Over the course of a millennium and a half, from the Bronze Age to the advent of Islam, the Red Sea was a threshold between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. From the Nile Valley to the Arabian Desert, influences, wealth, craftsmen, patterns and ideas circulated, accompanying caravans and travelers. Long-distance navigation was accompanied by cabotage from port to port demonstrating the extent to which seas are corridors rather than borders. Following the example of Abraha – a high-ranking military officer from the kingdom of Aksum on the African side of the Red Sea – who in the middle of the 6th century ruled over Yemen and extended his power over the entirety of the Arabian Peninsula, trade flowed in both directions.
The extravagant church that this Christian sovereign erected in his Yemeni capital Ṣanʿāʾ is still the subject of discussion among scholars. This book features the work of archaeologists, philologists and epigraphists, and is a rendition of the 21st Rencontres sabéennes which took place in Toulouse in 2017 and was devoted to the theme of “Relations between South Arabia and East Africa – from the Bronze Age to the advent of Islam”.
These contributions accompany a collection of moving tributes dedicated to the memory of Rémy Audouin (1935-2016) (Hommage à Rémy Audouin, Editions CEFAS 2020), who devoted his life to the archaeology of South Arabia and Ethiopia.
Auteur
Christian Darles † (1949-2021), architect and archaeologist, was honorary professor at the École nationale d’Architecture de Toulouse and associate researcher at several institutions including the CNRS. Since 1976 he has participated in French and International field programs in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, and was expert to UNESCO. He was a corresponding member of the French Académie d’Architecture and a Knight of the ordre national des Arts et des Lettres.
Lamya Khalidi is a researcher at the CNRS in the Cultures et Environnements : Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge (CEPAM) laboratory in Nice, and is an archaeologist and specialist in the late prehistory of Arabia and the Horn of Africa (12th – 1st millennium BC). She works on the circulation and production of obsidian, and human-environment interrelations to reconstruct prehistoric human interactions and mobility. She is a permanent member of international archaeological programs in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Republic of Djibouti, Syria, and Lebanon. Director of several missions in Yemen between 2002 and 2010, she currently directs the VAPOR-Afar project in Ethiopia. She is co-editor of three books and has authored and co-authored more than sixty scientific and mainstream articles.
Mounir Arbach is director of research at the CNRS in the Archéorient laboratory – Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, Lyon, and is an epigrapher and specialist in the languages and history of pre-Islamic South Arabia (8th century BC – 6th century AD). He is a member of the French Archaeological Mission in Yemen (1993-2010) and in Saudi Arabia (2006-2017) and is currently director of the French-Saudi Archaeological Mission in the al-Fāw region (2017-2021). He is author and co-author of a dozen scientific books and a hundred scientific and mainstream articles.
