According to James Bruce, who travelled through Ethiopia and wrote down many of the traditions he had heard, wrote about the origin of Aksum thusly:
So where did the Habash come from?a tradition among the Abyssinians, which they say they have had since time immemorial, that in the days after the Deluge, Cush, the son of Ham, travelled with his family up the Nile until they reached the Atbara plain, then still uninhabited, from where they could see the Ethiopian table-land. There they ascended and built Axum, and sometime later returned to the lowland, building Meroe.
Well, I believe I have the answer. I was reading about the kinds of Dhu Raidan, from whom Biqlis is descended (the "Queen of Saba"):
Essentially he is talking about conquering the "Other Berbers" discussed in historical works as living along the coast of East Africa in works such as the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea.Ifriqis took over after his father and ruled 164 years. He claimed fame for his colonization of the Berbers in the West. These Berbers were the remnant of the Palestinian Berbers who survived Yushua b. Nun's conquest of Palestine.
This is an interesting anecdote considering the relationship between ancient Palestine and the Horn of Africa that has been proven to exist through genetic evidence, but again this is Arab legend talking here, so who knows.Mu'awiya asks if the Berbers are descendents of Qays, as some claim (and thereby descendants of Sam) 'Abid replies that he knows nothing of that claim, but he knows that the Berbers are descendants of Kan'an b. Ham. Mu'awiya then wonders how the Qays can say that some of their descendants are also related to the Berbers.
So Ifriqis builds a town called Ifriqiya. I believe this is the town of Adulis, and that it was not named Ifriqiya but rather was named after his real name, not his nickname, which was Dhu al-Ashrar. al-Dhu-l-Ashrar, -> Aldhulashrar -> AdulisIfriqis ordered a town built in the West to be called Ifriqiya after himself. As-Samayda' b. 'Amr, a Himyarite, celebrated his rule in verse.
A few hundred years after the establishment of Adulis, the dynasty of King Ifriqis (which had ruled in Oman and Yemen) was driven from power in Oman and Yemen, however they still had Adulis. I believe the whole dynasty moved to Adulis and established a new kingdom there, which began the Habash people about the year 100 CE. One of the last rulers of Dhu Raidan was Queen Biqlis. This new kingdom that they established was the Kingdom of Diʿamat. All the kings of Di'amat identified themselves "of the Tribe of Agʿazi".
The thing about Kunama is that they inherit by the female line, not the male line. Their name for instance is derived from not their great king, Bazen, but rather his wife Kunama. The interesting puzzle about Ethiopian history is, if Ethiopia was founded by the "Agʿazi", then why are there victory stelae about how the Kingdom of Aksum conquered the Agʿazi? The simple truth is that rather than the Yemeni immigrants conquering the locals, the exact opposite happened, Axum conquered the Agʿazi.
The Kings of Axum conquered the Agʿazi, the Agame, and the Agaw, then invaded Yemen. The Momentum Adularum, erected over the capital of the Agʿazi at Adulis documents the triumphs of this unnamed king of Axum. To document his triumph, he wrote in Greek, then underneath the Greek inscription, he wrote a translation in Ge'ez.
On the coinage struck by the great Kings of Axum, no Ge'ez can be found until late in history. In fact, the greatest kings who defeated so many Yemeni kings, wrote in the Greek alphabet alone. The kings of Axum only began writing a legend for their coins in Ge'ez well after the conquest of the Agʿazi, and the kingdom did not switch to using Ge'ez as the kingdom's language until after their conversion to Christianity, much as the Romans in the east changed to speaking Greek rather than Latin after their conversion to Christianity, centuries after Rome had conquered Greece.
So I put it to you that the history of Aksum is not as we have all been led to believe. This theory I put before SomaliNet.
