Building on their trading wealth, Aksum's rulers became ever more powerful. Their titles (in Greek, Arabian, and Ge`ez or Ethiopic inscriptions) grow more elaborate. Ezana, second ruler, after the king of Armenia, to adopt Christianity as state religion c. AD 330, calls himself 'King of Kings, King of Aksum, Saba, Salhen, Himyar, Raydan, Habashat, Tiamo, Kasu, and the Beja tribes'.
The four names after Aksum represent Yemeni kingdoms and the palaces in their capital cities; Habashat is 'Abyssinia', Tiamo perhaps a memory of old Diamat; Kasu is Meroe, biblical Kush, in modern Sudan, where the Beja people, too, still live. Two centuries later Kaleb, King and Saint, added Hadramaut (SE Yemen) and 'all the Arabs on the coastal plain and the highlands'. His empire embraced, in modern terms, all northern Ethiopia, the Sudan to the Nile, and Yemen with part of Saudi Arabia.
Arab royal inscriptions of the 3rd century tell us---first hand evidence, written by the enemy---how Aksumite kings sent their sons with fleets and armies to ally with rival Yemeni tribes, slowly carving out a great Afro-Asiatic empire that bridged the Red Sea, and allowed the kings of Aksum to impose kings on the Yemeni Arabs. When, around 570AD, the Persians conquered Yemen, the blaze of all this magnificence, fuelled by commercial riches, faded away. The Red Sea trade with Rome and India slipped from Aksum's control. With the rise of Islam around 640 a new world map was drawn, excluding Aksum.
The city, for 600 years a great capital, was left with an exhausted environment. For centuries trees were felled for charcoal and agricultural expansion, the topsoil had washed away. Even the weather changed, according to recorded Nile flood-levels in Egypt, which depend on Ethiopian rains. Its hinterland incapable of supporting it, Aksum became a backwater, notable only for its ruins and Mary of Zion cathedral---still today the holiest shrine in Ethiopia, the reputed resting place of Indiana's Ark of the Covenant.
Text copyright Stuart Munro-Hay 1998
The four names after Aksum represent Yemeni kingdoms and the palaces in their capital cities; Habashat is 'Abyssinia', Tiamo perhaps a memory of old Diamat; Kasu is Meroe, biblical Kush, in modern Sudan, where the Beja people, too, still live. Two centuries later Kaleb, King and Saint, added Hadramaut (SE Yemen) and 'all the Arabs on the coastal plain and the highlands'. His empire embraced, in modern terms, all northern Ethiopia, the Sudan to the Nile, and Yemen with part of Saudi Arabia.
Arab royal inscriptions of the 3rd century tell us---first hand evidence, written by the enemy---how Aksumite kings sent their sons with fleets and armies to ally with rival Yemeni tribes, slowly carving out a great Afro-Asiatic empire that bridged the Red Sea, and allowed the kings of Aksum to impose kings on the Yemeni Arabs. When, around 570AD, the Persians conquered Yemen, the blaze of all this magnificence, fuelled by commercial riches, faded away. The Red Sea trade with Rome and India slipped from Aksum's control. With the rise of Islam around 640 a new world map was drawn, excluding Aksum.
The city, for 600 years a great capital, was left with an exhausted environment. For centuries trees were felled for charcoal and agricultural expansion, the topsoil had washed away. Even the weather changed, according to recorded Nile flood-levels in Egypt, which depend on Ethiopian rains. Its hinterland incapable of supporting it, Aksum became a backwater, notable only for its ruins and Mary of Zion cathedral---still today the holiest shrine in Ethiopia, the reputed resting place of Indiana's Ark of the Covenant.
Text copyright Stuart Munro-Hay 1998
More Information
- Royal Kingdom of Aksum
- Aksum a bit on the site
- Aksum trivia quiz
