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 Abyssinian capital of this Sabaean or Himyaritic colonization was Ava (Yeha), where there are monoliths, "a mass of Himyaritic inscriptions," and a sun-temple. Its founders (the "Avalitae"?) are supposed 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 elMusowwarat, etc., dating from about the third century A.D., and the roughly contemporaneous architecture of Axum shew that the links of connection 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 worshipped Jupiter {i.e. Amen-Ra) and Bacchus {i.e. Osiris). The Ethiopian tribes in the vicinity, however, practised circumcision, 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."