"Focuses on the Aksumite state of the first millennium AD in northern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea, its development, florescence and eventual transformation into the so-called medieval civilisation of Christian Ethiopia. This book seeks to apply a common methodology, utilising archaeology, art-history, written documents and oral tradition from a wide variety of sources; the result is a far greater emphasis on continuity than previous studies have revealed. It is thus a major re-interpretation of a key development in Ethiopia's past, while raising and discussing methodological issues of the relationship between archaeology and other historical disciplines; these issues, which have theoretical significance extending far beyond Ethiopia, are discussed in full. The last millennium BC is seen as a time when northern Ethiopia and parts of Eritrea were inhabited by farming peoples whose ancestry may be traced far back into the local 'Late Stone Age'. Colonisation from southern Arabia, to which defining importance has been attached by earlier researchers, is now seen to have been brief in duration and small in scale, its effects largely restricted to ľite sections of the community. Re-consideration of inscriptions shows the need to abandon the established belief in a single 'Pre-Aksumite' state. New evidence for the rise of Aksum during the last centuries BC is critically evaluated. Finally, new chronological precision is provided for the decline of Aksum and the transfer of centralised political authority to more southerly regions. A new study of the ancient churches - both built and rock-hewn - which survive from this poorly-understood period emphasises once again a strong degree of continuity across periods that were previously regarded as distinct."--Publisher's website.

During the first seven centuries AD there arose at Aksum in the highlands of northern Ethiopia a unique African culture. Although its monuments have long been known, their full significance is only now being revealed. Ancient Aksum maintained wide-ranging international trade and produced an unparalleled coinage in gold, silver and copper. Its kings adopted Christianity in the fourth century AD and the Christian civilization of the Ethiopian highlands traces its origin to Aksumite roots. This book, based on the author's field research, presents an illustrated account of Aksumite civilization in its African and wider context.

Aksum and Nubia assembles and analyzes the textual and archaeological evidence of interaction between Nubia and the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, focusing primarily on the fourth century CE. Although ancient Nubia and Ethiopia have been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years, little attention has been given to contact between these two regions. Hatke argues that ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified area politically, economically, or culturally. Rather, Nubia and Ethiopia developed within very different regional spheres of interaction, as a result of which the Nubian kingdom of Kush came to focus its energies on the Nile Valley, relying on this as its main route of contact with the outside world, while Aksum was oriented towards the Red Sea and Arabia. In this way Aksum and Kush coexisted in peace for most of their history, and such contact as they maintained with each other was limited to small-scale commerce. Only in the fourth century CE did Aksum take up arms against Kush, and even then the conflict seems to have been related mainly to security issues on Aksum’s western frontier. Although Aksum never managed to hold onto Kush for long, much less dealt the final death-blow to the Nubian kingdom, as is often believed, claims to Kush continued to play a role in Aksumite royal ideology as late as the sixth century. Aksum and Nubia critically examines the extent to which relations between two ancient African states were influenced by warfare, commerce, and political fictions.

A convenient, portable paperback derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages.

This work is an abridged version of the book CHANGING SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN THE AKSUM-YEHA REGION OF ETHIOPIA: 700 BCAD 850 written by the author and published in 2005 in the Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology Series by British Archaeological Reports (BAR) of Oxford, United Kingdom. Most of the books methodological and technical sections have been removed in order for the reader to more easily focus on the main theme of the work, namely how the study of the settlement history of a single region can reveal the ways in which a society adapts to changing conditions over the course of a thousand years. From a scatter of simple hamlets and villages, Ancient Aksum evolved into a formidable mercantile state that, for a time, controlled much of the trade at the southern end of the Red Sea. Then, as circumstances changed, Aksum went into decline, its urban center contracting then disappearing. The historical trajectory of Aksum as discussed in this work offers a textbook example of political change: from egalitarian hamlets, the Aksumites organized themselves into an increasingly prominent local chiefdom, then into a kingdom, and eventually into a state.

This Englishversion of the author's PhD dissertation, revised and updated in the light ofthe latest research and interpretation, aims to reconstruct thesettlement pattern of the area of Aksum between the early 1stmillennium BCE and the late 1st millennium CE. It describes thefield strategies employed during surveys conducted at Aksum in 2005 and 2006and the procedures that were adopted for the interpretation and chronologicalclassification of the surface archaeological records. It also provides anupdated assessment of the archaeological area of Aksum, including an overviewof the taphonomic processes affecting the preservation of archaeological sites,and presents the results of the statistical and spatial analysis undertaken forthe reconstruction of the ancient settlement pattern and for the investigationof the ancient dynamics of human-environmental interactions in the area.