Place · Red Sea kingdom capital · Ethiopia
Aksum
The capital of a kingdom that was one of the great powers of the Red Sea from roughly the first to the seventh century, with its granite stelae, its rock-hewn thrones and its own alphabet in Ge'ez. Ezana converted to Christianity in the fourth century, which makes Aksum one of the earliest Christian states anywhere, and it struck gold, silver and bronze coinage on a Roman weight standard — unusual for any power outside the empire, and the instrument by which its commercial reach can be traced. Its port at Adulis handled the trade with India.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 14.130, 38.720
Worth knowing
Aksumite coins carry Greek legends for the export trade and Ge'ez for home use, and the cross replaces the disc-and-crescent on them the moment Ezana converts — so a change of state religion is datable from small change.
Aksumite coins have been reported from Indian west-coast contexts; the finds are less well published than those from South Arabia, and specific attributions such as Mangalore should be treated as unconfirmed.
Connections (3)
- Trade routeKalyan
Kalyan on the Konkan creek behind Bombay is named in the Periplus and again by Cosmas Indicopleustes about 550 CE as a working port, and Aksumite traders crossed the western Indian Ocean to buy at harbours like it — African ivory, gold and emeralds against Indian cotton, iron and spices. Cosmas also puts a Persian-appointed bishop at Kalliana, which places an organised Christian congregation on this coast two centuries before any surviving Indian record of one.
- Site adjacencyAdulis
Adulis was Aksum's window on the Indian Ocean. The inland capital held the gold, the ivory and the stone thrones; the port eight days' journey away on the Red Sea handled the export, and the Periplus names it as the outlet for ivory, rhinoceros horn and tortoiseshell. Aksum struck gold and silver coinage on a Roman standard — unusual for any power outside the empire — and that coinage is what turns up along the trade's routes, which is how the kingdom's commercial reach is measured.
- AnalogueTarōn
Two claims about Indians settling far from India, and they are evidentially opposite. Aksum's trade with India is attested by the Periplus, by Cosmas Indicopleustes, by excavated goods and by coinage — it can be argued about in detail but not in principle. The Armenian account of two Indian princes founding a settlement in Tarōn in the second century BCE rests on one text of disputed date, compiled in the tenth century from a possibly fifth-century original, with no archaeological or independent textual support at all.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kingdom of Aksum” and “Aksumite currency”. Periplus of the Erythraean Sea; Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography; David Phillipson, Ancient Ethiopia (1998); Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (1991).
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