Aethiopia

Aithiopia, was a name applied by Greeks to any region in the far south, including (according to Aeschylus) even India

The Aithiopes are mentioned on Bronze Age Pylos tablets. Homer describes them as `people of burnt out faces,’ the furthest of humankind, whose banquets the gods visit. But from the time of Herodotus, who distinguished between straight- and woolly-haired races (in east and west respectively), the name was especially related to the lands south of Egypt, extending into Nubia (northern Sudan) and Abyssinia (now the state of Ethiopia). Its inhabitants lived on millet and barley (from which they made a drink) and used butter and tallow instead of olive oil. In the fourteenth century BC the Kingdom of Egypt extended southward as far as Napata, just below the Fourth Cataract (near Karima in the Sudan). According to the Iliad, Memnon, a mythical King of Aethiopia, helped the Trojans in their war against the Greeks. From c 750 Napata was capital of the Nubian kingdom of Kush (itself often known as Aethiopia), and its monarch Taharko (690–664) extended his control over Egypt. But Napata fell to an Egyptian force, strengthened by Greek and Carian mercenaries, in c 591/590; whereupon the capital, probably under King Aspelta, or, according to another view, later, was transferred to Meroe (Baharawiga), south of the Nile's junction with the Astaboras (Atbara); Mussawarat es-Sufra and Naqa, far to the south, were important Meroitic religious centers. By the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283/2–246) the Greeks knew the Nile as far up as Meroe. Its kingdom, ruled by a series of monarchs bearing the title Katake (Candace), dominated the middle Nile valley; and although the worship of both Egyptian and indigenous gods (for example Apedemek) continued, a partial process of Hellenization had taken place. Shortly after the annexation of Egypt in 30 BC by Octavian (Augustus), Meroitic forces, on the orders of a determined one-eyed queen, poured north across the frontier on the First Cataract, but were pursued back by Gaius Petronius (23–22), who destroyed Napata. He also stormed the stronghold of Primis (Kasr Ibrim, on a steep hill on the east bank of the Nile, seventy-five miles south of the Second Cataract), but subsequently refortified, garrisoned and provisioned it, relieving a further attack three years later. The sequel was Rome's occupation of the Dodecaschoenus, `twelve measures of land’ dedicated to the temple of Isis at Philae, between the First and Second Cataracts. This border remained intact until incursions from the frontier people of the Blemmyes in the later third century AD, after which the Dodecaschoenus was abandoned. It was probably in the same century that Heliodorus of Emesa (Homs) wrote his romantic novel the Aethiopica about mythical personages of the country. About 320–50 Meroe was sacked by the rulers of the Aethiopic state of Axum (Aksum) in Tigre (northern Ethiopia), which was founded in the first century AD and (as Rufinus records and coins confirm) became Christian as early as the first half of the fourth century, as a result of the missionary endeavors of St. Frumentius in the reign of King Ezana, who was the first Axumite King to call himself King of Aethiopia.

Meanwhile, however, Primis, now well outside the range of the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire, recovered impressively from its earlier destruction, as excavations on the site—originally 228 feet above the Nile plain, and now an island on Lake Nasser—have revealed. Its great eastern gate is one of the most important examples of military engineering in Africa, and several large houses of late Roman or early Byzantine date, with water cisterns and plastered living rooms, are now uncovered. Owing to the heat and dryness of the area more than 20,000 textile fragments, as well as basketry, rope, leather, wood and papyrus manuscript fragments in seven languages, have been preserved. From the early medieval period Primis was an episcopal see.