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Showing posts from February, 2008

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 q