aksumite Invasion of Arabia

 Hello everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode on the rule of king Gadarat, the first great expansionist king of the Aksumites. 

Most records of Gadarat's achievements in Africa come from an inscription called the Monumentum Adilutanum, a document composed in Greek and Ge'ez. The bilingual composition of this document can give us some hints about its intention. The inscription was meant to tell visitors to Aksum about the great achievements of its kings, adding an aura of prestige to the royal palace and projecting the power of the king. 

A recreation of the original Monumentum Adulutanum

Like most sources from Africa during this time, the Monumentum does not provide many details on specific battles, sieges, or skirmishes. Instead, it focuses more on the general character of the engagement. Even the Aksumite king who took part in the invasions of the Monumentum is technically unnamed, and we can only assume it to be Gadarat based on a few pieces of evidence. The first piece of evidence is that the time of the inscription's writing lines up with the rule of Gadarat, and a few other documents from Gadarat's rule indicate that he engaged in some type of war prior to his invasion of Arabia.

Unfortunately, Gadarat's invasions of Arabia are much less unified in their records. In fact, Aksumite records about the invasion are pretty scant. This indicates either that the invasion was never that big of a deal for the Aksumites, and that they didn't consider it worth recording, or that the less-than-successful nature of the conflict made Aksumite recordkeepers reluctant to record such an embarrassment. Instead, our understanding of the conflict has to be pieced together from a variety of sources, including limited Aksumite records and various Arabian inscriptions, and filling in the rest with our best guesses. For example, no sources technically detail the reason that Aksum's relationship with Saba fell apart halfway through the war, but given that there are records that indicate a joint Aksumite-Sabaean invasion of Hadramawt, and records that indicate previously strong relations between the Sabean and Hadrami kings, we can infer that this might have been one of the chief causes of the deteriorating relationship. 

Finally, here's a map that showcases the Aksumite empire after Gadarat's conquests. As you can see, Gadarat almost doubled the size of the Aksumite realm, but this expansion came at great expense to the kingdom's resources. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode, and come back to listen to the next episode. That episode will focus on how the kings after Gadarat tried to salvage the tough situation they were put into.

This episode required about 20 hours of work to research, write, record, edit, and publish. If you'd like to help support the show and compensate our crew for the hard work we put into free education, you can click the "support the show" link at the top of our page. Cheers!