Axum

*Includes pictures
*Includes ancient accounts of Axum
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
*Includes a table of contents

"The Tigreans had Axum, but what could that mean to the Gurague? The Agew had Lalibela, but what could that mean to the Oromo? The Gonderes had castles, but what could that mean to the Wolaitai?" - Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, in response to a question about Ethiopian unity

In the year 570 CE, a child by the name of Muhammad is born in the Arabian city of Mecca. Sixty-two years later, he dies, and upon his death, the faith that he founded, Islam (“obedience to the one God”), dominates the western half of the Arabian Peninsula. By the end of the first millennium CE, four centuries after the death of Muhammad, Islam has grown to dominate western Asia, north and east Africa, the Levant, and the Iberian Peninsula.

The Holy Lands are lost to Christianity, and Christian Europe is under siege. Folk tales begin to circulate — their origins obscure, but first noted in historic texts around the 12th century CE — of a lost Christian kingdom in the East, the Kingdom of Prester John. There resides the patriarch of Saint Thomas, who proselytized in the Orient. Later, in the 15th century, under the impetus of the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator, Portuguese missionaries and navigators enter the Indian Ocean from the south and, creeping northward up the east coast of Africa, hear ever more substantial tales of a Christian kingdom lost in the belly of Islam. As they enter upon the coast of Somalia, competing in a growing trade in slaves and gold with Arabs of the peninsula, they become increasingly interested in the source of this legend, in part to fulfil the centuries-long dream of discovering the Kingdom of Prester John, but also in part to secure the alliance of a Christian power against the force of Islam.
In 1515, a Portuguese missionary explorer by the name of Father Francisco Álvares enters Ethiopia and takes note in the interior of the remnants of a civilization of obviously Christian origin, with living adherents conforming to a branch of the faith clearly founded in deepest antiquity. Could this be the Kingdom of Prester John? Father Álvares is intrigued, but wary of too fanciful a construction, and he speculates more practically on the legend of King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and other such muses. The city at the center of the civilization he calls Aquasumo.

Thus the existence of the Kingdom of Aksum came to the notice of Christian Europe after almost a millennium of isolation. The Portuguese had their own motivations for reaching and taking note of African antiquity, but as has often been true of the Portuguese relationship with Africa, their earliest explorations tended to be eclipsed by the work of later European explorers representing the wealthier nations of Europe.

Axum: The History and Legacy of the Kingdom of Aksum’s Capital and One of the Oldest Continuously Inhabited Cities