Aksumite Christianity (conversion era)

The kingdom of Aksum, straddling what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, was a Red Sea trading power with its own script and its own coinage when Christianity arrived by an almost accidental route. A young man from Tyre named Frumentius, shipwrecked and taken into the royal household, rose to be tutor and adviser, then travelled to Alexandria to ask Athanasius for a bishop. And was consecrated for the job himself, around 330. King Ezana's conversion followed, and it is legible in the most concrete way imaginable. His coins stop carrying the disc and crescent of the old religion and start carrying the cross, one of the earliest such declarations by any state anywhere. The faith took root in Ge'ez, the kingdom's own language, in which Scripture and liturgy were eventually rendered, and Frumentius's consecration bound the Ethiopian church to the Egyptian one for the next sixteen centuries. What survives from these years is mostly inscriptions, coinage, and later chronicles rather than the everyday voices of ordinary believers.