Destinations: City of Obelisks

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The northern Ethiopian town of Axum has to be the world’s only tourist destination where the most famous attraction is something nobody is allowed to see.

According to local tradition, Axum is the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, the gilded wooden chest containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians believe the Ark was brought to Ethiopia 3,000 years ago by Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It now resides, say the faithful, within the walls of Axum’s St. Mary of Zion chapel, off limits to all but a solitary priest who serves as the Ark’s custodian.

Like countless other visitors to Axum, I got no closer to the Ark than the wrought-iron fence surrounding the chapel’s squat, mausoleum-like exterior. Had I tried, I was told, I would have burst into flames.

Axum’s fertile agricultural land attracted early settlers to the region in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E., including Nubians from southern Egypt and northern Sudan and Arabs from Saba (now modern Yemen). From the first century B.C.E. until the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E., Axum was the bustling capital of a wealthy trading empire that stretched from the Nile Valley to southern Arabia. The third-century C.E. Persian writer Mani ranked Axum with Rome, Persia and China as one of the four great kingdoms of the world.

The largest known palace of the Axumite Kingdom, called Ta’akha Maryam, dates to the fourth or fifth century C.E. Most of what is known about the palace comes from the field notes of German archaeologist Enno Littman, who led the 1906 Deutsche Aksum-Expedition. “Legend has it,” Littman observed, “that there was once a shrine to the Virgin Mary on this site.” In ancient times, the Ta’akha Maryam palace included a 100,000-square-foot building complex with high, crenelated walls, towers and courtyards.

Notwithstanding Ta’akha Maryam’s size, Littman had a hard time finding it. Like other residents of ancient cities gone to seed, Axum’s inhabitants regarded ruined structures as sources of free building material. When they saw Littman and his crew poking around, they camouflaged the palace complex with straw and sticks.

Today, local guides are happy to show visitors around the site for about $10. But they are notorious tellers of tall tales. For example, there’s the oft-repeated connection between Axum and the Queen of Sheba: Guides will point out the Queen of Sheba’s bath (an algae-covered pool in the center of town), as well as the ruins of her palace. According to the Kebra Negast (Glory of the Kings), Ethiopia’s colorful—but largely fictional—medieval history of its rulers, a queen named Makeda once ruled an ancient Axumite territory called Aseba (Saba, or Sheba). Until recently, Ethiopia’s monarchs traditionally claimed direct descent from Solomon via Menelik (the same Menelik who brought the Ark to Axum). In 1974 Haile Selassie, the 237th and last Solomonic ruler of Ethiopia, was unceremoniously whisked away from his palace in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle during Ethiopia’s socialist revolution.

Nonetheless, there is evidence of ties between the south Arabian Sabaean Kingdom (in modern Yemen),^a which does have a claim as the land of the Queen of Sheba, and the Axumite Kingdom. Some inscriptions and artwork found in Axum reveal a south Arabian influence, while the names of several Axumite rulers have been found inscribed on ruins at the ancient Sabaean capital of Marib.

Ancient Axum had the good fortune to be located in the right place (Africa’s Red Sea coast) at the right time (the Roman and Byzantine periods). Axum’s merchants controlled the flow of luxury goods—gold, emeralds, obsidian, frankincense, myrrh, ebony, ivory, tortoise shells, rhinoceros horns, ostrich feathers and 061cassia bark (a kind of cinnamon)—between India, Africa, Arabia and the Mediterranean. The ancient Axumites traded their exotica for such basic Mediterranean commodities as wine, olive oil, glass, iron and linen.

Axum’s lower classes, on the other hand, made pottery, beer and tej, a mead-like drink made from honey and a local bush known as gesho. Tej, still popular throughout Ethiopia, is served in saloons called tej beats. It has the cloudy color of apple cider and tastes like wine a few days shy of vinegar. Like salsa, the drink comes in three degrees of potency: mild (laslasa), medium (mahakalenya) and extra-spicy (derek). I tried the first two but refused the third, afraid that I might develop a taste for the stuff.

The most impressive remains of Axumite culture are the city’s monumental stelae. The 17th-century Portuguese missionary Manoel de Almeida expressed alarm at the “presumptuous grandeur” of the site: “What is most worth seeing here,” he wrote 062in a letter to his Jesuit monastery, “are many tall stones like obelisks, needles and pyramids.” Erected in the third and fourth centuries C.E., some of the stelae once rose more than 100 feet into the air. (According to local tradition, they were raised through the power of the Ark of the Covenant.) These often well-preserved monuments are intricately decorated with relief carvings, mainly showing such architectural elements as doors (complete with knockers), windows and rounded crossbeams. Originally the stelae had gilded bronze plaques affixed to their rounded tops, which would have reflected the blazing African sun like lighthouse beacons—but all of these plaques have been looted. Whoever scaled the obelisks to steal these bronze treasures must have stoked their courage with the third, extra-spicy flask of tej.

Most scholars believe the stelae are funerary monuments honoring ancient Axum’s kings, with each monarch making his stela bigger than his predecessors’. By the early fourth century C.E., Axum’s tallest obelisk—taller than any in Egypt—soared nearly 110 feet above the ground.

But not for long. This towering monument either toppled soon after it was erected or crashed to earth before it was ever brought upright. It now lies where it fell more than 1,500 years ago, broken in fragments resembling an abandoned pile of gigantic children’s blocks.

One 80-foot-tall stela is no longer in Axum but in Rome, courtesy of Benito Mussolini. The Italian dictator had the monument shipped to Italy during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1937. A decade later, under the terms of a United Nations peace treaty, the Italians agreed to return all African loot.

Despite repeated demands from the Ethiopian government, the stela still stands in Rome’s Piazza di Porta Capena. For many years the Italian government had claimed that the obelisk is too large and fragile to be transported over land, and that only two aircraft—the American-built Lockheed and the Russian-built Anatov—are big enough to handle the job. Unfortunately, the airstrip at Axum cannot accommodate either plane.

The Italians also argued that it was risky to return the obelisk to a “war zone” and that it was safer where it was—a point of view that was literally blasted by a lightning strike last spring in Rome that seriously damaged the obelisk.^b Recently the Italian government seems to have undergone a change of heart; attempts are underway to dismantle the steel bars that had been installed in the obelisk’s interior. Once the fragile obelisk is divided into more manageable sections, shipment to Ethiopia will presumably follow.

Another monument, the King Ezana stela, is still standing in Axum. This obelisk is named for a fourth-century C.E. ruler who converted to Christianity, making Ethiopia the first African nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion.

According to a story related by the early church historian Rufinus (345–411 C.E.), Christianity arrived on Ethiopia’s shores by accident. When a Roman ship called at an Axumite port for supplies, its cargo was seized and its crew and passengers were slaughtered—all, that is, except for two young Christians, Frumentius and Aedesius. The captives were taken to the palace at Axum, where Frumentius so impressed the court with his knowledge that he was put in charge of the young prince Ezana’s education. Schooled by Frumentius in the Gospels, Ezana, on becoming king, declared Christianity to be Axum’s state religion.

In later years, Frumentius traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, to report the conversion of the Axumite Kingdom to the elders of the Coptic church, a branch of early Christianity. Frumentius was sent back to Axum as its new bishop, with the understanding that the Ethiopian church would be subject to Alexandrian authority—an arrangement that endured until the mid-20th century.

How and when Jews entered into Ethiopian history is both intriguing and uncertain. According to 063tradition, Ethiopia’s Jews are descended from the Israelites who accompanied Menelik from Solomon’s court 3,000 years ago. Others have suggested that Jews fled to Axum (taking the Ark of the Covenant with them for safekeeping) to escape the Babylonians, who conquered Jerusalem in the early sixth century B.C.E. Most historians, however, believe that the Axumite Jews migrated from Yemen much later, perhaps in the late first century C.E.

As the Axumite Kingdom became increasingly Christian, the Jewish population retreated to Ethiopia’s northern highlands. They were prohibited from owning land and lived in distressing poverty for centuries. Because the Ethiopian government would not permit large-scale emigration, the Israeli government staged two operations to move the Jewish population to Israel. In 1984, 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were flown to Israel from the Sudan, which they had reached on foot. Seven years later, during the Ethiopian civil war, over 14,000 Jews were airlifted from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to Israel just as the city was about to fall. Today only a small population of Jews remains in Ethiopia.

In the centuries following the spread of Christianity to the Axumite empire, climatic changes in the region began to cause economic upheaval. Severe droughts left farmers with little to harvest but dust. Then, in the seventh century C.E., Arab domination of the Red Sea shipping lanes effectively put Axumite traders out of business—bringing an end to the ancient kingdom.

Visitors can still glimpse vestiges of old Axumite glory. The town’s National Museum, inside the St. Mary of Zion church complex, has an extraordinary collection (albeit displayed in dimly-lit, jumbled vitrines): beautifully carved granite lions’ heads purportedly from the Queen of Sheba’s palace, delicately inlaid jewelry, fluted glass stemware, and dozens of Axumite coins.

Even today, camel caravans lumber past Axum’s ancient obelisks. Donkeys bearing bloated, sweating waterskins trot through the dusty streets, urged along by chattering children with reed switches. On several holy days each year, the cloth-covered “Ark of the Covenant” is paraded through town by a troupe of chanting priests. Holding silk umbrellas (symbols of heaven), swinging incense burners, beating drums and clapping sistras (cymbal-like instruments), these modern priests recall the ancient Israelites described in the Bible: “And they … went before the ark. And David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals” (2 Kings 6:4–5).