A port established by law
Adulis is the best documented place in ancient Eritrea, because other people wrote about it. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's handbook composed in the first century CE, calls it a port established by law — a harbour with rules, duties and an administration — and describes the caravan road running inland from the coast to the capital of the Aksumites. Roman, Greek, Arab and Ethiopian sources all knew the name. It was the point where the highland kingdom met the sea.
What came and went
The port exported what Africa's interior produced: ivory, tortoiseshell and rhinoceros horn, carried down the escarpment by caravan. It took in what the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean sent back — cloth, glassware, metalwork, wine and olive oil in amphorae, and spices from further east. Coins from Rome, from Himyar in southern Arabia and from India have been recovered in the surrounding district, and the pottery found at the site traces routes that ran from Aswan to the Malabar coast. Adulis was one node in a system that stretched from the Nile to the Ganges.
The city itself
The town was built of dressed stone and coral block, close to the shore and watered by a nearby stream. A sixth-century visitor, the Egyptian merchant and monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, walked its streets and copied two Greek inscriptions he found there, one of them a royal record of campaigns far older than the city he was standing in. Excavation since 2011 has reached occupation layers going back to the third century BCE, uncovered the foundations of a large building its excavators identify as a church, and begun to trace the street plan of a substantial city — most of which remains untouched beneath the coastal plain.
A Christian sea-gate
After King Ezana adopted Christianity in the fourth century, Adulis became a bishopric as well as a harbour. In the early sixth century it was the departure point for Emperor Kaleb's expedition across the Red Sea against the Himyarite kingdom in southern Arabia — the moment when the Aksumite state acted as a naval power. When Adulis sailed, the highlands ruled the sea lanes.
Decline and rediscovery
Raids along the coast in the seventh century, the slow silting of the harbour and the shift of trade after the rise of Islam all worked against the port. As Aksum declined, Adulis was left to the sand. Nineteenth-century travellers recognised the ruins, and twentieth-century excavators opened the first trenches; today the finds — coins, pottery, glass and the bones of the trade they carried — are held in the National Museum of Eritrea in Asmara, and digging continues.
Key facts
- Where
- The Gulf of Zula, about 50 km south of Massawa, on the Eritrean coast.
- First named
- In the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's handbook of the 1st century CE.
- Role
- The royal port of the Aksumite kingdom and the sea-gate of the Eritrean highlands.
- Traded
- Ivory, tortoiseshell and rhinoceros horn out; cloth, glass, wine, oil and spices in.
- Decline
- Raids and a silting harbour in the 7th century; abandoned as Aksum faded.
- Today
- Still largely buried; excavation has continued since 2011.