Sabean colonization of Africa

[1] One of the oldest colonisation process in history occurred around 1000 BC, when the Sabeans of Southern Arabia, with a civilization based on agriculture, began to colonize the highlands of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.

[2][1][3][4] Many hold to this view, because according to archeology, "epigraphic and monumental evidence point to an indisputable South Arabian influence suggesting migration and colonization from Yemen in the early 1st millennium BC as the main factor of state formation on the highlands.

Scholarly consensus had previously been that Sabaeans had been the founders of Semitic civilization in Ethiopia, though this has now been contested, and their influence has been reassessed for its impact on architectural, sociopolitical, religious, and cultic spheres.

[19] Anthropogenetic studies using blood samples on Ethiopians, have found that their allele and haplotype frequencies appear quite similar to South Arabians, and were considerably differentiated from that of other African peoples.

[21] A 2010 study found that their phylogenetic clock estimates of the Haplogroup J1 in the Horn of Africa, were indirectly supported by a linguistic model for an introduction of Semitic from Arabia 2800 years ago.

[23] The population geneticist and professor David Reich noted in his 2018 publication on human origins: "There is significant archaeological evidence of intense contact and migration between Ethiopia and southern Arabia around 3,000 years BP.

During the first millennium BC, southern Arabians from the Saba territory established a polity in the Abyssinian highlands of Ethiopia, and a new conglomerate cultural landscape called the Ethio-Sabean society emerged.