3860 AM · 100 CE · world history
The Kingdom of Aksum
On the Ethiopian highlands grows Aksum — a power trading through the Red Sea and minting its own coin.
Aksum lies on the highlands of present-day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, and its port of Adulis receives ships from Egypt, Arabia and India. Through it pass ivory, incense and gold, and the Aksumite kings are among the first outside the Mediterranean world to strike their own gold coinage, with Greek inscriptions. In the city they raise stelae of single blocks of stone, tens of metres high. By the fourth century Aksum subdues Meroe and for a time gains a foothold in southern Arabia.
§Sources
Documents of the period
- inscriptions and coinage of Aksum
Scholarship
- the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and studies of Aksum
Basis: documents and evidence.