Aksum

Where it is

Aksum lies in the northern Ethiopian highlands, in Tigray, at around 2,100 metres on a plateau that gets reliable summer rain when the lowlands around it do not. It sat between the Red Sea — reached through its port at Adulis — and the interior that produced gold, ivory and incense, which is the whole commercial logic of the place: a highland capital positioned to tax what moved between an ocean and a hinterland.

The land and water around it

• The Tigray plateauplateau

  High ground with a summer monsoon, which made rain-fed agriculture possible where the surrounding lowlands are arid. Altitude here is not a hardship but the reason a state was possible.

• The Red Sea corridorsea

  Reached from the highlands by a descent to Adulis on the coast. Whoever held both the port and the plateau controlled the exchange between the Indian Ocean trade and the African interior.

• The stelae fieldplateau

  The ground north-west of the town, where carved granite monoliths were raised over tombs. The stone came from a quarry a few kilometres away; how the largest were moved and raised is not established.

Its history, in short

From roughly the first to the seventh century CE, Aksum was the centre of a kingdom that minted its own coinage in gold, silver and bronze, wrote in its own script, controlled the Red Sea trade at its end, and at times held territory across the water in southern Arabia. A third-century Persian text lists it among the great powers of the world alongside Rome, Persia and China. Its king converted to Christianity in the fourth century, making this one of the earliest Christian states anywhere. The kingdom declined from the seventh century as Red Sea trade reorganised and the environment around the capital degraded. The town remains the ceremonial centre of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• The Church of Our Lady Mary of ZionFounded 4th century; rebuilt repeatedly

  The chapel beside it is held by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to hold the Ark of the Covenant. One monk is appointed guardian and nobody else may enter, so the claim is by its nature not open to examination.

  The presence of the Ark is an article of Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition, held and transmitted by that church. It is recorded here as their claim, not as an established fact.

• The fallen stelec. 4th century

  About 33 metres of carved granite lying broken on the ground, cut to look like a many-storeyed building with false doors and windows. Its failure is as informative as the standing ones: it marks the limit of what the technique could do.

• The Ezana stone4th century

  An inscription in three scripts — Ge'ez, Sabaean and Greek — recording the king's campaigns. A trilingual is exactly what the Indus civilisation lacks, and it is why Aksum can be read.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereAksum is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• What do Aksum's coins settle that texts do not?

  The date of the royal conversion to Christianity

  The disc and crescent give way to the cross, which dates the conversion more precisely than any surviving text.

• What is unusual about the Ge'ez writing system?

  It became a syllabary by modifying each consonant to mark its vowel

  The vowel-marking development happened here rather than being imported, and the script is still in use for several languages.

Worth arguing about

• A stele was taken in 1937 and returned in 2008. Why are completed restitutions so rare?
• A claim nobody outside one appointed guardian may examine. How should a reference work record it?

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