A third-century prophet ranked this African kingdom alongside Rome, Persia and China.
The Kingdom of Aksum, in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, controlled trade between Rome and India, minted its own gold coins and raised giant carved stone stelae. The prophet Mani counted it among the four great powers of his world. Yet it later fell into obscurity.
Aksum emerged in the first century AD in the highlands of the Horn of Africa, with its capital at the city of Axum. A Greek trading guide from around that time, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already mentions it, along with the Red Sea port of Adulis, as a source of ivory. Over the next centuries it grew rich on the trade route linking the Roman world with India, at times extending its power across the Red Sea into Yemen. By the late third century Mani, founder of Manichaeism, listed it with Rome, Persia and China as one of the world's four great kingdoms.
Its achievements were remarkable. Aksum was one of the first African states to issue its own coinage, in gold, silver and bronze, from around AD 270; its coins have turned up as far away as Caesarea and southern India. It developed the Ge'ez script, which was later adapted to include vowels. Its giant stone stelae, carved with false doors and windows to resemble multi-storey palaces, marked royal tombs; the largest would have stood about 33 metres had it not broken.
Under King Ezana in the fourth century, Aksum adopted Christianity as its state religion, and around 340 its coins switched from pre-Christian imagery to Christian symbols. After this, the great stelae stopped being built. In 615 the kingdom gave refuge to early Muslims fleeing persecution in Mecca, an event remembered in Islamic history as the First Hijrah. Its power peaked under King Kaleb in the sixth century, when it briefly ruled much of Yemen.
Decline set in by the seventh century. Persian and later Arab control of the Red Sea cut its trade, the Roman world it traded with had weakened, and environmental and internal pressures added to the strain. Coins stopped being minted, the capital shrank, and after a poorly documented final few centuries the kingdom collapsed around 960 under uncertain circumstances.
Source: Wikipedia — Kingdom of Aksum · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
