The Age of Monks and Empires · 451-615 · Ethiopia / Eritrea
Aksumite Christianity
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About This Movement
Aksum had been Christian since the fourth century, and in the period after Chalcedon it was a serious Red Sea power with its own coinage, its own script, and its Bible being translated into Ge'ez. Tradition credits the spread of monasticism and much of that translation work to the Nine Saints, monks said to have come from the Roman east around the turn of the sixth century. In 523 the Jewish king of Himyar, across the water in Yemen, massacred the Christians of Najran. The Aksumite king Kaleb crossed the Red Sea in about 525, destroyed his kingdom, and for a few decades Aksum ruled southern Arabia. Its church stayed in communion with Alexandria and shared its refusal of Chalcedon. Evidence from inside this particular window is thin — inscriptions, a few very early gospel books, archaeology. But the kingdom was still substantial enough in 615 that Muhammad sent his first followers to its king for protection.
Sources
- Ezana inscriptions and Aksumite royal epigraphy (RIE; trans. in Munro-Hay, Aksum, and elsewhere) (primary) — The kingdom's own words - Ezana's shift to Christian formulae, later Kaleb-era texts; scattered scholarly editions (Recueil des inscriptions de l'Ethiopie), no single accessible English corpus.
- The Garima Gospels (Abba Garima Ge'ez gospel manuscripts) (primary) — Radiocarbon-dated c.5th-7th c. - the earliest Ethiopic gospel books and witnesses to the Ge'ez Bible translation itself; studied and illustrated in McKenzie & Watson, The Garima Gospels (2016).
- Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography, esp. bk 2 (trans. J. W. McCrindle, 1897) (primary) — Outside eyewitness who copied the Monumentum Adulitanum at Adulis c.520s and describes Aksumite trade-world Christianity; old English translation online.
- Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (1991) (secondary) — Standard synthesis of Aksumite history and archaeology incl. Christianization; full text has circulated free online.
- David W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn (2012) (secondary) — The current archaeological synthesis, updating Munro-Hay; this window's evidence rests mainly on inscriptions, manuscripts and archaeology; James Currey, in print.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 4, 'Early Asian and East African Christianities' (David Bundy) (reference) — Reference chapter covering Ethiopia among the non-Roman Christianities.