Who ruled Aksum?

Aksum, also spelled Axum, is a town in northern Ethiopia's Tigray Region, lying at about 2,130 metres near the Adwa mountains. In the first millennium CE it was the capital of the Kingdom of Aksum, a trading power on the route between the Roman world and India, and its giant carved stelae rank among the largest monuments of the ancient world. Long after its political decline it remained the holiest city of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and a place where emperors were crowned.

Excavations on the hill of Beta Giyorgis above the town point to a settlement here from roughly the seventh to the fourth century BCE, and the area of the central stele park has been in use since about the start of the common era. By the first century CE the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea already described Aksum as a metropolis. The kingdom grew rich on Red Sea and Indian Ocean commerce and minted its own coins, which have turned up as far away as southern India. The Persian prophet Mani is said to have counted it among the four great powers of his time, alongside Rome, Persia and China.

The kings of Aksum marked their graves with granite stelae, at first rough slabs and later finely dressed shafts carved to look like multi-storey towers. The largest, the Great Stele, is about 33 metres long and is thought to have fallen and broken while being erected. Monumental stone thrones carried inscriptions recording royal wars. In the mid-fourth century King Ezana adopted Christianity, and his coins switch from pagan to Christian symbols around 340; after this the building of stelae came to an end. Under Kaleb in the early sixth century Aksumite power reached across the Red Sea into Yemen, and the traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes described a four-towered royal palace in the city.

As Arab armies took Byzantium's eastern provinces, Aksum lost its links with the Mediterranean and grew poorer. The capital of the kingdom moved south some time after the eighth century, perhaps partly because the land around the town could no longer feed and fuel a large population, and by the end of the ninth century much of Aksum lay in ruins. Ethiopian tradition blames the burning of its great church on a queen called Gudit.

The town revived after the rise of the Solomonic dynasty, becoming the spiritual capital of the Ethiopian Empire. Emperor Dawit I restored the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in 1406, and Zara Yaqob was crowned there in 1436. The church is said to hold the Ark of the Covenant, kept in a chapel that only a single guardian monk may enter. The Portuguese priest Francisco Alvares, who stayed eight months in the 1520s, admired its five aisles and painted vaults.

In 1535, during the Ethiopian–Adal War, troops of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi sacked and burned the town and destroyed the church. A later visitor found only about a hundred inhabitants among the ruins. Emperor Sarsa Dengel rebuilt it around 1580, but Oromo raiders burned it in 1611, and Fasilides restored the church in the 1650s; the present old cathedral is usually attributed to him. During the era of weak emperors known as the Zemene Mesafint, Aksum came under the lords of Tigray, and in 1872 Yohannes IV was crowned emperor there.

German scholars led by Enno Littmann studied the ruins in 1906. Italian troops took Aksum in October 1935 in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and in 1937 they broke a 24-metre stele into five pieces and shipped it to Rome. Despite a 1947 United Nations agreement to return it, the obelisk stayed in Italy for decades; it came back in 2005 and was re-erected in 2008. Emperor Haile Selassie built a new cathedral beside the old one, begun in 1955. In 1989, during the Ethiopian Civil War, the town was bombed from the air and three people were killed.

UNESCO listed Aksum's archaeological sites as a World Heritage Site in 1980, and the town had about 66,900 residents in 2015. During the Tigray War, in late November 2020, soldiers killed many civilians in the town; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Associated Press and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission attributed the killings to Eritrean forces, with estimates of the dead ranging from about 100 to 800.