Aksum

Rome, Persia, China, and Aksum

The Kingdom of Aksum, centred in what is now the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, was one of the four great powers of the ancient world according to the third-century Persian prophet Mani — alongside Rome, Persia and China.

At its peak in the fourth century AD it controlled trade across the Red Sea, ran a navy on both coasts, ruled territories in southern Arabia, and minted its own gold, silver and bronze coinage with Greek inscriptions for international trade and Ge'ez inscriptions for domestic use.

Almost no one in Europe today has heard of it.

The largest stone ever quarried to stand

The royal cemetery at Aksum holds about 120 standing stelae of nephelinite granite.

The largest — Stele 1, the Great Stele — was 33 metres tall and weighed about 520 tonnes. The largest single stone ever quarried and intended to be raised vertically in human history. It broke during erection and lies today in the cemetery in six fragments. The second largest, the 24-metre King Ezana Stele, still stands.

All are carved on all four sides to look like multi-storey Aksumite tower houses, with false windows, false doors, projecting beam- ends, and at the top a small carved bowl or pediment. Some bear long Ge'ez inscriptions recording royal victories.

The first Christian state outside Rome

In about AD 330, King Ezana of Aksum converted to Christianity under the influence of Frumentius, a Syrian Christian who had been shipwrecked on the Red Sea coast as a boy and rose to become tutor to Ezana's children.

The conversion is documented archaeologically. Ezana's earlier coinage carries the pagan disk-and-crescent of the Aksumite sun and moon gods. His later coins replace the symbol with the Christian cross — the first appearance of the cross on any coinage anywhere in the world.

Aksum thus became the second nation to adopt Christianity as the state religion (after Armenia in 301) and the first in Africa. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church traces its unbroken line from this conversion sixteen hundred and ninety-five years ago.

The Ark of the Covenant question

The Cathedral of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum, founded in the fourth century and rebuilt several times, claims to hold the biblical Ark of the Covenant — the gold-overlaid wooden chest that contained the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Ethiopian tradition holds that Menelik I, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark from Jerusalem to Ethiopia around 950 BC.

Only one man — a monk known as the Guardian of the Ark, appointed for life — is permitted to see it. He never leaves the small sanctuary chapel.

The claim cannot be verified. No scholar has been allowed to inspect what the chapel contains. The Ethiopian position is that verification is unnecessary because faith does not require it.