The Ancient Kingdom of Aksum: Obelisks, Emperors and the Ark of the Covenant

Aksum was once among the most powerful states on Earth. From roughly the first to the seventh centuries CE, the Aksumite Empire controlled the trade routes between the Roman Mediterranean, Arabia and India, commanding the Red Sea from its highland capital in what is now northern Ethiopia. It minted its own gold coins, built monolithic stone obelisks that remain among the largest ever erected by any civilisation, and was among the first states in the world to officially adopt Christianity — doing so in the fourth century, decades before Rome.

Today the town of Aksum is a modest city in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, its population of roughly 60,000 living among the ruins of an empire that most of the world knows little about. Yet the obelisks still stand, the ancient tombs lie beneath the red earth, and in the chapel of St Mary of Zion — the holiest church in Ethiopia — the Orthodox clergy maintain that the original Ark of the Covenant rests, kept from public view by a single guardian monk who never leaves. Whether the claim is literally true matters less than what it reveals: Aksum carries the Ethiopian conviction that this is the place where the world's deepest religious continuity resides.

An empire at the crossroads of trade

The Aksumite Empire grew wealthy because of where it sat. The highlands of northern Ethiopia command the western approaches to the Red Sea, and the port of Adulis — now buried near the Eritrean coast — gave Aksum direct access to the sea lanes connecting the Mediterranean world to Arabia, India and East Africa. Luxury goods moved in both directions: ivory, gold, incense and enslaved people outbound; cloth, wine, olive oil, glass and metalwork inbound.

The empire was cosmopolitan in a way that surprises travellers expecting something provincial. Aksumite coins, minted from gold, silver and bronze from at least the third century CE, are among the most sophisticated numismatic products of the ancient world — they bear the royal face and Greek inscriptions, later replaced by Ge'ez (the ancient Ethiopian script), and from the reign of King Ezana onwards carry the Christian cross. The coins circulated across the trading world; some have been found as far away as India. They are a reminder that Aksum was not a regional power but a global one.

The obelisks of Aksum

The most visible legacy of the Aksumite Empire is its stelae — tall, carved monolithic obelisks of granite, quarried from a site several kilometres from the city and erected in a large field now known as the Northern Stelae Park. The largest still standing is about 24 metres tall and weighs hundreds of tonnes; it is the largest such monolith in the world still upright. The great fallen stele, now broken in several pieces on the ground, would have been around 33 metres — the largest ever erected, toppled presumably in antiquity.

The stelae are carved to represent multi-storey buildings — false doors, windows and beams rendered in stone — and stand over subterranean royal tombs. The Tomb of the False Door and the Tomb of Kaleb and Gebre Meskel are accessible to visitors, their carved granite chamber walls still largely intact. The engineering required to transport, carve and erect these monoliths — the largest weighing over 500 tonnes — using only human and animal labour remains an impressive achievement that specialists continue to study.

Christianity at the edges of the ancient world

The conversion of the Aksumite Empire to Christianity is traditionally dated to the reign of King Ezana, around 330 CE — making Ethiopia one of the earliest officially Christian states in history, before the Roman Empire formalised its own adoption. The conversion is attributed to Frumentius, a Syrian Christian who came to Aksum as a young man, rose to influence at court, and was eventually consecrated as the first bishop of Ethiopia by Athanasius of Alexandria.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church that grew from this conversion has maintained a continuous tradition to the present day, with its own canon of scripture, its own liturgical calendar and its own theology — including a distinctive emphasis on the Old Testament, a lunar calendar that gives Ethiopia thirteen months, and the celebration of major feasts on dates that differ from those of both the Western and Eastern churches. This antiquity and independence are sources of deep national pride; the church is not a colonial inheritance but an institution older than most of the Christian world.

The Ark of the Covenant and the Church of St Mary

The Church of St Mary of Zion in Aksum is considered the holiest site in Ethiopia, and within its chapel compound stands a small treasury building in which the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to keep the Ark of the Covenant — the golden chest described in the Hebrew Bible as containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. According to Ethiopian tradition, the Ark was brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I, son of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, in ancient times.

The Ark is tended by a single guardian monk who is appointed for life and may not leave the compound; no outsider is permitted to see what the treasury contains. The scholarly view is that what is kept there is a tabot — a wooden replica of the Ark, of a kind that all Ethiopian Orthodox churches possess as the most sacred object in the sanctuary. But the claim, and the centuries-long tradition it represents, is central to Ethiopian religious identity and to Aksum's particular gravity as a sacred place. Visiting the church — its outer compound open to visitors, the treasury glimpsed only as a structure behind gates — is an encounter with a living tradition of extraordinary depth.

Visiting Aksum today

Aksum sits at the heart of the Ethiopian historic circuit — the cluster of ancient sites in the north of the country that most travellers to Ethiopia combine into a single journey. The circuit typically pairs Aksum with Lalibela (the rock-hewn churches, further south), Gondar (the medieval castles) and, for the more adventurous, the Simien Mountains. Aksum is reached by a short flight from Addis Ababa via Lalibela, or overland via Mekele.

The town itself is small and easily navigated on foot. Beyond the stelae field and the Church of St Mary, the Archaeological Museum of Aksum holds a collection of Aksumite artefacts including coins, pottery and carved stone, and the ruins of the old palace of Dungur — sometimes called the Queen of Sheba's Palace, though the name is largely legendary — are open to explore. Allow at least a full day; two days allows the tombs, the museum and the surrounding sites at an unhurried pace that an ancient capital deserves.