42 THE BEGA, THE BLEMYES i. 3. xvi.

doors orientated to the four points of the compass, the sacred groves surrounding the churches, and the dancing of the priests—all recall what

\ve know of Baal worship, which was closely akin to the sun-worship of

Southern Arabia."

He remarks in this connection onthesuggestivenessof Herodotus's

statement^ that "Ethiopia borders on the Southern Sea and the

table of the Sun in Ethiopia is a meadow on the skirts of their town

full of the boiled flesh of all manner of beasts." The ancient Abys-

sinian capital of this Sabaean or Himyaritic colonization was Ava

(Yeha), where there are monoliths, "a mass of Himyaritic inscrip-

tions," and a sun-temple. Its founders (the "Avalitae"?) are sup- posed to have been traders in the first instance, but as they increased

in numbers and strength and were reinforced by their kin from over

the Red Sea they succeeded in imposing their language, their religious

rites, and to some extent their racial type, upon northern Abyssinia.

Its name of Ava is presumably connected with the Sabaean worship

of Baal-Ava. The capital was subsequently removed to Axum, also

a Himyarite foundation with monoliths and "a highly perfected form

of stone worship associated with sacrifices to the Sun."

Resemblances between the later Meroitic architecture of elMusow-

warat, etc., dating from about the third century A.D., and the roughly

contemporaneous architecture of Axum shew that the links of con-

nection between the main valley of the Nile and Abyssinia held fast

in the generations that followed. Crowfoot notes in particular "the

exact resemblance of the plan of the upper storey in the old Dongola church with the plan of Enda Giorgis near Adowa^."

XVII Bearing these facts in mind, we may now revert to the

descriptions of Meroe left by the classical geographers.

In the time of Herodotus the inhabitants of Meroe itself wor- shipped Jupiter {i.e. Amen-Ra) and Bacchus {i.e. Osiris)^. The Ethiopian tribes in the vicinity, however, practised circum-

cision, wore skins, used palm-branch bows, stone-headed arrows,

spears tipped with horn and clubs of wood, and painted their bodies

before going into battle*.

As far south from Meroe as Meroe was south of Aswan lay the

country in which had settled the "Automoloi" or "Asmach"

^ Q.v. Bk. ni,§7.

- Loc. cit. p. 40, but Crowfoot is inclined in the case of el Mu?ow\varat and Axum to regard the Axumites as the borrowers.

* Herodotus, H, 29, 144, 156.

* Herodotus, VJI, 69 (speaking of Xerxes's army). He does not specifically mention that they lived round Meroe but speaks merely of the "region above Egipt."