Oxford University Press as publisher was already a good hint that this wouldn't be an easy read, but I love to learn completely random facts about the world that are thoroughly reviewed and that I'll never need again, so I'm fine with that.

The topic itself is pretty obscure: A pre-islamic conflict between jewish Arabs in the territory of today's Yemen and christian Ethiopians at the other side of the Red Sea that is in the end not much more than a proxy war between the Byzantine and the Persian empires.

Bowerstock analyses and explains meticulously the body of source material, the power structure in the region, the influence of outside and historical powers like the Roman, Meroitic and Egyptian empires and the development of the conflict.

The lessons? Propaganda is everything, it's not about religion, and every aggressor always has good reasons. ( )

The Throne of Adulis centres around the eponymous, now lost, artefact: a white marble throne and accompanying black basalt stele which stood in an African port city during the sixth century. Transcriptions made of the throne's inscriptions during the sixth century allow G.W. Bowersock to reconstruct something of the history of the regions bordering the Red Sea during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire, and Late Antiquity. In particular, he focuses on the conflict between Christian Ethiopians and Jewish Arabs, which was something of a proxy war between the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Zoroastrian Sasanian Persian Empire. Bowersock argues that this environment of religious instabilty and political conflict is a key piece of context that helps to explain the rapid rise of Islam in subsequent years. Bowersock's work is an example of the kinds of insight which can be gleaned from even the sparsest evidence through the meticulous use of palaeography, epigraphy, archaeology, etc, though the methodology employed here means that this likely won't be the most accessible book for the neophyte. ( )