Hudson writes:

Building and agricultural practices, cattle keeping, sociopolitical organisation and writing have been named as the superior cultural element introduced into Axumite Ethiopia by South Arabians. Arguments have arisen that all of these except writing may now be considered native to Ethiopia or to North East Africa. As for writing, it is notable that the early inscriptions of South Arabia, of possibly the 8th but perhaps as late as the 5th century BC, are not significantly earlier, if at all, than the earliest Ethiopian inscriptions. (1)

The agricultural argument has been pursued by Christopher Ehret, who writes that:

the idea that agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn is relatively recent and owes to Arabian influences can no longer be entertained in any form. That the plough, and the near eastern cereal cultivation associated with it, antedate the Sabaean intrusion can be demonstrated from comparative artefactual reconstruction; it is a necessary assumption from linguistic and other testimony as well. The inception of the use of the plough and of wheat and barley may date even several millennia before the South Arabian episode. Moreover, it can be argued on botanical grounds, cultivation of wheat and barley was itself preceded in the Horn by a still earlier indigenous cereal agriculture in which the staples would have been teff and/or eleusine (finger millet). (2)

Neville Chittick, the archaeologist, has written that 'grains of finger millet (eleusine corocana) were found in a stratum [near Axum] which is most likely to date from the third or fourth millennium BC. The grain thus seems to be the earliest African cultivated cereal yet identified. '(3) Once again, Bruce displayed remarkable perspicacity when he described the movement of agricultural development from west to east and observed that the resin-producing trees which furnish myrrh and frankincense and are native to the Abyssinian and Somali coastal areas were introduced into Arabia in antiquity.

(1)ibid., p. 151.
(2)0n the Antiquity ef Agriculture in Ethiopia (1978).
(3)'Notes on the Archaeology of Northern Ethiopia', Abbay, no. 9, p. 15.