Now Featured: Elagabalus

Elagabalus isn't a household name like Caligula, Nero, or even Honorius. Probably more than his better-known peers, however, Elagabalus fits the stereotype of the ineffectual, do-nothing emperor who was far more interested in art, music, fashion, or just about anything else than he was in the business of governing.

He is the subject of today's "Featured Article" on Wikipedia, so perhaps he'll make up a tiny bit of ground on the name recognition front.

Judith Weingarten wrote a fantastic series of entries last year on some of the women who pulled the levers behind the curtain of the Severan dynasty. After you read the Wikipedia article, have a look at her take on Elagabalus through the nervous eyes of his grandmother, Julia Maesa.

American tombaroli

When considering the problem of modern archaeological plunder, I'm probably not alone in reflexively picturing stubbly-faced Bulgarian men with metal detectors, spades and flashlights, rummaging through the Italian countryside at night in search of illegal antiquities.

I don't know how accurate that image is, but I've spent so much time trying to learn about the cradles of Western civilization that I often overlook the fact that my country, too, has an archaeological record, and that it can also fall prey to looters.

What I find interesting about that case is that the grave robber, since deceased, was apparently an enthusiastic amateur historian and was regarded as a local authority on the subject. It's not tough to imagine him believing, misguidedly, that he was somehow acting as a preservationist for a Civil War cemetery that otherwise might have been forgotten in a dusty archive. Though I don't doubt the good intentions of the real preservationists who've since tackled the site, the end result--exhumation and scattered reinterment of all the remains--somehow doesn't seem like an enormous improvement on the previous situation.

A last (?) look at the Akhdam

After the last post, I poked around the library a bit to see if I could find more substantive information on Yemen's Akhdam and their traditional association with the region's 6th C. Aksumite conquerors. I found "Akhdam tribe in servitude," a 1976 Geographical article by James Horgen. His version of the "commonly held myth about their ancestry...heard from both illiterate tribesmen and learned scholars" goes something like this:

After 570, Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an, the Jewish Himyarite aristocrat who'd successfully entreatied Sassanid Persia to deliver his people from Aksumite Christian dominion, was installed as Persia's vassal. He killed the surviving Aksumite fighters, save for a few who were kept as a ceremonial guard for his processions.

Ceremonial or not, the Aksumites still carried spears. They played along with the pomp for a while, but one day, they turned those spears on Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an and assassinated him. This prompted the Sassanids to carry out an ethnic cleansing.

Their armies are said to have returned in anger with orders to "kill every Abyssinian (Aksumite) or child of an Abyssinian and Arab woman and not leave alive a single man with crisp, curly hair."

The survivors of this massacre were enslaved and pointedly used as menial laborers and entertainers, professions which remain the only real options available to the Akhdam today.

Here's where it gets fuzzy. After the coming of Islam, Arab dynasties in the region employed Abyssinian soldier slaves who were thought to be descended from the 6th century invaders. They also crossed into Abyssinia to "recruit" more of them. One 11th C. Yemeni Arab dynasty supposedly fielded 50,000 Abyssinian fighters in its army. Migrants from the African coast opposite Yemen have continued to trickle in ever since, many of them on pilgrimage to Mecca. Some of them stay and intermarry with the Akhdam, inheriting their social status.

Based on that, my hunch is that the servile caste occupied by today's Akhdam may be a sociological continuation of a Yemeni Aksumite slave class that survived the Persian purge. Unfortunately, short of new archaeological discoveries and/or a DNA study with a very creative methodology, it's difficult to see how anyone would be able to demonstrate a direct ancestral link between the modern people and the 6th C. people. Even if we were able to match DNA taken from the Akhdam with a sample conclusively identified with 6th-7th C. Yemeni Aksumites--and I suspect we would find matches, perhaps many matches--the results would only be suggestive. They wouldn't automatically support the conclusion that the matches belonged to unbroken family lines that subsisted in Yemen from the 6th C. onward.

Something else I first learned from Horgen's article was that Aksum's initial invasion of Himyar in 525 was not, as I'd previously inferred, a solo effort.* In a subsequent post, I'll revise my narrative of the Aksumite conquest of Himyar and explain how the Akhdam might owe some thanks for their lot to the Byzantine emperor Justin I...or perhaps even his more famous nephew, Justinian.

_* The brief history I related in my original post was derived largely from Christian Julien Robin's entry for Yemen in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World from Harvard U. Press.

Echoes of Aksum in the alleys of Sana'a?

A New York Times travel article inspired me last March to write about the late antique history of Yemen, which saw the Abyssinian Christian empire of Aksum (located in what's now Ethiopia) displace Yemen's Jewish rulers, only to be overcome by Sassanian Persia and, finally, the first Islamic caliphate.

Today, the Times's Robert Worth writes about the plight of the Akhdam, a hereditary Yemeni underclass whose origin dates at least to medieval times. What caught my attention was the popular Yemeni conception of their background:

They are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam.

I think that sort of folk wisdom is too often dismissed out of hand. One has to be careful, of course, because the solutions offered by such sources can be very convenient, and one only has to consider the many competing folk origins of Ireland's Traveler people to see how quickly the historical yarn can become hopelessly tangled.

Sometimes, though, the oral traditions coalesce around a kernel of truth, as Tudor Parfitt demonstrated with the Lemba of South Africa.

Could the Akhdam be descended from the remnants of Yemen's 7th-century Aksumite Christian community? Here are a few things to consider. When the Persians came to oust them, the Aksumites in Yemen had, in living memory, broken away from the kingdom of Aksum under Abraha, a renegade Aksumite general. It's reasonable to speculate that the surviving ruling class regarded the acceptance of second-class citizenship under Sassanian rule as preferable to an awkward or even dangerous homecoming. In any case, there was almost certainly a sizable Christian community when the forces of Islam arrived a few generations later. At that point, they would have become the conquered people of a conquered people, which probably meant very bad things for their standard of living. Lastly, though the article translates "al Akhdam" as "the servants," I can't help but notice the similarity between "Akhdam" and "Aksum."

At least one local sociologist doesn't think much of a potential link:

The popular notion that the Akhdam are descendants of Ethiopian oppressors appears to be a myth, said Hamud al-Awdi, a professor of sociology at Sana University. Most of them have roots in villages in the Red Sea coastal plain of Yemen, and many of them may have African origins, he added. Little else about them is clear, despite a number of academic studies.

Those coastal village origins are presented here as evidence against Aksumite origin, but as it happens, that's the part of Yemen that was most frequently and permanently in Aksum's area of direct control. If one were looking for evidence that an ostracized remnant of Yemen's erstwhile Christian conquerers managed to hang on somewhere, the ancestral land of the Akhdam perhaps wouldn't be a bad place to start.

The wren boys

They had to start the rounds early, because by midday, the locals' reserve of holiday cheer would be depleted. If yours was the first roving band of wren boys to come to a house, you'd do well, but if you were the third or fourth, they might not even answer the door, no matter how well you sang. After the novelty wore off, you were just another beggar, and this was a banner day for beggars.

My father, the postman's son, would wear his Sunday best, save for some walking shoes and a bright green scarf around his neck. The latter was his lone concession to an ancient tradition that would have dressed their leader, an older boy with a strong baritone, in straw and blackface and festooned my father with every piece of colored ribbon from their mothers' dressers. In the town, some of the more established wren boys still bothered with the old trappings, often to the detriment of some poor wren. My father's wren boys were more pragmatic. The town was two miles away and saturated with competition, but they owned the countryside. They skipped the hunt, sparing the wrens to take shortcuts across fields and bogs, through hedges and over fences. When they arrived at each farm, my father was the tenor.

The Wren, the Wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s day was caught in the furze.
Although he is little, his family’s great,
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.

The version my father and his friends sang was in Irish Gaelic and was much less deferential towards the ladies of the houses. They usually answered the door anyway, and listened with expressions of obligation, patient indulgence, and sometimes real enjoyment. A few listened with desperation, and those would often implore the wren boys to stay for an extra song, or two, or three, or perhaps come inside for some tea and cake. They'd do the requests, but the invitations were usually declined, because there was money to be made and the sun was sliding across the low southern sky.

Their Iron Age predecessors may have paraded a dead wren around the countryside as part of a ceremony that imbued its receiving households with a small portion of the wren's supposed powers of divination and foresight. It's probably just as well that that my father and his friends left the wrens alone; as it was, they learned soon enough that a wren boy's windfall was as good as it got in the hills of West Cork.

FEAST!

Bill & Ted used a time-traveling phone booth, but in a pinch, a tatty old Ford Taurus will also do. This funny series of history-themed ads for Snickers candy bars has recently begun airing in the U.S.:



You can find episodes 2-8 (!) here.

The baths (?) are alive with the sound of music

Anyone planning on visiting Hadrian's Wall this Saturday may want to note this bizarre little news item so that they can plan their visit accordingly. I have no pretensions to being a travel consultant, but my humble advice to such folks would be to schedule a late lunch:

Choirs, including Carlisle’s Margaret Frayne Singers, will be accompanied by loofahs, bath toys and shower caps.

That said, if anyone reading this is in the vicinity, I'd love some photos or video.