Sheba

116
THE KEBRA NAGAST
Caleb and Yusuf had seen as their future empire but much more besides.
Within a few years, the Arabs, a people dismissed as being of no
consequence for generations, swept across North Africa into Spain and
across Persia to the frontier of India, dooming Aksum and Yemen, which
for one short span of time had stood on the verge of true empire, to political
insignificance.
While the plague appears to have upset the demography of the Semitic
Aksumites, changing trade patterns forced them to reassess their economic
interests. The Persians overran southern Arabia in the last years of the sixth
century, severely disrupting Aksumite trading relations. The triumph of
Islam as a world power exacerbated the problem even though traditions say
that Islam behaved cordially towards Aksum for its past kindness to
members of the Prophet Mohammad’s family when they fled to Aksum
during the early persecutions. Whenever the Islamic Empire was based in
Damascus or in Baghdad, the Red Sea declined literally and metaphorically
into a trading backwater. This only changed when Fatimid Egypt asserted
its independence in the eleventh century.
After the rise of Islam, the Aksumites turned southwards and began
expanding into Africa to exploit new resources. A temporary capital was
established at Ku’bar, probably near Lake Hayq on the escarpment edge
overlooking the plains towards Djibouti. The expansion into the interior
provoked fierce resistance. Tradition holds that in the mid tenth-century
Yudit, a Hebrew or pagan-Hebraic queen of the Bani al-Hamwiyya from
Damot (a name reminiscent of ancient D’mt), a realm overlooking the Blue
Nile gorge, defeated and killed the king of Aksum, pillaging the area,
severely weakening the state. Yet another capital was established in the
Cushitic speaking area southeast of Aksum, although Aksum remained the
ecclesiastical center. It is usual to refer to the Aksumite empire after this
date as Ethiopia because the city of Aksum was no longer its political
center. As time went by the Cushitic-speaking Agaw people became
increasingly influential in the army and in the government. Eventually the
“Solomonid” ruling house was replaced by a dynasty known as Zagwe
(from the word Agaw), whose kings (ca. 1030-1270) traced their ancestry to
Moses. The Zagwe king Lalibela (ca. 1185-1211), responsible for
strengthening Christianity, built impressive churches such as the
subterranean rock structures at the New Jerusalem (Lalibela) and
established cordial relations with Muslim-ruled Jerusalem. Despite these
successes, the Aksumite clergy led a campaign that terminated Zagwe rule