Kingdoms and empires rise and fall and by the end of the first century AD Meroe, though still an important state, had passed its peak. Both internal and external pressures were growing. A change in the climate, says Arkell, was resulting in a slow desiccation of the land, reducing the supply of agricultural products and of wood-fuel for the iron industry. From outside, there was a movement of Nuba tribes pressing in from the west while a new power was arising in the south-east diverting the profitable commerce which followed the Nile Valley to a seaborne route based on the Greek, or Ptolemaic, trading station at Adulis on the Red Sea, near the modern port of Massawa. In addition, the expanding Roman Empire was casting covetous eyes on the lucrative incense trade, one of the main sources of wealth in the Horn of Africa and south-west Arabia, handling great quantities of those fragrant resins used for burning on the altars of the Roman Empire and for embalming the Egyptian dead. The gums were produced-as they still are-in Somaliland (the ancient Punt) and in the Yemen and Hadhramaut as well as in Eritrea and Tigrai and in Sudan.

The almost total disappearance of the Meroitic civilisation is a strange phenomenon. Adams has pointed out that by the fourth century AD the great city of Meroe seems to have been largely abandoned and its name forgotten. No memory of it survived in local tradition, and the 'City of the Ethiopians' was lost to the world's knowledge until the revival of classical learning made it known once again through the pages of Herodotus and Strabo. Even then it was often dismissed as fable: not until the end of the 18th century was the legend of Meroe invested with any substance. In 1772 the quixotic explorer James Bruce came upon the 'heaps of broken pedestals and pieces of obelisks' near the modern village of Bagrawiya, and wrote in his journal that 'it is impossible to avoid risking a guess that this is the ancient city of Meroe'.(1)The subsequent discovery of the remains at Napata, while verifying beyond question the existence of an ancient Nubian civilization, left some doubt as to which of its main centres was the 'capital' known to Herodotus. The matter was not finally settled until

(1) Travels, vol. 4, pp. 538-9.

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