Aksum A kingdom formed from at least the first century AD in southwestern Ethiopia which developed into an empire including northern Ethiopia, Sudan, and southern Arabia.
Forager Someone who gathers food or provisions, especially forcibly.
Horn of Africa A peninsula of East Africa that juts for hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea, and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden.
Tigray The northern-most of the nine ethnic regions (kililoch) of Ethiopia.
Paleontological and Stone Age research is particularly dynamic in Ethiopia. Major Australopithecus sites are found along the Ethiopian part of the East African Rift Valley, from the Omo Valley in the south to the fossils’ bearing formations of Djibouti in the Northeast. Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands are nonetheless considered as important centers of African plant domestication and agricultural innovation but archaeological research on this and related topics, even if seriously improved during the last two decades, is still lagging behind. Teff (Eragrostis teff), noog (Guizotia abyssinica), as well as finger millet (Eleusine coracana) are part of the locally domesticated plants grown in association with Near Eastern crops such as wheat, barley, chick pea, lentil, and fava bean. Food-producing societies combining agricultural production with livestock husbandry lived in the lowland and Eritrean plateau as well as Tigray from the Middle Holocene onward.
During the first millennium BC, South Arabic culture and influence expanded across the Red Sea and took roots in Ethiopian highland areas of Eritrea and Tigray. Archaeologically, this new situation is indicated by the sudden appearance of writing, monumental stone architecture, and sculpture. Iron technology may have been part of this new ‘cultural package’ that triggered the sixth to seventh century BC process of urbanization in Highlands Ethiopia. Urban centers emerged at such places as Yeha surrounded by at least 30 other known sites among which the Hawelti-Melazzo complex. Yeha grew out of an earlier mixed farming village and became the main urban center of the Daamat kingdom in the fifth to fourth century BC. It was a relatively small town, 7.5 ha in size, with however spectacular stone monuments, the temple, and the Great Beal Gebri. The former is a massive rectangular building, 18.5 m long, 15 m wide, with preserved plain walls measuring 11 m in height. The latter consists of a series of square-section massive monolithic pillars that may have been part of a cultic complex with some affinities to the Moon Temple at Marib.
The Daamat kingdom collapsed during the later part of the first millennium BC but very few is in fact known about the causes and consequences of its demise. Smaller polities emerged. Stelae were used to mark elite burials, and exchanges seem to have been predominantly with the Nile Valley. Aksum was one of these small polities that developed in the area during the later part of the first millennium BC and the early centuries of the first millennium AD. Aksum appears to have been settled in the first century AD. A few centuries later, in the third-fourth century AD, it achieved regional primacy, controlled great amount of wealth, developed a centralized monarchical system, adopted Christianity as state religion, and launched an extensive expansionist policy. As suggested by Phillipson and Anfray, Aksum’s political control extended at several times to regions beyond the modern borders of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Large areas of southern Arabia were ruled from Aksum at intervals between the third and sixth century AD. It is likely that Meroe in the Sudanese Nile Valley was conquered by an Aksumite army under King Ezana, but the nature and consequences of this episode remain poorly understood.
The town of Aksum, at the foot of two hills, Beta Giyorgis in the west and May Qoho in the east, was extended in a deep gorge oriented north-south. The surrounding land was rich, water abundant, building stone ubiquitous. The town itself was stretched along approximately one mile west-east with its width along the north-south axis measuring no more than 500 m. Massive architectural complexes have been excavated. Some were storage facilities, elite residences, and religious buildings. Elite and royal burials carved in the bedrock and marked by lavishly sculpted stelae were located in a central position overlooking the rest of the town complex. The largest stelae appear to mark the graves of the kings of Aksum immediately prior to their adoption of Christianity in the midfourth century. These stelae are the most remarkable monuments of the Aksum ‘skyline’. Now fallen and broken, the largest of these, was originally 33 m long, and 520 tons in weight, probably the largest single block of stone which people anywhere, at any time, have attempted to stand on end according to Phillipson (see Africa, East: Foragers; The Horn of Africa).
Very early in its history, Aksum became a trade hub linking the Red Sea to the Nile Valley and the Roman world from the north to the rest of the continent. It was visited by merchants from Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and even India. Adulis was its main and only harbor on the Red Sea. The economic growth and expansion of the Romans was one of the key factors for the quick pace of development of Aksum as a thriving economic metropolis. At the peak of its power and influence, the core of the ‘Aksumite civilization’ extended over a territory measuring 300 by 160 km, from 13°/17° latitude north and 38°/40° longitude east, with an access to the Red Sea at Adulis.
Aksum kingdom collapsed during the eighth century AD partly because of the success and fast expansion of Islam and its corollary political and economic isolation in a predominantly Muslim world. The overexploitation of local resources, intensive erosion of the deforested land, as well as a short arid spell may have accelerated the depopulation and demise of the Aksumite metropolis in the eighth-ninth century AD.
See also: Africa, East: Foragers; Madagascar and Surrounding Islands; Swahili Coast; The Horn of Airica; Asia, West: Arabian Peninsula; Plant Domestication.
World History
