A Bab al-Mandab Saga: The Gate of Grief from Aksum to the TPLF Part 1

This is a brief designed to locate all the fuses under nearly all the explosive checkpoints, surrounding the chokepoint of grief, called Bab al-Mandab.

Bab al-Mandab, often rendered “Gate of Lamentation,” is about 30 kilometres wide at its narrowest, split in two by the island of Perim, with Yemen on one shore and Djibouti and Eritrea on the other. Through it runs the traffic between the Indian Ocean and Suez, a corridor that Egypt’s own government puts at around 12% of world seaborne trade. Whoever can menace that gate can tax, bargain with, or blackmail everybody else. That is why so many have tried, and why the record of who actually owned it is so thin.

This first part of this series is a necessary backward dive into a timeline that runs from antiquity to the collapse of the Ethiopian Derg, which will seek the historical keys to today’s geopolitical setting of Bab al-Mandab. The second brings the story to this month’s headlines, which would look a lot less like breaking news once you have seen how old the script is.

Aksum crosses the water

We do not need to start with the Pharaohs, nor with Roman merchants reading the Red Sea like a price list. The first solid entry in the ledger is the Kingdom of Aksum. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s handbook from the 1st century CE, describes Adulis as Aksum’s port, busy with traders from Egypt and Arabia. By the sixth century the kingdom, enriched as the middleman between Rome and India, was strong enough to cross the water. King Kaleb (r. 514-542) invaded the Himyarite kingdom in Yemen between 518 and 525, urged on, by the Byzantine account, by Emperor Justin I, to end the persecution of Christians under the Jewish king Dhu Nuwas.

Holy war? Byzantine-Persian proxy contest? A quarrel over who taxed the India trade? Historians still argue, and the honest answer is “yes.” Aksum’s grip on southern Arabia did not last: Abraha displaced its appointee, Persian and later Muslim power reshaped the sea, Rome declined, and by the seventh century Aksum had stopped minting coins.

Solomon, Sheba, and a very useful family tree

Every great empire commissions a genealogy, and Ethiopia’s is the most famous. In the fourteenth century, the Kebra Nagast relates the story of the Queen of Sheba’s son by Solomon, Menelik I, and his bringing of the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum. The Solomonic dynasty, which claimed descent from that child, was “restored” in 1270 by Yekuno Amlak, who threw out the Zagwe. Modern scholarship sees it as a legitimising document written for the rise of that dynasty, and finds no historical evidence for the lineage.

Two clarifications for anyone tempted to read this as a purely Tigrayan story. First, it was the imperial tradition of Ethiopia as a whole: the dynasty had Tigrean, Gojjam........

© New Eastern Outlook