page_title: Kingdom of Aksum
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Kingdom of Aksum / History / Origins
context_page_description: The Kingdom of Aksum, also known as the Kingdom of Axum or the Aksumite Empire, was an ancient kingdom centered in Northern Ethiopia, in the Tigray region as well as what is now Eritrea. Axumite rulers styled themselves as King of kings, king of Aksum, Himyar, Raydan, Saba, Salhen, Tsiyamo, Beja and of Kush.
  Ruled by the Aksumites, it existed from approximately 80 BC to AD 825. The polity was centered in the city of Axum and grew from the proto-Aksumite Iron Age period around the 4th century BC to achieve prominence by the 1st century AD.
  Aksum became a major player on the commercial route between the Roman Empire and Ancient India. The Aksumite rulers facilitated trade by minting their own Aksumite currency, with the state establishing its hegemony over the declining Kingdom of Kush. It also regularly entered the politics of the kingdoms on the Arabian Peninsula and eventually extended its rule over the region with the conquest of the Himyarite Kingdom. The Manichaei prophet Mani regarded Axum as one of the four great powers of his time, the others being Persia, Rome, and China.
  The Aksumites erected monumental stelae, which served a religious purpose in pre-Christian times.
context_section_description: Largely on the basis of Carlo Conti Rossini's theories and prolific work on Ethiopian history, Aksum was previously thought to have been founded by the Sabaeans, who spoke a language from the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Evidence suggests that Semitic-speaking Aksumites semiticized the Agaw people, who originally spoke other Afroasiatic languages from the family's Cushitic branch, and had already established an independent civilization in the territory before the arrival of the Sabaeans.
  
  Scholars like Stuart Munro-Hay thus point to the existence of an older kingdom known as Dʿmt, which flourished in the area between the tenth and fifth centuries BC, prior to the proposed Sabaean migration in the fourth or fifth century BC. They also cite evidence indicating that Sabaean settlers resided in the region for little more than a few decades. Sabaean influence is now thought to have been minor, limited to a few localities, and disappearing after a few decades or a century, perhaps representing a trading or military colony in some sort of symbiosis or military alliance with the civilization of D'mt or some proto-Aksumite state. As George Hatke put it:
  The most significant and lasting impact of these colonists was the establishment of a writing system and the introduction of Semitic speech—both of which the Ethiopians modified considerably. . . . South Arabian culture [was] a foreign commodity from which the Ethiopians were able to freely pick and chose when they saw fit, rather than an entire civilization imposed by foreign rulers.
  The Ge'ez language is no longer universally thought of, as previously assumed, to be an offshoot of Sabaean or Old South Arabian, and there is some linguistic (though not written) evidence of Semitic languages being spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia since approximately 2000 BC. However, the Ge'ez script later replaced Epigraphic South Arabian in the Kingdom of Aksum 
  .
caption: The King Ezana's Stela, an Aksumite obelisk in Axum, Ethiopia
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