The Kingdom of Aksum

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It's the 4th century AD.

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.

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.

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

The boat is filled to the brim with Aksumite goods to sell.

ivory, tortoiseshell, rhino horn and gold.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

It's infectious.

I really do hope you enjoy.

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

Thank you so much, Tristan.

I really appreciate you having me.

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.

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 and a couple of other cities themselves.

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.

So we're really getting a horizontal and vertical spread across the Aksumai region.

We've got a big period of time to cover.

And you mentioned there in passing the capital.

So

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I've worked in Amhara in the more like central, central north state, where you'll have oral traditions of things that different Oksumite 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 those northeast regions of Ethiopia going into Eritrea.

But Dylan, 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.

Yeah, it definitely is.

It's strategic and it's in a good location for a few different reasons.

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

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 Eridona was

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.

You know, we have shipwrecks carrying ayahaba, amphora coming from Jordan in the Red Sea.

We find Ayah Akabal all over the place.

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

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.

We have a monastery that literally has a cachet of Buddhist coins from the Kushana empires in Pakistan, Punjab, Afghanistan, like there.

And, you know, so you have these economic interests.

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

So because

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

We have economic works dealing with the trade.

That's usually what foreign records are referring to.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 and so forth, but they're like a little smaller through these miniature versions.

So we have coinage, which is another big study.

And then we have the more traditional historical and archaeological methods.

So excavations.

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.

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

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 Tigray and with Aksum and Aksumite cultures.

Well, let's explore one of those horizons that it seems, what you hinted at earlier, is being expanded currently, which surrounds the origins.

of the kingdom of Aksum.

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

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

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

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.

So Al-Muqab, the god of the moon, was the biggest of those.

And then there was another site, Wokro area, as well, that was uncovered.

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.

So the earliest big things we had were South Arabian, right?

But since the archaeological work has accumulated, we have cultural horizons stretching back.

There was a wave of sites popping up from around the 900 BC to 1200 BC range with Maiodrasha excavated by UCLA, Seglamen by University of Napoli Laurentale.

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

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.

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.

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

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 the Semitic influences that would come there, mixing with things that were very local.

The earliest place we find the Sidla tradition is actually near Kassala.

in Sudan.

And that's in the second millennium, early second millennium BC or so.

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.

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 Tequeza River Valley, which is one of the feeding rivers into the Blake Tana and then the Blue Nile.

And so there's probably like agro-pastoralist groups that are interacting with settled communities.

communities and within this big sphere of interaction you start having complex polities emerge so axum emerges and of course we call it the kingdom of axum which i'm guessing kind of gives the game away uh dil do we know much about the whole social and political structure of the kingdom of axum yeah so we do know they had a king uh who's called a nagus surprise right yeah yeah and that's mentioned in the paraplus and that's uh we see that in the inscriptions and and so forth.

The different neguses, the most famous being King Gazana, erected restrictions to his many military victories over surrounding groups going up to Meraway,

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.

But it's also incomplete.

So like some of the kings we know about, because they're, 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 Aksum before.

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.

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

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.

Now that is for the Aksumite period.

Going before that, we don't really know.

There's a lot of more legendary traditions and or traditions that relate to kings.

But at least from the Axumai period, we do start seeing a kings list and we do start seeing all these references.

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.

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 known about it.

The other one, a more likely one, is a place called Kohaido.

These are both in southern Eritrea.

So Kaheido seems to be another urban center.

And in the Periplus, that's mentioned as the first place where you can get ivory, which was the primary export of the oxamites.

So Kawaido is a big one.

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

But 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.

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.

So my career up at John Hopkins has been doing some of the most instrumental work in looking at settlement patterns.

And what we actually find is from 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.

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

When we get to the Oxumai 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.

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.

So you start having these like urban clusters.

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 Kuhaido and then Adulis.

But we have all these other sites too that just sort of, Matthew Curtis, when we were working out and shitting, 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.

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.

Could we imagine potentially

the G word, could they potentially be these kind of guilds or something like that?

They totally could be.

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 brotherhoods.

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

The archaeological core that we can definitely say is that Alabama do seem specialized even for either for hide working or other types of manufacture and so forth.

They do seem to be their own industrial units.

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.

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

If you were an Axemide trader and you had a ship and you were going from somewhere like Adulis, or let's say from Adoulis, how far and wide were the Axumite 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 Periplus, which mentions a lot of the ports, but there was another hitchhiker.

in the sixth, seventh centuries, Cosmos and Dicoplaestes.

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 ports of Aksum were actually in Sri Lanka.

And he seems to mention Oxumite ships themselves.

And we do find Oxumite artifacts, coinage and pottery popping up in Gujarat, popping up in Tamil Nadu and 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, right?

So we do find artifacts that are corroborating that.

to some degree.

We don't know if Indigoplasius himself went down to Sri Lanka himself, but he certainly talks about Oxumite boats.

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

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

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.

So Ayakaba, like I said, it's actually a Romanymphora made in Aqaba, Jordan.

That's probably the second most common potty type we see in Oxen itself after the local red wares.

But we also find in one of the main sites that next we have Yeta Georges, they have before that late Roman III emphora and the Gaules type.

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.

So there's a big injection coming from this Mediterranean and Red Sea trade.

And that's probably mostly where they're operating.

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

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

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.

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

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 Wolber Schmidt, when you trace out his route, he seems to have made it to Aksum and then exited through the port of the Doulas.

So we're talking about like where are people interacting completely?

You know,

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

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

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 caravan that he's talking about is going through the desert and parting away the sands.

So those are the places that are seemed to be interacting with Aksum.

And it's not just that we're talking about direct trade links.

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

While Lisa Yakuba 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.

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.

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

there's

there's 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.

So all these sort of categories.

of like foreignness are being built along these trades and we see it in Aksum as well.

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

in previous conversations.

And also the fact that you highlighted their Aksumite ships.

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

can make the kings, the rulers of Axum, incredibly, you know, mighty and powerful because of all the trade going through.

Alongside, you know, 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?

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 Rakta, which may match up with Somalia.

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.

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.

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.

Going from the kind of known to the unknown we have, a lot of the excavations have occurred from Oxumite East going up to the Red Sea trade.

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.

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.

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.

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

One last thing on the trading contacts.

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

They seem to be mostly exporting wall materials, tortoise shell, rhino horn, things like that.

Ivory is above and beyond their major one.

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

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

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.

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.

One of the Byzantine ambassadors to the region records in the area of Yeha about 5,000 oaklands that he's probably guessing.

We believe the Oxumites likely hunted elephants to extinction in the area.

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.

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 paraplis.

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.

The ivory is actually very interesting because in oxymate material culture, we see a lot of animal symbology, such as like wallia ibexes and then snakes are one of the biggest ones and there's a lot of old traditions and legends about snakes but we never really see an elephant 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.

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

So those are some of the main things that we're seeing.

The biggest import, at least in terms of the artifacts we find, is probably wine.

There's probably other elements of trade coming in with like black pepper and so forth.

Aksum appears to have its own vineyards at a later time.

They're also importing a good amount of steel.

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

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I've also got in my notes something called the Afar Salt Trail.

Can you explain what that is?

Yeah, so Afar is interesting.

So that's a really cool region in the eastern part of Ethiopia.

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.

Okay, no, thank you.

No, thank you.

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 full, it is exactly what you want them to be in, like imagination.

Yeah, there's salt formations and everything.

So people don't really live there, live there.

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 barter today.

We had always believed that oxum was somehow involved there.

And we find obsidian and other oxamite sites, which Afar is a great obsidian source.

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

So there was more recent research by Helena Walakiris on that area and she did find oxamite sites and she did trace back a caravan type trade going into the area.

So most of her sites date to late oximite into medieval times, but she was finding earlier oxamite material in there as well so it seems to be the verification that we had that they were in that area likely also mining salt at least participating some sort of caravan commerce yes you mentioned helena wodekiros there and uh yeah i saw her research on this and thought actually that's fascinating so i must ask it and thank you very much for mentioning her name because she's been leading that research hasn't she 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.

But she basically formed their own caravan.

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 ox mite 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 arguably the most well-known symbolic monuments that have survived from the kingdom of Aksum, which are, of course, these steli.

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?

Yeah, so the stela themselves are burial markers.

And that's a tradition going back with agro-past studies, as it mentioned out in Sudan.

So it seems to originate there.

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.

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.

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 stila.

I think the one in Karnak is bigger, but this is one they they actually tried to get it up and the base war is only about two meters.

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 Nephal's Maucha.

So it only collapsed in ancient times.

And so these stela, they're carved from the volcanic stone.

It's a Nephiline 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.

So they start erecting these stela in monumental forms.

But there's hundreds of stila all across Aksum.

And that cemetery itself, there's at least like 75, 76.

It's located at the bottom of a hill.

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're used as beds for some of the skeletons.

Stela buried in the tombs themselves yeah so actually if you walk around that area in the right time of year with the right hydrology you can see buried stela and there's one in particular i'm thinking of that marks the entrance to a tomb that you can see there and it 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 and some of them seem to have wound up as beds inside some of the the tombs in the area and so there there's tons of these stila 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 oxumite 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 they make something that looks like a house or they have lines and dots that look like the monkey heads as well.

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

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

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.

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

They're imbued with a sense of power.

They're radiating something or they have this sort of meaning to them.

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

That is the worst place for a cemetery in all of Aksum.

because all the runoff going down those hills that that helps fill up that water source is going into those tombs.

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.

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

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

And there is just, it's like a curtain of light that just comes down the steel in the morning, which people like see this all the time.

We're not sure if 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?

Except for the stila and beado Georgie's hill behind it.

So they're kind of like illuminated.

And that seems to be the time that they switched to this Nephilim material coming from Gilbertera.

in the in the lifetime of the stila field 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 well if there's a air-man 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 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 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 that curtain of light coming down them absolutely i can see on a couple of images that like uh online just that kind of the sunlight on those steel and how they really just this just stand out 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 it feels like they've accidentally also kind of designed the ancient axomite concept of what a skyscraper looks like today they're they're striking yeah yeah no that's totally right yeah that's a trip i didn't think about it that way are those steely then i mean do they endure for several centuries and is it very much a status symbol so only the richest inaximite society and the royalty would be able to have a stelae erected when they die yeah so i actually i actually answered your question quite poorly on that earlier so traditionally that has been what's interpreted with the stela And it's because of just how we think who has the money to make these giant stela, which seems to be quite an undertaking.

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.

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.

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

At the same time, oral tradition is a lot more, people usually mark date with people.

There's an aspect of that going on.

But this convenience alliance between our ideas on monument construction and some of the old tradition has created that impression.

And the stela in other areas are markers for individual graves.

In the stila park, they are not any longer.

The biggest stila does mark two tombs.

That seems to be one of them.

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 because the cross section looks like a house and in addition the the real kicker is that the 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.

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

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

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

in this area.

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

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

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 Axum, everyday people outside of these Stila fields?

We do a bit.

So there has been one other Stila field that has been excavated called the Gouda Stila Field.

And that we usually take that more in reference of things we see in the stela park and the stela park is part of a larger stela field called the northern stela field 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 so it's hard to tell what is the commonest grave other than you have simpler grave grids which the Gudet Stela field does, but there is some fluidity because at least one of the stelae there is bigger than maybe some of the royal stela and the stela park this is where i say there's a lot more variability going on 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 now when we were excavating steelfield it may be that so these people were definitely rich whoever's buried there 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.

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

In addition, the people that were buried in the tomb that we have best excavated called Tomb of the Brick Arches, which is one of the larger tombs and it's usually thought to be a middle-class tomb, one of the things we see from the bones is we can tell they were working outside.

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.

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 this is still more at the level of speculation 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 it's more of a community feel 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 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.

The new thing that we have in Oxum that we don't have in sites before, such as seglamen and so forth, is that we start finding cup marks on the bone.

So they're taking the bodies out sooner.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Yeah, so the Axum Bones Project, that was part of my dissertation there, 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 Aksum, as well as the site of Segla Men, the place where you have

basically the oldest Stila cemetery in the area that's excavated by the University of Napilo in Tale.

uh Luis

Nicola and Andrea Monzo.

And then another medieval site called Mrs.

Body, which is actually one of of the best bioarchaeological samples we have in all of Africa that looks like it was a late Oksumite 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 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.

But that's not what happens at Aksum 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.

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, these stila all suddenly become monuments inside, suddenly become very ritualized, become more like community-ish-based to some degree.

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

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 more than anything archaic.

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 depth rights changed at time.

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Dylan, 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.

I don't think we're going to have enough time to cover all of those.

So maybe another chat in the future.

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

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?

We know a little bit.

So we know that there is a South Arabian pantheon in the area.

Al-Mukah is the most important of the deities that they talk about.

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

And Ishtar, that's normally linked with Babylon as well.

So that's going very far away.

Right.

Yeah, it's linked to Babylon.

And then at times, it also has an aspect of like Venus in there as well.

So

we have this South Arabian panpeon, but Oxumites, 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.

So in Oxum itself, there's three gods that are mainly mentioned.

There's a star.

The primary god, however, is someone named Maharem, who may be a version of Al-Mukhal that was later adopted in a different way, but maybe its own thing.

And then the Greece sort of cognate is more related to Aries.

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.

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

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.

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 Muru and Habas.

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

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's what we have in the area.

Maharem is the principal god mentioned in the inscriptions.

The Aksumite king claimed to be a descendant or son of Maharem, at least until Christianity.

So King Azana, cutting ahead a little bit, but King Azana is the one that we see converts to Christianity.

So Christianity came from connections with the Red Sea trade, and there was probably already Christians in the area long before King Gazana 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 doulis.

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.

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.

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

And one of them is made a tutor for King Azana, Fermentius.

And King Azana, from that influence, converts to Christianity.

Fermentius becomes the first major patriarch in Ethiopia.

And that's how Christianity starts begin.

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.

And so, when King Azana makes inscriptions, he makes them in Ghiz, Greek, Sabian as well.

And the Greek inscriptions, he is very much talking about the Holy Trinity when he references his victories.

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

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

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 Oxum.

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 how we understand the coming of Christianity and so far how it's matching up with the archaeological correlates.

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.

So it is pretty early in the scheme of things.

And you mentioned there, Giyas as well.

Is that the religious Christian language of Ethiopia or of Aksum?

Yeah, so it was probably the primary language of Aksum.

So that we see a lot of inscriptions in Ghiz.

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 Guz 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.

And then today it remains as a language of the church.

So even today, people will speak in Guz or write in Guz within the church tradition as well.

So it's preserved.

within within the religion.

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

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

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.

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

Yeah.

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

So someplace place like Adulis was very, very cosmopolitan and very heavily involved in the trade.

But, you know, Aksum seems to be more of a regional African injection into the trade.

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 Oxum.

And thinking through how those mix together is one of the future research questions.

But it certainly is a cosmopolitan area,

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.

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

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.

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

Dale, very quickly, before we end, because

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, it probably has oral tradition components that go back earlier, maybe during the time of Oxum, 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.

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.

There's all this investigation looking into how it's earlier.

We already have these connections going on with the Middle East, not only I mentioned there.

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.

In addition, one of the biggest texts that 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.

It's from Egypt and is the text, 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.

It's someone pretending to be Solomon and and talking.

It's a big

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 tabo.

And a tabo 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.

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

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

So those are 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 that we see playing out during this time between Aksum and the region of Israel, Middle East.

And we do find Oxumite coinage in Palestine and Israel as well.

And in Palestine particularly, there's Doxumite knockoffs.

There's the Roman copies of Oxumite coins, but there's also Oxumite coins.

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 and so that's been taken to mean that we actually have visitors going between the two regions when we find those coins there wow well

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.

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

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 Dyl, this has been absolutely brilliant.

And

when are you next out in Axum?

What's the next big Axum project for you?

I will probably be going again next year in the winter time.

I just arrived a couple couple of months ago from there.

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.

They're looking more into some of how these Christian rites change.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's a big part.

in the culture today to be able to celebrate heritage, to celebrate Aksumai heritage, and people see that inheritance of that down.

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.

So we feel very connected to that.

That's very, yeah, it's a very exciting thing to see in people.

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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A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.