History

Adulis appears in the Periplus Maris Erythraei (a Greek merchant manual of c. 50 AD) as the principal emporium of the African Red Sea coast, where merchants could buy elephants, elephant teeth (ivory), tortoiseshell, and rhinoceros horn. By the 4th century it had become the maritime gateway of the Aksumite Empire — a Christian kingdom whose territorial reach at its height extended across the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula (modern Yemen) and whose gold coinage circulated alongside Roman denarii and Sassanid drachms in markets from Alexandria to India. Contemporary Roman and Persian sources ranked Axum alongside their own empires as one of the four great powers of the world.

The most consequential event in the history of Adulis was a shipwreck. Around 316 AD, a Syrian Christian scholar named Meropius set sail from a Red Sea port and was wrecked, with his entire party killed except for two young students, Frumentius and Aedesius, who were enslaved and brought to the Aksumite court. Frumentius became the secretary and later treasurer of the king, eventually winning his freedom; he converted the royal court to Christianity, and around 340 AD King Ezana I formally proclaimed Christianity the state religion of Axum — one of the earliest state adoptions of Christianity anywhere in the world. Frumentius was consecrated the first Bishop of Axum by Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria; he is venerated by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as “Abba Salama,” Bringer of Peace, and by the Coptic tradition as the Apostle of Ethiopia.

Adulis declined sharply after the rise of Islam disrupted Red Sea trade routes in the 7th century. The port was abandoned around 640 AD after Arab raids; the Aksumite state gradually contracted inland and the empire dissolved over the following centuries. Italian archaeologists conducted excavations in 1906 and again in the 1950s–1960s, but large areas of the site remain unexcavated, and political instability in the region has largely prevented systematic modern work.