It is against the background outlined in the previous chapter that we must now view the highly significant developments which took place in the northern Horn during the first half of the first millennium BC. A major reassessment is required as to the degree of local continuity associated with these developments, and of the extent to which they were stimulated by external factors. A recurring theme of this chapter is the need critically to evaluate the view that cultural and political trends in the northern Horn were dominated by contacts with southern Arabia and, more specifically, that colonisation from the latter area was responsible for numerous cultural innovations which, according to the late Professor Edward Ullendorff, contributed to ‘a vastly superior civilisation’. This view, first enunciated in detail over 80 years ago by Carlo Conti Rossini, has been widely – if uncritically – accepted and has passed into much popular historical understanding and, for that matter, mythology, despite strong epigraphic counter-indications from the 1970s and, more recently, archaeological evidence that a number of innovations to which Conti Rossini had attributed a southern Arabian origin were in fact indigenous African developments at a significantly earlier date. While it should not be argued that cultural trends east and west of the Red Sea took place completely independently at this time, it now appears that the scale, duration, and overall importance of their interconnections have been significantly exaggerated. As argued in Chapter 2, this has been at least partly due to paucity of information about earlier times in the northern Horn.