The Kingdom of Aksum (, Sabaic:, ), also known as the Kingdom of Axum, the City-State of Axum, or the Aksumite Empire, was a kingdom in East Africa and South Arabia from Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. Based in what is now Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, and spanning present day Djibouti and Sudan, it extended at its height into much of Southern Arabia during the reign of Kaleb, King of Aksum.
Axum served as the kingdom's capital for many centuries but relocated to Jarma in the 9th century due to declining trade connections and recurring external invasions. Emerging from the earlier Dʿmt civilization, the kingdom was founded in 150BC.It is not known whether a war of succession took place between competing states for control of the region after the fall of D'mt evolved to the Kingdom of Axum.
As the kingdom became a major power on the trade route between Rome and India and gained a monopoly of Indian Ocean trade, it entered the Greco-Roman cultural sphere. Greek was the language of administration in Axum and was widely known by the third century AD. It was used in inscriptions, coinage, and trade. The Geʽez script came into use by the 4th century; by the 6th century translations into Ge'ez were common. Due to its ties with the Greco-Roman world, the Kingdom of Aksum adopted Christianity as the state religion in the mid-4th century, under Ezana of Axum. Following their Christianization, the Aksumites ceased construction of stelae.
The Kingdom of Aksum was considered one of the four great powers of the 3rd century by the Persian prophet Mani, alongside Persia, Rome, and China. During the reign of Endubis, Aksum began minting coins that have been excavated as far away as Caesarea and southern India. Axum continued to expand under the reign of Gedara, who was the first Axumite king to involve In South Arabian affairs at sometime around the early 3rd century, conquering Najran, the Tihama tribes and occupying the Himyarite capital, Zafar, until a joint Himyarite-Sabean alliance pushed them out. Yemeni-Ethiopian conflicts however will continue throughout the 3rd century.
The kingdom continued to expand throughout late antiquity, conquering Kush under King Ezana in 330 for a short period of time and inheriting from it the Greek exonym "Ethiopia". Aksumite dominance in the Red Sea culminated during the reign of Kaleb of Axum, who, at the behest of the Byzantine Emperor Justin I, invaded the Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen in order to end the persecution of Christians perpetrated by the Jewish king Dhu Nuwas. With the annexation of Himyar, the Kingdom of Aksum was at its largest territorial extent, being around 2,500,000km². However, the territory was lost in the Aksumite–Persian wars.
The kingdom's slow decline had begun by the 7th century, at which point currency ceased to be minted. The Persian (and later Muslim) presence in the Red Sea caused Aksum to suffer economically, and the population of the city of Axum shrank. Alongside environmental and internal factors, this has been suggested as the reason for its decline. Aksum's final three centuries are considered a dark age, and through uncertain circumstances, the kingdom collapsed around 960. Despite its position as one of the foremost empires of late antiquity, the Kingdom of Aksum fell into obscurity as Ethiopia remained isolated throughout the Late Middle Ages.
Etymology
According to some philologists the word “Aksum” derived from a combination of 2 different languages; the Agaw and Ge’ez languages. The word “Ak” (means Water in the Agaw language) and the word “Shum” (means chief/Lord in Ge’ez). However, Carlo Conti Rossini believed that the word Aksum is of Semitic root and means a green and dense garden, full of grass.
History
City-State of Axum
Before the establishment of Axum, the Tigray plateau of northern Ethiopia was home to a kingdom known as Dʿmt. Archaeological evidence shows that the kingdom was influenced by Sabaeans from modern-day Yemen; scholarly consensus had previously been that Sabaeans had been the founders of Semitic civilization in Ethiopia, though this has now been refuted, and their influence is considered to have been minor. The Sabaean presence likely lasted only for a matter of decades, but their influence on later Aksumite civilization included the adoption of Ancient South Arabian script, which developed into Geʽez script, and Ancient Semitic religion.