The Kingdom of Aksum

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Speaker 1 It's the 4th century AD.

Speaker 1 A merchant ship sails out of the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden along one of the busiest maritime routes in the world. The trade route that connected the Roman Empire and its ports in Egypt with India.

Speaker 1 But this ship and its crew are neither Roman nor Indian. They are Aksumite, hailing from the bustling port of Adulis in present-day Eritrea.

Speaker 1 Their destination, the flourishing ports along India's west coast.

Speaker 1 The boat is filled to the brim with Aksumite goods to sell, ivory, tortoiseshell, rhino horn and gold.

Speaker 1 In exchange they hoped to acquire steel and spices, valuable commodities both in Aksum and in the Roman Empire to their north.

Speaker 1 These African merchants were vital cogs in this far-reaching trade route, making both them and the kingdom they hailed from all the richer.

Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Today we're exploring the story of the kingdom of Aksum, situated largely in what is today northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Speaker 1 Incredibly well positioned, with strong contacts to the Roman Mediterranean, India, Arabia and Mesopotamia, the Kingdom of Aksum flourished and became incredibly powerful in the first millennium AD.

Speaker 1 Today, it is most famous for the gigantic steli obelisks that towered over its main city and for the kingdom's early conversion to Christianity in the 4th century.

Speaker 1 But, as you're about to to hear, there is so much more to Axum's story.

Speaker 1 To explain all, I was delighted to interview the archaeologist and Aksum expert Dil Singh Basanti, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Speaker 1 Dil has worked out in Ethiopia on Axum's archaeology for several years and holds a particular interest in Aksumite mortuary monuments and burial practices.

Speaker 1 He's a fantastic speaker and his passion for all the things Aksum shines through. It's infectious.

Speaker 13 I really do hope you enjoy.

Speaker 21 Dyl, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 18 Thank you so much, Tristan. I really appreciate you having me.

Speaker 21 And to talk about the kingdom of Axum, there is so much to explore with the story of Axum and its incredible archaeology. There is so much to talk about.

Speaker 18 Yeah, we've really had an explosion of work in the last couple of decades. So prior to that, we've just had excavations and viewers in the capital city city and a couple of other cities themselves.

Speaker 18 But since then, we've had work going on from some of the earliest times. We have a new cultural horizon that stretches back even deeper in time, going on into the medieval times and after.

Speaker 18 So we're really getting a horizontal and vertical spread across the Aksumite region.

Speaker 21 We've got a big period of time to cover. And you mentioned there in passing the capital.
So

Speaker 21 where are we talking about with the kingdom of Aksum with modern countries?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so the capital itself, Aksum, is in northern Ethiopia in a state called Tigray, in the Tigray Plateau. But the actual polity, we don't fully know the boundaries.

Speaker 18 A lot of the work that's been done, it's as we see in many places where you have roads and where you can actually get to.

Speaker 18 So a lot of it trends towards the east of Aksum. And then we have a lot of older work that was done in Eritrea.
So we know that it took up a lot of current Tigray going into Eritrea.

Speaker 18 There are times in its history that it stretched across the sea and had some sort of influence in South Arabia.

Speaker 18 There's oral traditions in Uganda that relate to Aksum, that we don't really know how those relate. You go down to central, southeast parts of Ethiopia, you'll find Oxumite coinage there.

Speaker 18 I've worked in Amhara in the more like central, central north state, where you'll have oral traditions of things that different oksumai kings built and things going on there as well but that full history itself is unexplored so we don't really know the full boundaries right now we're focused more on the tigray state and that those northeast regions of ethiopia going into eritrea But Dyl, thinking about that area of the world in antiquity, if you've got the Red Sea there, connections with Arabia, southern Arabia, as you've mentioned, the Horn of Africa, this feels like an incredibly important and strategic area of the world geographically where you find this ancient kingdom rising.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it definitely is. It's strategic and it's in a good location for a few different reasons.

Speaker 18 Because first of all, there is like the political interest and the economic interests over the Red Sea trade and the Indian Ocean trade.

Speaker 18 There's times when I believe it's Justinian I like sent a letter to Aksum to persuade them to go into South Arabia. And he said it was because the king of the Erdona was

Speaker 18 persecuting Christians, but it seems that they were maybe more interested in silk prices and wanted an ally in the region. We find many aspects of the trade that we can go into.

Speaker 18 You know, we have shipwrecks carrying ayah Kabalah coming from Jordan in the Red Sea. We find Ayah Akabal all over the place.

Speaker 18 You go into people's homes today, just like the compounds, and Amphora litter the floors, right?

Speaker 18 And we have a monastery, as I was talking about earlier to you, how some of the monasteries keep a lot of the ancient artifacts and there's a big sort of indigenous component to archaeology and so forth.

Speaker 18 We have a monastery that literally has a cache of Buddhist coins from the Krishna empires in Pakistan, Punjab, Afghanistan, like there. And, you know, so you have these economic interests.

Speaker 18 But before that, there is also a mix of cultures going on in the area, which coming from a Semitic influence.

Speaker 18 So Guz, the language, the primary language during Aksum in the area is mostly a Semitic language, but mixing in with cultures from Sudan as well, which is where the Stila tradition probably comes from.

Speaker 18 So it was already like an area of interaction that, well, for that reason, became important for economic and political reasons and many different scales.

Speaker 21 Can you talk to us a bit about the types of source material that we have, that experts and archaeologists like yourself have for learning more about the kingdom of Aksum?

Speaker 18 Aksum was always kind of internationally known, and that comes from textual material.

Speaker 18 So we have foreign records, and we have had histories of Aksum written just with foreign materials coming from the Greeks and historians. We have poetry from Arabia that talks about Aksum.

Speaker 18 We have economic works dealing with the trade. That's usually what foreign records are referring to.

Speaker 18 So the most famous is the Periplus of of the Red Sea, which is written in the first century and lists the Aksumite port, Aegulus, and talks about Aksum as the capital controlling influence over that region.

Speaker 18 So we have these foreign records. We have internal inscriptions in Guz, as well as Sabian and Greek from the various kings in the area.

Speaker 18 And then we also have or tradition that relates to the histories.

Speaker 18 in Aksum and that's a good way to find sites and that's a good way to get sort of a preliminary idea of the dating in some places, or at least like try to figure out what cultural horizon you're working with.

Speaker 18 Then we also have coins, which is kind of an international textual material because those are found all over the place.

Speaker 18 When they're original, we also have counterfeit coins because the Romans are actually making counterfeits of oxumite coins. So we find those in Palestine, we found those in Sri Lanka.

Speaker 18 and so forth, but they're like a little smaller through these miniature versions. So we have coinage, which is another big study.

Speaker 18 And then we have the more traditional historical and archaeological methods. So excavations.

Speaker 18 We had accounts of explorers going back to Francisco Alvarez in the 15th century, but then four more excavations began in the 19th century. And those have continued periodically.

Speaker 18 We had a big set of recordings in the early 1900s, and then a set of excavations that weren't republished in the mid-20th century.

Speaker 18 And then from 1970, we had a good deal of work before interruption with the change in the political regimes until mid-1990s where we've had more sustained archaeological work first in just a few areas but now there's a lot of teams from all over the place working in uh tigray and with axum and oxumite cultures well let's explore one of those horizons that it seems that you hinted at earlier is being expanded currently which surrounds the origins of the kingdom of Aksum.

Speaker 21 Now, Dil, what do we know about this, how this kingdom emerges?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so this has been one of the things that's been changing in recent years and how people think about Aksum.

Speaker 18 There used to be a model where Aksum was thought to be colonized by South Arabia sometime in maybe around 800 BC.

Speaker 18 The earliest sites in Aksum at that time, which would be the temple of Yeha, had South Arabian features. and was dedicated to a South Arabian pantheon of polytheistic gods.

Speaker 18 So Al-Muka, the god, the moon, was the biggest of those. And then there was another site, Wokro area, as well, that was uncovered.

Speaker 18 You know, when you get to a new archaeological area, the first thing you find are the big things, or the first thing you're looking at, the big things.

Speaker 18 So the earliest big things we had were South Arabian, right? But since the archaeological work has accumulated, we have cultural horizons stretching back.

Speaker 18 There was a wave of sites popping up from around the 900 BC to 1200 BC range with Major Drasha excavated by UCLA, Seglman by University of Napoli Laurientale.

Speaker 18 The Ona culture up in Eritrea around Asmara was one of the first by Peter Schmidt and Matthew Curtis.

Speaker 18 And then Gulu Makeda, which is a site that's on that route between Aksum and the port city that started, that found out was earlier than the trade. And all these sites were earlier than Yeha.

Speaker 18 In addition to that, that area that I just talked about, Gulu Makeda, they recently published in the last couple of years dating that goes back to about 1600 BC.

Speaker 18 It shows some of the earliest like agriculture working in the area.

Speaker 18 So, the current idea that we have is that there are movements and migrations and interactions going on a very large scale going out to the Arabian Peninsula and Semitic influences that would come there, mixing with things that were very local.

Speaker 18 The earliest place we find the Sila tradition is actually near Kassala in Sudan. And that's in the second millennium, early second millennium BC or so.

Speaker 18 And so that seems to be the earliest thing that we consider in the complex of the sites or cultural region that we're talking about.

Speaker 18 And it looks like we're having a big interaction sphere with people from there interacting with people arriving more from coastal regions, probably using what we call the Tekeza River Valley, which is one of the feeding rivers into the Blake Tana and then the Blue Nile.

Speaker 18 And so there's probably like agro-pastoralist groups that are interacting with settled communities. And within this big sphere of interaction, you start having complex polities emerge.

Speaker 21 So Axum emerges. And of course, we call it the kingdom of Axum, which I'm guessing kind of gives the game away.

Speaker 21 Dil, do we know much about the whole social and political structure of the kingdom of Axum?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so we do know they had a king who's called a Nagus.

Speaker 21 Surprise.

Speaker 18 Yeah. And that's mentioned in the Pyroplus.
and we see that in the inscriptions and so forth.

Speaker 18 The different Neguses, the most famous being King Gazana, erected instrictions to his many military victories over surrounding groups going up to Meraway,

Speaker 18 actually, in Sudan. And then we also have a coinage line where the kings were actually imprinting their likenesses on the coins.
So we have been able to get a kings list from that.

Speaker 18 But it's also incomplete.

Speaker 18 So like some of the kings we know about, because they're, you you know, you have to go to India and you find the coins there that talk about kings you didn't really know about in Aksu before.

Speaker 18 And all of a sudden you find it like a coin with a new king on it, right? So we do have like a kings list, but the entire range of kings is not well known.

Speaker 18 A lot of them are only really known from coinage. And there's a lot of reading between the lines on how the kings talk.

Speaker 18 and how various people talk about the kings, where it looks like there's something called the Nagusa Nagast, the king of the kings.

Speaker 18 And then there does seem to be some regional political system that had their own centralized heads as well. So it's not just the king, but there does seem to be a sizable nobility.

Speaker 18 Now that is for the Aksumite period. Going before that, we don't really know.

Speaker 18 There's a lot more legendary traditions and oral traditions that relate to kings, but at least from the Aksumite period, we do start seeing a kings list and we do start seeing all these references.

Speaker 18 And do we know then, if you say there evidently was this nobility and almost, I guess, almost a hierarchy of people in control you mentioned earlier axum as the capital do we know of many other key urban centers in this kingdom so we know about a few there's ones that are mentioned in the paraplis so a dulis is the main port of axum and there's another town they mentioned that i believe they say was like a three days walk away called kaloe And there's two sites that that might match up to.

Speaker 18 One is Matara, which was excavated, I believe, in the 60s or 70s. And we haven't really had much work since and not much is known about it.

Speaker 18 The other one, a more likely one, is a place called Kawhaido. These are both in southern Eritrea.
So Kaheido seems to be another urban center.

Speaker 18 And in the Periplus, that's mentioned as the first place where you can get ivory, which was the primary export of the oxumites. So Kaheido is a big one.

Speaker 18 One of my colleagues and professors, Matthew Curtis, was working there in the early 2000s.

Speaker 18 Unfortunately, we had conflicts starting in the regions at that time between the Border War. And since then, no work has been really done there.

Speaker 18 So, there's many like urban places we know about that people just can't get to, and that's one of them. And then, there's just a plethora of sites.

Speaker 18 So, Mike Harrow up at John Hopkins has been doing some of the most instrumental work in looking at settlement patterns.

Speaker 18 And what we actually find is the change from what we call the pre-Axemite period to the Oxumite period, pre-Axemite period has a few centralized sites that appear much more hierarchical.

Speaker 18 And we see that with some of the Sabian temple features as well, that their entire spatial syntax is about like restricting access.

Speaker 18 When we get to the Aksumai period, it's not that these cities get bigger. They actually get smaller.
They decentralize a bit. There's definite population growth, and there's a lot more infilling.

Speaker 18 So it's more like a conglomeration of centers from excavations that we've seen in the 90s under Philipson. It looks like there's a bunch of satellite sites.
that are all interdependent.

Speaker 18 So you start having these like urban clusters.

Speaker 18 So you have a few major metropolies that seem to be mentioned along the trade between Aksum, Gulumakeda, which I mentioned earlier, or at least like urban areas is how we have to start thinking about them, going up to Kawhido and then Adulis.

Speaker 18 But we have all these other sites too that just sort of Matthew Curtis, when we were working out and shitted it, he'd go out and survey for like a week and a half and find six settlements and then a cemetery everyone lost for like 60 years or something.

Speaker 18 So there's all these other sites that seem to have some urban sense of specialization to them and seem to be interdependent with everything else going on.

Speaker 21 Could we imagine potentially

Speaker 21 the G-word? Could they potentially be these kind of guilds or something like that?

Speaker 18 They totally could be.

Speaker 18 With the specialization that we're seeing, people that aren't working in Oxum, they're just working on the Indian Ocean trade, do talk about those guilds operating on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade or some sense of commercial groups or other herds.

Speaker 18 So there may be something like that going on in Oxum that probably originates in its own way and then maybe interacting with these larger economic structures.

Speaker 18 The archaeological core that we can definitely say is that a lot of them do seem specialized, even either for hide working or other types of manufacture and so forth.

Speaker 18 They do seem to be their own industrial units.

Speaker 21 So let's move on to trade. Highly anticipated this chapter in our conversation, given the hints you've already given regarding how important it is.

Speaker 21 And if we focus first on maritime trade, because you mentioned the port of Adoulis, which does feel to be really, really significant.

Speaker 21 If you were an axumide trader and you had a ship and you were going from somewhere like a doulis or let's say from a doulis

Speaker 18 how far and wide were the axumide maritime contacts how far and wide could you trade your goods yeah so we have a couple of sources for that a couple of documentary sources the first is the paraplis which mentions a lot of the ports but there was another hitchhiker in the sixth seventh centuries cosmos and dicoplastes so we're not sure if he made it to where he says he made it or implies that he made it but it looks like from his readings, we can gather that the main ports of Aksum were actually in Sri Lanka.

Speaker 18 And he seems to mention Oxumite ships themselves.

Speaker 18 And we do find Oxumite artifacts, coinage and pottery popping up in Gujarat, popping up in Tamil Nadu, in other places in southern India, and then popping up in Sri Lanka as well, which I mentioned earlier, we find some of the Roman counterfeits down there.

Speaker 18 Right. So we do find artifacts that are corroborating that to some degree.
We don't know if Indigo Places himself went down to Sri Lanka himself, but he certainly talks about Oxumite boats.

Speaker 18 He's actually there when one of the kings, King Kalib, is about to launch those wars into South Arabia, apparently, and is gathering his ships together for that.

Speaker 18 So that's the direction that we know Aksumites seem to show direct link and trade connections.

Speaker 18 They have very, very strong links, and probably a bigger injection of their trade was coming from the upper parts of the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.

Speaker 18 So Ayakaba, like I said, it's actually a Roman emphora made in Aqaba, Jordan. That's probably the second most common pottery type we see in Oxen itself after the local red wares.

Speaker 18 But we also find in one of the main sites that's been excavated, Bioto Georges, they have before that late Roman III emphora and the Gaules type.

Speaker 18 And they can actually identify some of the manufacturers going to production centers in France or in ancient Gaul at the time. we do have redware coming in from Tunisia.

Speaker 18 So there's a big injection coming from this Mediterranean and Red Sea trade. And that's probably mostly where they're operating.

Speaker 18 And then there's a bunch of tangential hints that people will overinflate or dismiss this evidence, depending on who's talking.

Speaker 18 But there may be relations with China in terms of some of the Han import lists match up with what's coming up with out of Aksum.

Speaker 18 And then there's mentions of kingdoms, Huang Chi, which may relate in a lot of circumstantial factors to Aksum. We did find cast steel in Aksum itself, which at the time is being made in China.

Speaker 18 But we, you know, with iron production, there might be all sorts of things going on.

Speaker 18 What seems one of the more likely ones is that there are memoirs written immediately after the decentralization of Aksum, after the Battle of Talus, where one of the generals from the Tang dynasty, when you trace out his route, this is work by Wilber Schmidt, when you trace out his route, he seems to have made it to Aksum and then exited through the port of Adoulis.

Speaker 18 So we're talking about like, where are people interacting completely? You know,

Speaker 18 China may be involved in interactions, but we need to understand that if it is, it's more of an indirect thing.

Speaker 18 There are much bigger interactions going on between India, Rome, and we do find Sasanian ware, so going up into the Sasanian regions in Iran and so forth as well.

Speaker 18 And we do have Arabic poetry, like I mentioned, from Iraq that talks about the Aksumite ships, and it has like very beautiful deep, it's a court poet that's basically bragging about their court, and in this case, bragging about a queen, and talks about the Aksumite ships, just with imagery of them parting the foam of the water, like this this caravan that he's talking about is part is going through the desert and our way of the sands.

Speaker 18 So, those are the

Speaker 18 places that are seemed to be interacting with Aksum. And it's not just that we're talking about direct trade links.

Speaker 18 We start talking about some of the virtual mechanisms, trade, things like cosmopolitanism, globalization, so forth.

Speaker 18 While at least Sayakaba and some of the other amphora are very, very common throughout Aksum. But there is one place we don't see any imports at all in Aksum,

Speaker 18 and that is in the Stila Park in the Graves. So they do seem to, yeah, so they do seem to differentiate between local and foreign there.

Speaker 18 And we do see the same thing going on in other parts of the trade where like, you know,

Speaker 18 there's

Speaker 18 sources in Egypt that talk about like Indians buying wine and getting drunk. There's sources in India that talk about the foreigners that eat way too much black pepper and so forth.

Speaker 18 So all these sort of categories of like foreignness are being built along these trades and we see it in Oxum as well.

Speaker 21 I'd like to quickly ask, because you've highlighted there, I don't need to ask it now because I think we've already covered it, like the importance of Aksum in that really significant trade route between the Roman Empire and India that we've covered

Speaker 21 in previous conversations. And also the fact that you highlighted their Aksumite ships.

Speaker 21 And I'm guessing I didn't really think of Axum as a maritime power, but having control of that important stretch of water.

Speaker 21 can make the kings, the rulers of Axum incredibly mighty and powerful because of all the trades going through.

Speaker 21 Alongside contacts with Sri Lanka and India and Sasanian Persia and the Roman Empire, do we know whether the Aksumites also went down the east coast of Africa to places like Zanzibar and so on?

Speaker 18 That's a good question. We actually don't know.
From the Periplus, I think the last port they mention on the east coast of Africa is a place called Rapta, which may match up with Somalia.

Speaker 18 We generally don't know how far they're going into down the coast. The Swahili coast trade is something that would pick up after this more antiquity version of the Indian Ocean trade.

Speaker 18 That seems to be its own independent thing that occurs later or is using, if there's any infrastructure there that they might be using, that's not fully known to us.

Speaker 18 This is more larger investigative issues. We don't really know how far into the African interior or other parts of Africa going south and southwest that oxum actually went.

Speaker 18 Going from the kind of known to the unknown we have, a lot of the excavations have occurred from oximite east going up to the Red Sea trade.

Speaker 18 So there's sort of a bias of information just in where we can do work and the best places to do work that kind of point to these international routes.

Speaker 18 And then we have, you know, the interaction sphere between Sudan and those Afghan roots in the immediate region that we are. But going beyond that, that's something that we don't fully know.

Speaker 18 That's what makes some of these other like chance finds or chance instance references to Oxum, such as oral traditions in Uganda and so forth. That's what makes them interesting.

Speaker 18 We don't really know much about them and they haven't really been investigated in any way.

Speaker 21 One last thing on the trading contacts.

Speaker 21 You mentioned ivory earlier, but what were some of the other main goods that the Axemites were trading in, that they were exporting, and those that they were importing?

Speaker 18 They seem to be mostly exporting wall materials, tortoise shell, rhino horn, things like that. Ivory is above and beyond their major one.

Speaker 18 Myrrh was probably, this is another region that's important for myrrh, so that might have also been involved.

Speaker 18 As you know, this perishable trade doesn't, you know, preserve as well in the archaeological record.

Speaker 18 There's what the Periplus says, but then there's also the additional things to that and the things that happen, because the Periplus is about the first century CE.

Speaker 18 Oxum seems to be most heavily involved in the third and fourth centuries. So by that time, we don't know exactly what shifted.
Ivory seems to be the main thing.

Speaker 18 One of the Byzantine ambassadors to the region records in the area of Yeha about 5,000 elephants that he's probably guessing. We believe the Oxumites likely hunted elephants to extinction in the area.

Speaker 18 The only place that we still have an elephant population in that region today is up in Kaf the Sharar, which I believe is in the few hundreds. And that's the northernmost elephant herd.

Speaker 18 So they seem to have hunted them to extinction. So they're importing wine.
They're also importing heavy amounts of iron, at least during the time of the paraplice.

Speaker 18 They might have their own industry later. But that seems to be something that would be instrumental in the hunting of elephants.
especially for spears and so forth.

Speaker 18 The ivory is actually very interesting because in oxumite material culture, culture, we see a lot of animal symbology, such as like wallia ibexes and then snakes are one of the biggest ones.

Speaker 18 And there's a lot of old traditions and legends about snakes, but we never really see an elephant.

Speaker 18 So outside of the raw ivory, the elephant, the animal that's like actually hunted possibly to extinction in the area, or at least endangered to some degree, is what we don't see in any of the symbolism.

Speaker 18 Either Cosmos or another sixth century historian, Procopius, also mentioned the Oxumite king's chariot being pulled by two elephants as well.

Speaker 18 So those are some of the the main things that we're seeing. The biggest import, at least in terms of the artifacts we find, is probably wine.

Speaker 18 There's probably other elements of trade coming in with like black pepper and so forth. Oxum appears to have its own vineyards at a later time.
They're also importing a good amount of steel.

Speaker 18 And then their major export of all the things listed tends to be ivory.

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Speaker 18 Afar is interesting. So that's a really cool region in the eastern part of Ethiopia.

Speaker 18 And it's legendary as like a travel destination because it's the hottest place in the world by average temperatures. I think it averages somewhere around like 140 Fahrenheit.

Speaker 21 Okay, no, thank you. No, thank you.

Speaker 18 And oh, but it gets cooler because it's filled with sulfuric acid lakes in some of the regions or some of the areas, as well as like moving lava lakes that are totally, when you see those lava lakes flow, it is exactly what you want them to be in like imagination.

Speaker 18 Yeah, there's salt formations and everything. So people don't really live there, live there.

Speaker 18 They mostly go just to mine salt and they'll make them in these little blocks that in historic times was used as money and people still barred it today.

Speaker 18 We had always believed that oxygen was somehow involved there. And we find obsidian in other oximite sites, which Afar is a great obsidian source.

Speaker 18 I was there about four years ago, and there's people that still use obsidian flakes to shave.

Speaker 18 So, there was more recent research by Helena Wodakiros on that area, and she did find oxumite sites, and she did trace back a caravan-type trade going into the area.

Speaker 18 So, most of her sites date to late oxamite into medieval times, but she was finding earlier oxamite material in there as well.

Speaker 18 So, it seems to be the verification that we had that they were in that area, likely also mining salt, at least participating in some sort of caravan commerce.

Speaker 21 Yes, you mentioned Helena Wodakiros there. And yeah, I saw her research on this and thought, actually, that's fascinating.
So I must ask it.

Speaker 21 And thank you very much for mentioning her name because I said she's been leading that research, hasn't she?

Speaker 18 Yeah. And, you know, there's like how you do your excavations or expeditions and so forth that we usually talk less about.
And Helena, being humble, is very humble about hers.

Speaker 18 But she basically formed their own caravan.

Speaker 18 And so she was like one of the first, like, I think female caravans or maybe the only female caravan operating in the time, just living in one of the most difficult areas to live in for like five six months finding all these uh oxumite sites and engaging in this it is some top level work and top level experience it was very very arduous undertaking very impressive very impressive what a story let's move on to arguably the most well-known symbolic monuments that have survived from the kingdom of Axum, which are of course these steely.

Speaker 21 To introduce this, Dyl, can you explain to us how the royal members of the Aksumite dynasty, how the elites buried their dead, and then how that relates to these great monuments?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so the stela themselves are burial markers, and that's a tradition going back with agro-past studies, as I mentioned out in Sudan. So it seems to originate there.

Speaker 18 And the earliest site that we have with stela in Aksum is in Segla Men, which their dates are about 1000 to 500 BC for that cemetery area.

Speaker 18 And then by the time we get to Aksum, these stela, which were sometimes like only half a meter or so tall out in Sudan, are now all of a sudden monumental.

Speaker 18 So the biggest stela there is 32 meters tall. It weighs about 500 tons.
Yeah, solid stone, like traditionally what we think of with like an obelisk or a stela.

Speaker 18 I think the one in Karnak is bigger, but this is one day they actually tried to get it up. And the base for it is only about two meters.

Speaker 18 So it wasn't sufficient to keep the monument standing upright so it immediately went down and it seems to have shattered the top of another tomb called the nefal maucha so you know it collapsed in ancient times and so these these stela they're carved from the volcanic stone it's a nepheline stone and so it's very likely that in ancient times people saw people hauling these giant stones as blanks from this quarry and then they seem to have worked them in place in the cemetery because we find at least one that's incompleted there.

Speaker 18 So they start erecting these stela in monumental forms, but there's hundreds of stela all across Aksum. And that cemetery itself, there's at least like 75, 76.
It's located at the bottom of a hill.

Speaker 18 So sometimes stila get covered up, sometimes they get exposed. There's a lot of stela that are buried in the tombs as well.
And sometimes we use this beds for some of the skeletons.

Speaker 21 Stela buried in the tombs themselves.

Speaker 18 Yeah, so actually, if you walk around that area in the right time of year with the right hydrology, you can see buried stela.

Speaker 18 And there's one in particular I'm thinking of that marks the entrance to a tomb that you can see there.

Speaker 18 And there may have been termination rituals going on with these stela, meaning that after their use life, they were ritually broken, terminated, disposed in some way.

Speaker 18 And some of them seem to have wound up as beds inside some of the tombs in the area. And so there's tons of these stila.

Speaker 18 Many of them are quite smaller, meter to like three or four meters, but there's six of them that were carved like to look like oxamite elite structures so they have multiple rows of windows and timber frames that would stick out of oxumite architecture that we call monkey heads and doorways so the main symbolism of that is on six of them and those range in size from about 13 to the largest one which was about 32 meters and then there's other like proto forms of the symbolism where they make something that looks like a house or they have lines and dots that look like the monkey heads as well.

Speaker 18 But the cool thing about the symbolism too, though, was that it was very heavily ritualized.

Speaker 18 So that stila I was talking about, the stila one, which people usually believe that that marks the tomb for the king because it's the largest tomb there. When that collapsed, so

Speaker 18 as I mentioned, these stila have little doorways on it. When that collapsed, they actually cut out the handle for the doorway to terminate the symbolism.

Speaker 18 And then you'll see it today, and it's collapsed. And that doorway, yeah,

Speaker 18 you could go see that the door handle is hacked out of the doorway symbolism there. So it's not just that these things are cosmetic.
They had some sort of ritual power.

Speaker 18 They're imbued with a sense of power. They're radiating something or they have this sort of meaning to them.

Speaker 18 And when you look at where the Sila are located, they're in between two hills in front of the central water source.

Speaker 18 That is the worst place for a cemetery in all of Oxum because all the runoff going down those hills that helps fill up that water source is going into those tombs.

Speaker 18 So some of those tombs are just always filled with water. and something is always falling down.
But so it's the worst place to preserve skeletons if that is your goal.

Speaker 18 But it's the best place for monuments because everyone that is going to get water is going to see them.

Speaker 18 And in addition, those two hills, the hill in front, Mai Kojo, it dips just enough in area that in the morning, the hills are blocking the sun.

Speaker 18 And there is just, it's like a curtain of light that just comes down the stila in the morning, which people like see this all the time. We're not sure.

Speaker 18 It's probably not like ritually purposeful, but there's an aesthetic quality to where if you go there in the morning, like everything is dark out in front, except for the Stila, right?

Speaker 18 Except for the Stila and Vietnam Georgie's hill behind it. So they're kind of like illuminated.

Speaker 18 And that seems to be the time that they switched to this Nephilim material coming from Gilberta in the, in the lifetime of the Stila field.

Speaker 18 So that's why I say they seem to be taking advantage of it to some degree. The whole field seems very improvised.
Like it's not.

Speaker 18 well it there's a element planning element improvisation to it so it's not something i think they set out in the beginning to do to make it like a a ritualized feature, but it's certainly an aesthetic effect that you have these like blue stones with these like twinkling phenocrysts just radiating in the light while everything in front of it is dark.

Speaker 18 And you can see that effect today. They're patented a bit now, but you can see the effect of them lighting up in the morning today, or at least that curtain of light coming down them.

Speaker 21 Absolutely. I can see on a couple of images that like online, just that kind of the sunlight on those steel and how they really just

Speaker 18 stand out.

Speaker 21 And I also, I had no idea, I was about to ask about the decoration, but you've answered my question for me with the doors and the windows and multiple levels of windows.

Speaker 21 It feels like they've accidentally also kind of designed the ancient Axemite concept of what a skyscraper looks like today. They're striking.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, no, that's totally right. Yeah, that's a trip.
I didn't think about it that way.

Speaker 21 Are those steely then? I mean, do they endure for several...

Speaker 21 centuries and is it very much a status symbol so only the richest in Axemite society and the royalty would be able to have a steelite stilai erected when they die.

Speaker 18 Yeah, so I actually answered your question quite poorly on that earlier. So, traditionally, that has been what's interpreted with the stela.

Speaker 18 And it's because of just how we think who has the money to make these giant stila, which seems to be quite an undertaking.

Speaker 18 And then, when you know that there is a king in the area, it's like, oh, okay, the largest stila should belong to a king.

Speaker 18 There's a convenient alliance between those ideas and the oral traditions in the area. So, the oral traditions do mark the stila as kings, but they mark them all by one king.

Speaker 18 They mention a king called Ram Hai, which we don't have from any other form of material culture referencing, but they believe all the stila were marked by these kings.

Speaker 18 At the same time, oral tradition is a lot more, people usually mark date with people. There's an aspect of that going on.

Speaker 18 But this convenience alliance between our ideas on monument construction and some of the oral tradition has created that impression. And the stila in other areas are markers for individual graves.

Speaker 18 In the stila park, they are not any longer. The biggest stila does mark two tombs.
That seems to be one of them.

Speaker 18 It marks a tomb we call the mausoleum, which has 10 chambers off the central passageway that might have been designed to look like the inside of a stila

Speaker 18 because the cross section looks like a house.

Speaker 18 And in addition, the real kicker is that the inside was plastered with a lime-based plaster that doesn't have any water like protection poppies or anything but it does have flecks of methylene stone in it the same stone that the stela are carved from so they have that tomb there's another tomb that people couldn't excavate because it's too dangerous called the east tomb that's also marked and still unknown to us the two other biggest stila in the area surrounding it has been excavated don't seem to mark tombs at all so The Stila Park is actually one of the best investigative features in African archaeology.

Speaker 18 And people, because we expect to find kings' tombs there, like people are always kind of looking for it.

Speaker 18 But if you look at what's been excavated, there's not really a lot of areas left around Bostila.

Speaker 18 So, and people still like hold out hope, but it's like, yo, I'm not sure if you're going to drop a two by two and find a royal tomb here

Speaker 18 in this area.

Speaker 21 Going on to, I know an area that you find really, really interesting.

Speaker 21 Perhaps those people are actually missing out on what is arguably even more impressive and interesting when it comes to Aksumite burials, which is how everyday Axumites buried buried their dead.

Speaker 21 Now, you mentioned cemeteries earlier, so do we know a lot about kind of these cemeteries and burial rites and so on for people who are living in the kingdom of Aksum, everyday people outside of these steel fields?

Speaker 18 We do a bit. So there has been one other stela field that has been excavated called the Guda Stila Field.
And

Speaker 18 that we usually take that more in reference to things we see in the Stela Park. And the Stila Park is part of a larger Stela field called the Northern Stela Field.

Speaker 18 So those are two cemeteries where we kind of get our sources. The problem is, is that the hierarchy in Oxum may or may not be working as we traditionally think.

Speaker 18 So it's hard to tell what is the commonest grave other than you have simpler grave grids, which the Good Steeler Field does.

Speaker 18 But there is some fluidity because at least one of the stelae there is bigger than some of the royal stela. And the stela park, this is where they say there's a lot more variability going on.

Speaker 18 So people still attach to the kingly interpretation, but their mixture of classes is so fluid that it gets, at least from what we see from the mortuary terrier, that it gets hard to tell.

Speaker 18 Now, when we were excavating Steelfield, it may be that, so these people were definitely rich, rubber's buried there.

Speaker 18 They're definitely a, they're probably like a neighborhoody community, based on what we see from some of the oxygen isotope research we've done on some of the remains.

Speaker 18 They're using at least that water source, or at least people that use the central water source.

Speaker 18 In addition, the people that were buried in the tomb that we have best excavated called Two of the Brick Arches, which is one of the larger tombs and it's usually thought to be a middle middle-class tomb.

Speaker 18 One of the things we see from the bones is we can tell they were working outside.

Speaker 18 So they show multiple signs of labor stress throughout their bones, especially in the hamstrings, especially in the biceps areas. And they seem to be a wealthy tomb.

Speaker 18 If there is a difference between that and the mausoleum, it may be that they got their ivory from hippos and not from elephants. And this is still more at the level of speculation.

Speaker 18 This is still something we're investigating. So this is what I mean, that the hierarchy is a bit mixed up.
It's not working in the ways that traditional norms sort of lend us to think that works.

Speaker 18 There's more of a community feel.

Speaker 18 And the big things that we see in death and burial practices is that early on in the Stila tradition, they're very much monuments for ancestor veneration rites or rites venerating or honoring the dead.

Speaker 18 And that seems to be the main purpose. And that seems to be what's being emphasized in the stila and in the burials, because we have evidence of people going back into these graves, taking the bones.

Speaker 18 The new thing that we have in Oxford that we don't have in sites before, such as seglamen and so forth, is that we start finding cut marks on the bone. So they're taking the bodies out sooner.

Speaker 18 And we can tell they're ritualized cut marks because we don't see signs of disarticulation.

Speaker 18 We just see that they're having little systematic nicks down the bone to remove the last remnants of organic tissue to preserve the bones like relics.

Speaker 18 And the places that they have the most cut marks are the places of labor stress where the muscle tissue is starting to ossify.

Speaker 18 So that's why they had to clean those bones to get the last of that tissue off.

Speaker 18 And what's interesting is that we have some later burials in the Stila Park that are medieval from about 7th to 13th century.

Speaker 18 They also have the cup marks, but they don't have as much signs of labor stress.

Speaker 18 So this thing that started off as very technical in the production of an ancestor from the remains in terms of cleaning their body for very technical reasons and these areas where the muscle tissue would ossify.

Speaker 18 Later on, that's just a ritual tradition in the medieval times, right?

Speaker 18 So something very technical becomes something very ritual by the end of it, at least from what we can see in the window of the two cemetery tombs that we're looking at.

Speaker 18 So that's kind of what we see going on with the graves and the actual death and burial rites.

Speaker 21 It's such extraordinary research. And I'm guessing all that you've just mentioned, are those key parts of a project that I know you've done a lot of work around for years, the Axum Bones Project?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so the Axum Bones Project, that was part of my dissertation, and it was a bigger project than my dissertation, but what we were looking at is we were looking at three cemeteries, the Stila Park in Oxum, as well as the site of Segla Men, the place where we have the basically the oldest Stila cemetery in the area that's excavated by the University of Napuilo in Tale, Luis

Speaker 18 Nicola and Andrea Monzo, and then another medieval site called Mrs. Body, which is actually one of the best art bioarchaeological samples we have in all of Africa.

Speaker 18 that looks like it was a late oxumite church that was later used as a late oxumite to post-oxumite like medieval times cemetery and so we were trying to look at how these traditional rites change through time especially with globalization especially with the advent of christianity in the area and just understanding how death and people's experience of death is changing and it's really more the the point of that is more of a social message in that you know when we see ancestor rites or these processing of bodies these very like exotic looking things initially, people want to ascribe that as something that's like a relic of an archaic belief.

Speaker 18 But that's not what happens at Auxum because the time when people, when the ancestors have the greatest presence or the dead and the living are most closely connected is during the time of globalization.

Speaker 18 It's during the time that the stila park becomes an area of the local, the only place where you don't see foreign objects.

Speaker 18 These stila all suddenly become monuments from side, suddenly become very ritualized, become more like community-ish based to some degree.

Speaker 18 And we start having this, they're at least taking bodies out sooner and they seem to be processing them more.

Speaker 18 So that we start seeing that, you know, the ancestor, if that's what we call it, or this living dead, if that has a presence, it's really much, it's something that's coming from like modernizing processes like globalization and urbanization and things like that more than anything archaic.

Speaker 18 So that was the point that we were, or that I was to try to look at and looking at these three sites and seeing how death rights changed in time.

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Speaker 21 still we could cover so many more different themes whether that be Aksumite mythology or their art and their pottery, their house styles, the military and so on.

Speaker 21 I don't think we're going to have enough time to cover all of those. So maybe another chat in the future.

Speaker 21 However, we must talk about the coming of Christianity that you mentioned there because it feels so important to the story.

Speaker 21 Before we actually talk about Christianity in Aksum, do we know much about the religion or religions that the Aksumites followed before Christianity arrived there?

Speaker 18 We know a little bit. So we know that there is a South Arabian pantheon in the area.
Al-Muka is the most important of the deities that they talk about.

Speaker 18 And so what happens with the pre-Christian era between the various gods that are in the region is that they're kind of like mixing together, but kind of not. So Al-Muka may be an aspect of Ishtar.

Speaker 18 or may be an aspect of something they locally call a star who at other times has some connection with Zeus or at least the heavens.

Speaker 21 And Ishtar, that's normally linked with Babylon as well. So that's going very far away.

Speaker 18 Right. Yeah, it's linked to Babylon.
And then at times it also has an aspect of like Venus in there as well.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 we have this South Arabian panpeon, but Aksumites, they have, it appears there's another version of polytheism in the area. And then there's also cosmopolitanism coming in from the Red Sea.

Speaker 18 So in Aksum itself, there's three gods that are mainly mentioned. There's a star.
The primary god.

Speaker 18 however, is someone named Maharem, who may be a version of Al-Muqal that was later adopted in in a different way, but maybe its own thing. And then the Greece sort of cognate is more related to Aries.

Speaker 18 So that's the war god. So King Azana would claim that he was the son of Maharem, the war god.
And then there's another god named Bahair that is also very important in the area.

Speaker 18 This goes a little bit further, but the Christian word for God is Exiabear, and that may have bear a relationship with Bahair, which just means land.

Speaker 18 So Exiabear, the Christian god, just means the lord of the land. So there's this other polytheism that may or may not be related to the South Arabian one.

Speaker 18 And these are mostly come from inscriptions, but there's various gods that seem to be permutations of the sun and the moon and have different temple aspects. So there's also Nuru and Habas.

Speaker 18 There's Dat Himyan and Dat Badan, which may be the dimming of the sun during different times of the year.

Speaker 18 So there's different permutations of like the sun and the moon, and they may be incorporating an aspect of temporality and what keeps them difference which may or may not bear a relationship with agricultural cycles that's sort of like the go-to intuitive sort of understanding but that that's what we have in the area maharem is the principal god mentioned in the inscriptions the oxumite king claimed to be a descendant or son of maharem at least until christianity so king azana cutting ahead a little bit but king gazana is the one that we see converts to christianity so christianity came from connections with the Red Sea trade.

Speaker 18 And there was probably already Christians in the area long before King Azana converts, especially in a doulas where they have before, you know, in addition to the two pantheons I was talking about, you know, you have the more traditional Zeus, Poseidon, Aries mentioned in a throne inscription in a doulas.

Speaker 18 And then we have some churches, four churches in a doulas that are not well dated, but could be some of the earliest churches in Africa and maybe somewhere in the third to sixth century range.

Speaker 18 They're not really well dated, so this is more speculation than anything. But King Azana, we know himself converts to Christianity because we can actually see that on his coinage.

Speaker 18 So he has a crescent and a disc symbol on his earliest coins, and that gets replaced by a cross. And that matches up with some of the old traditions in the area that talk about...

Speaker 18 So in the story, there's a shipwreck. with two Syrians that are later captured and brought to the father, King Azana.

Speaker 18 And one of them is made a tutor for King Azana, Frementius. And King Azana, from that influence, converts to Christianity.

Speaker 18 Fermentius becomes the first major patriarch in Ethiopia, and that's how Christianity starts begin.

Speaker 18 So these archaeological correlates match up in that we do see King Azana converting earlier in the coinage, and not only that, but in the inscriptions.

Speaker 18 And so when King Azana makes inscriptions, he makes them in Khiz, Greek, Sabian as well. And the Greek inscriptions, he is very much talking about the Holy Trinity when he references his victories.

Speaker 18 In the same text, in the Giz inscription, he's very, very ambiguous on who he's dedicating his victory to.

Speaker 18 So he's totally a Christian to foreigners, but he may not be a Christian to people around, at least in Aksum.

Speaker 18 But we do see, there is oral tradition that at a later time in the fifth to sixth centuries, a migration of nine saints from Syria come and help convert the population in axum and that is the time that we start seeing crosses made on the pottery and we do start having datings for more of the earlier churches in the area so that's the that's how we understand the coming of christianity and so far how it's matching up with the archaeological correlates oh it is stunning and king azana so fourth century so About the same time as Constantine the Great, you know, starts embracing Christianity in the Roman Empire as well.

Speaker 21 So it is pretty early in the scheme of things. And you mentioned the Gias as well.
Is that the religious Christian language of Ethiopia or of Aksum?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so it was probably the primary language of Aksum. So that we see a lot of inscriptions in Ghiz.

Speaker 18 And then we also see one of the cool things to talk about this interaction with Christianity is on the island of Socotra near Ethiopia, which was a waypoint for this trade where we have Ghiz.

Speaker 18 written alongside Aramaic, the language of Israel, written alongside Brumi and all these other scripts and so forth. So that was the main language of Oxum as far as we can tell.

Speaker 18 And then today it remains as a language of the church. So even today, people will speak in Ghiz or write in Ghiz within the church tradition as well.
So it's preserved within the religion.

Speaker 21 It's so interesting that, you know, you mentioned a dou list there and possible early churches there.

Speaker 21 I remember talking to William Dalrymple and Steve Cybosum about discoveries of a Buddha in Bereniki.

Speaker 21 So it's interesting whether there could be evidence of Buddhism there as well at that time, kind of a religious melting pot because of that trade.

Speaker 21 And ultimately, Christianity is the one that emerges on top.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 18 And going with what I was talking about earlier with the patchiness of Aksum, at least socially and some of these cultural traditions, you probably had different hatchiness of that cosmopolitanism throughout the Aksumite area.

Speaker 18 So some place like Adoulis was very, very cosmopolitan and very heavily involved in the trade. But, you know, Aksum seems to be more of a like regional African injection into the trade.

Speaker 18 And that's something we're still investigating. The full range of archaeological correlates for that trade, we don't have a full understanding of at Aksum.

Speaker 18 And thinking through how those mix together is one of the future research questions. But it certainly is a cosmopolitan area,

Speaker 18 just from how we see the different categories being made. King Azana is one of the first people to use the word Ethiopia for Ethiopia, which historically might have referred to Nubia or something.

Speaker 18 But he is very much like almost co-opting the name Ethiopia because of the respect that it had to refer to himself.

Speaker 18 He's almost playing like a propaganda game here on how he gets envisioned to all these foreign powers and the trade in this international sphere, along with the various categories being made.

Speaker 18 He's very much trying to curate what his kingdom and what his category is going to be seen as.

Speaker 21 Dale, very quickly, before we end, because

Speaker 21 I've used a lot of your time for this wonderful interview and don't want to go on too long.

Speaker 21 But one more question on Christianity quickly is, of course, Ethiopia and the kingdom of Aksum becomes strongly associated with the Ark of the Covenant and I guess the Queen of Sheba earlier as well.

Speaker 21 I mean, can you explain a little bit as to why and how these famous names from the Old Testament become so strongly associated with Aksum and Ethiopia more generally?

Speaker 18 Yeah, so that is one of the longest-lived traditions that we see in Ethiopia. And one of the big things that people are really interested in, what it's known for.

Speaker 18 So the primary text for that is a later medieval text called the Keber Nagast, which it's more associated with the rise of the Amhara Empire, which is a bit south of Vaksum, and itself probably dates to the 13th century in textual form.

Speaker 18 However, it probably has oral tradition components that go back earlier, maybe during the time of Aksum, because there's this one point where they just randomly start talking up and praising an Aksumite king named Gabriel Mescal for almost no reason at all in the text.

Speaker 18 So that's the thing that makes people think, like, okay, that has to be something earlier that found its way in as part of this novel. So that's the primary text.

Speaker 18 There's all this investigation looking into how it's earlier. We already have these connections going on with the Middle East.

Speaker 18 Not only I mentioned with Aramaic, but also with some of the crop packages we see in the area. Wheat and barley from the Near East come in pretty early as well.

Speaker 18 In addition, one of the biggest texts that we're we're not really sure in the dating of that talks about the Queen of Sheba legend relating to Ethiopia is actually not from Ethiopia.

Speaker 18 It's from Egypt and is the Testament of Solomon, which is dated anywhere from like the first century CE to like medieval times. But so it's a fake text.

Speaker 18 It's someone pretending to be Solomon and talking, it's a big

Speaker 18 text in the occult. because it talks about the various like demons and jinns that Solomon was commanding and commanding to build his temple.

Speaker 18 But there is a brief interlude where a queen from the south, the queen of Sheba, comes to visit him.

Speaker 18 And that seems to be the first reference, if it does date indeed that early, of the Queen of Sheba myth. And it actually doesn't come from Ethiopia.
So

Speaker 18 Wendy Belcher is currently doing research on this and how the Queen of Sheba story, that that's not just an Ethiopian tradition relating to the medieval ages.

Speaker 18 It's more of like a pan-African narrative that's emerging between Ethiopia to Egypt.

Speaker 18 Now, the Ark of the Covenant, the story is that the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon, and they have a son who is the first emperor of Ethiopia, King Menelik I.

Speaker 18 And that bloodline lasts in Ethiopia until Hali Selassie was deposed in 1974. So the story is Queen Menelik visits his father.
And he brings back three things. The Ring of Solomon.

Speaker 18 He brings back an instrument like a lyre that we do have in Ethiopia today called the Begana. And he brings back the Beda Israel tribe, which was also in Ethiopia.

Speaker 18 And in addition to that, either he brings back or some of his followers go and bring back themselves, but then it's later justified somehow, the Ark of the Covenant.

Speaker 18 And then that is to have rested in Aksum. And you can go see the chapel today where it's kept in Mayam Seon Church.
And you can also see it in the mornings. The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months.

Speaker 18 And the the first seven days of each month, they have something called the Mhalela, which they actually take the ark on a procession around the historic center of Aksum every morning.

Speaker 18 So you can go see that today. And that has been a long-lived part of the Ethiopian tradition.
And there's not only the Ark, but every church has something called a Tabul.

Speaker 18 And a taboo is a copy of the Ark. But, you know, in the West, we kind of see like a copy as sort of an artificial knockoff, something that's completely sort of against the original.

Speaker 18 In Ethiopia, it's seen as having aspects of the original. So a church is not a church if it doesn't have a taboo and so that

Speaker 18 tradition is long-lived in Ethiopia and centralizes the church and centralizes the Christian tradition.

Speaker 18 So those are the ways that it matches up with what we see with the presence of the other things that such as the Beganah that Menelik I was supposed to have had and the interactions interactions that we see playing out during this time between Aksum and the region of Israel, Middle East.

Speaker 18 And we do find Oxumite coinage in Palestine and Israel as well. And in Palestine particularly, there's Oxmite knockoffs.
There's the Roman copies of Oxumite coins, but there's also Oxumite coins.

Speaker 18 And the key thing is that we see silver and bronze coins in Aksum. So Oxumite coinage, gold coins were used as international currency, but the silver and bronze forms were not.

Speaker 18 And so that's been taken to mean that we actually have visitors going between the two regions when we find those coins there.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 21 Well,

Speaker 21 Dil, what a way to end it. Thank you for doing those explanations because it feels an important part of the story and, of course, the heritage of Ethiopia.

Speaker 21 We've covered so much in the last hour or so, and I think we'll wrap it up there.

Speaker 21 As mentioned, we can cover so much more in another chat, whether it's the domestic houses, pottery, art, mythology, and of course the ultimate fall of the kingdom of axum although that feels us going a little too far into the medieval period for the ancients' liking but dil this has been absolutely brilliant and when when are you next out in axum what's the next big axon project for you um i will probably be going again next year in the winter time i just arrived a couple of months ago from there uh just to see with my colleagues and see what research they're up to i'm going to do a short bioarchaeological project on a medieval cemetery uh they're looking more into some of how these Christian rites change.

Speaker 18 Some of those rites of retrieval of bodies and stuff like that seem to continue in the Christian era in their own form. So I'm going to look more at that.

Speaker 18 And then we're going to start forming our project with some of the museum specialists and looking at the indigenous archaeologists in the area and this big inventory of, you know, you go to monasteries, you see Ayakaba pottery, you see Buddhist coins, things like that, getting a full idea of exploring that to look at some of these early material heritage traditions in Ethiopia.

Speaker 21 Teal, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 18 Thank you so much for having me, Tristan, and thank you so much for your interest. We always get very excited about people's interest in Oksum.

Speaker 18 It's a big part in the culture today to be able to celebrate heritage, to celebrate Oksuma heritage, and people see that inheritance of that down.

Speaker 18 So when we see people excited about it, it's very much so that they seem to be engaging in the culture, engaging in the same celebrations of heritage that people prize.

Speaker 18 So we feel very connected to that. That's very, yeah, it's a very exciting thing to see in people.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was the archaeologist Dil Singh Basanti giving you a wonderful introduction, an all-rounded introduction to the kingdom of Aksum.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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Speaker 1 Now that's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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