Introducing Adulis

First, let us introduce you to Adulis. Adulis is an ancient Red Seaport located in Eritrea. Adulis rose to prominence from 1000 BCE to 700 ACE, although the most impactful and noticeable time appears from 400 BCE to 500 ACE. Ancient Adulites from this era have left us building structures that made their way to the present. At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, we studied these structures with the available advances in archaeology, led by Dr. Daniel Habtemichael. We present it here for Eritreans and the general public.

What you see next is the map of the site Adulis. This map contains the distribution of twenty building plans across the site, some single structures, others groups of buildings that are material remains from ancient Adulis. Blue lines circle these building plans and have numbers that extend from 1-20. If you hover over the building plans (on mobile touch it) you will see buidling pictures and names. For instance, the building at quadrant D4 designated by number 12 is Adulis Court. Adulis court represented at least 24 polities at its peak, while number 13 in D3 is Temple 1, a religious center in the pre-Christian era. The Adulis map also contains the latitude (left-right), longitude (bottom-up) coordinates of the building structures for further research and verification purposes.

In the first step, you familiarized yourself with Adulis' general building structures distribution on the site. The subsequent step will be to get acquainted with each building. There are 20 horizontal lines with numerical designations similar to the map of Adulis above. If you click on each of these lines, it will expand. A brief description of the built-form and illustrations of what the built-form looked will follow. The material remains of the built-forms represented here are 3D-reconstructed. Long term study has enabled us to infer how the building structures looked when built or in their complete form. We will present the research in the subsequent writing, but for now, the intention here is an introduction to Adulis. We encourage you to visit all the building structures to get a representative sample of Adulis buildings. There are many building structures buried under the sand at the site, as our geophysical survey shows (see the picture below). The built-forms of Adulis presented here offer the basis for any further study. We hope Eritreans, archaeologists, and the general public enjoy and benefit from this research of a long term study.