Aksum and the conversion of King Ezana

In the first centuries CE, a powerful kingdom grew up in the highlands of what is now Tigray and Eritrea, centred on the city of Aksum. Its port at Adulis on the Red Sea linked the African interior to Egypt, Arabia, Persia and India. Aksum exported ivory, gold, incense and other goods, and by the late third century it was minting its own coins in gold, silver and bronze, one of very few ancient states to do so. A third-century Persian writer, Mani, reportedly listed it among the four great kingdoms of the world, alongside Rome, Persia and China.^•

Aksum’s rulers left a dramatic monument: giant stone stelae, carved to look like multi-storey buildings with false doors and windows. The tallest, now fallen, was about 33 metres long, perhaps the largest single stone that ancient people ever tried to raise. Most stood over elite tombs. The field of stelae is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.^•

A king turns to the cross

The story of the conversion comes from the Roman church historian Rufinus. Two Syrian Christian boys, Frumentius and Aedesius, survived a shipwreck on the Red Sea coast and were taken to the Aksumite court, where Frumentius became a tutor to the young prince Ezana. Later Frumentius travelled to Alexandria and asked its patriarch, Athanasius, to send a bishop to Aksum; Athanasius consecrated Frumentius himself. Ethiopians call him Abba Selama, “father of peace”, the first abuna of their church.^•

The archaeological record confirms the shift. Ezana’s early coins carry the pagan crescent and disc; later ones carry the cross, making them among the earliest coins anywhere to bear it. His early inscriptions thank the god Mahrem; a later one, in Ge’ez and Greek, thanks “the Lord of Heaven” and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Historians date the change to the 330s or 340s, within a generation of the Roman emperor Constantine’s own conversion.^•

A church apart

At first, Christianity was the faith of the court. It spread more widely from the late fifth century, when monks known as the Nine Saints, traditionally from the Roman and Syrian world, founded monasteries and translated scripture into Ge’ez. The Ethiopian church followed Alexandria in rejecting the Council of Chalcedon of 451, and so it belongs to the family of Oriental Orthodox churches, with the Copts, Armenians and Syriac Orthodox. Its official name, Tewahedo, means “made one”, a reference to its teaching on the single united nature of Christ. For sixteen centuries, until 1959, its head bishop was an Egyptian monk sent from Alexandria.^•

The church kept customs that surprise visitors: male circumcision, observance of the Saturday Sabbath alongside Sunday, Old Testament dietary rules, and the tabot, a consecrated tablet representing the Ark of the Covenant, without which no church is holy. Some scholars see in these Jewish-influenced traditions very early contacts with southern Arabia and the Jewish world; others see them as later developments. Either way, they gave Ethiopian Christianity a character all its own.^•

Decline and legacy

From the seventh century Aksum declined. The rise of Islam changed Red Sea trade, the port of Adulis faded, and the kingdom’s centre moved south into the highlands. But the idea of Aksum, a Christian African kingdom equal to Rome, never faded. Emperors were still crowned there for centuries, and Ethiopians still speak of Aksum the way Europeans speak of Rome or Athens.^•

In 1937 Mussolini’s regime shipped one of the great stelae to Rome as a trophy. After decades of Ethiopian campaigning it was returned in 2005 and re-erected in 2008, a moment of real national joy.^•

Why it matters today