Too many index posts not enough after-action reports!
Or before-action reports as the case may be.
The Horn of Africa
And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to king Solomon.
And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones.
And the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the LORD, and for the king's house, harps also and psalteries for singers: there came no such almug trees, nor were seen unto this day.
And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty. So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants.
Kings 1.10-13
The wealth of the Horn of Africa has always been dependent on trade and the freedom of the sea. The Horn is cut off from the Mediterranean world by formidable geographic barriers on land: nigh-impassable, bone-dry deserts and mountains, penetrated only by the Nile River. And the upper Nile itself was famously impassable, having baffled successive Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Arab explorers for a dozen centuries, with its maze of marshes and a thousand twisting channels and tiny islands with no clear course or banks. From the other great locus of civilizations, Eastern Asia, the Horn is divided by the Indian Ocean, ever treacherous with its unpredictable currents and powerful monsoon winds.
Hemmed in by such natural barriers to movement on the land, it is no wonder that the history and fortunes of the Horn of Africa civilizations have always been linked inextricably to trade and travel by sea. From the ancient Red Sea trade between the Egyptians and what they called the Land of Punt, to the Queen of Sheba's famous expedition to Jerusalem, to the Axumite trade with the Roman and East Asian worlds, the people of East Africa have always looked to the sea to provide links with the outside world. Indeed, the very foundation of the Axumite Empire (which produced the first actual Ethiopian attestation of the word Ethiopia, although the name Αιθιοπία in Greek appears as far back as Homer) was the vast wealth of the southern Silk Road, the Romans' hunger for Asian goods and the Asians' hunger for Roman gold. The southern route passed from the Indian Ocean through Axum's Red Sea, and its cargoes went to or from India in Ethiopian ships. As long as the trade routes remained open, the kings and the peoples of East Africa grew wealthy.
Decline of Axum
"In that day shall messengers go forth from me in ships to make the careless Ethiopians afraid, and great pain shall come upon them, as in the day of Egypt: for, lo, it cometh."
-Ezek. 30.9
The reverse, however, was also true; when trade suffered, so did the East African kingdoms. When trade with Pharaonic Egypt died, Punt vanishes from the historical record; when the decline of Rome led to less robust European markets, Axumite coins become rarer in the archaological record; and when, with the rise of Islam, Arab piratical emirates disrupted the vulnerable sea route to India along the south Arabian coast, the empire of Solomon's descendants entered a long period of contraction and decline. Despite friendly links to early Muslims (the Axumite Empire having been the first in the world to offer sanctuary to Muslims fleeing pagan persecution in Mecca) and even despite Mohammed's own praise of Ethiopian justice and tolerance, later Arab rulers attacked the Empire, driving Ethiopian traders from the Indian Ocean and raiding Red Sea ports. The Empire retreated inland; it was never overrun, the highlands of Ethiopia being eminently defensible, but after abandoning the old imperial capitol at Aksum in favor of strongholds in the highlands, Ethiopia lost contact with much of the European world. The Emperors remained in close contact only with nearby African rulers, and maintained sporadic correspondence with the mighty Fatimid Caliphate to the north*
*Interestingly, surviving correspondence from the Emperor to the Caliph several times addresses the Caliph as "የአጎት ልጅ" (cousin) among various other titles; presumably this amounts to an acknowledgment on the Emperor's part of the Fatimid claim to descent from Mohammed, and thus through Ishmael from Abraham. The ruling dynasty of Ethiopia also traced its line directly back to Abraham - through Solomon to Abraham's other son, Isaac - though in such case the kinship claim, with the connection between the two lines lying so far back in history, must have been viewed more as a diplomatic form than a claim of close blood relationship.
The medieval Ethiopian Empire
"Come up, ye horses; and rage, ye chariots; and let the mighty men come forth; the Ethiopians and the Libyans, that handle the shield; and the Lydians, that handle and bend the bow."
Jeremiah 46.9
For centuries the closure of the southern Silk Road has meant stagnation and isolation for the Ethiopian nation, and a gradual loss of knowledge from and about the outside world. But midway through the long fourteenth century, changing conditions in Europe will once again resonate in distant corners of the world. Where for half a millenium hostile Christian and Muslim kingdoms had fought each other across the Mediterranean, and strangled trade, now Muslim victory brings peace - and commerce - back to the wine-dark waters. Once cut off from the East by religious enmity, the cities of Western Europe, now under Islamic rule, clamor for the trade of the Orient, and the great demand is more than the tortuous land route across Persia can supply. In Arabia, the piratical emirates have fallen one by one to the Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphs; free of their predations, the Indian Ocean trade route is stirring once again.
And in the highlands, still not far off from the Red Sea shores, a series of vigorous and effective Emperors may be poised to return power and prosperity to the Horn of Africa once again, and see the Earth's most ancient Christian nation once more take a place among the great kingdoms of the world.