The Kingdom of Aksum

How is the unique narrative of the Ark of the Covenant deeply rooted in Ethiopian culture and tradition? Embark on a journey to the Kingdom of Aksum with host Tristan Hughes and archeologist Dil Singh Basanti, located in present-day northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. They discuss how fourth-century African merchants from Axum sailed from Eritrea to India, trading goods like ivory and gold for steel and spices. They uncover the secrets of Aksum's burial practices, including the monumental stele and the rituals that honoured the dead, and learn how the cosmopolitan port city of Adulis boomed with diverse religious influences, from Christianity to possible traces of Buddhism. This episode offers a captivating glimpse into daily life and the vast trade networks that made Aksum a powerful ancient empire. MORE The Kingdom of Kush https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QXTNyMH3Ov6UweDXEsf67 The Romans and India with William Dalrymple https://open.spotify.com/episode/0RSacQ0ngYW2YjrE2UMeVF Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:37Tristan Hughes?

  This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with The Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel Podcast from NerdWallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it, and which are just an airport gate with better snacks and worse lighting,

• 2:22Tristan Hughes?

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• 3:01Tristan Hughes?

  It's the 4th century AD. A merchant ship sails out of the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden, along one of the busiest maritime routes in the world: the trade route that connected the Roman Empire and its ports in Egypt with India. But this ship and its crew are neither Roman nor Indian. They are Achaumite, hailing from the bustling port of Adulis in present-day Eritrea. Their destination: the flourishing ports along India's west coast. The boat is filled to the brim with Achaumite goods to sell: ivory, tortoiseshell, rhino horn, and gold. In exchange, they hope to acquire steel and spices,

• 3:46Tristan Hughes?

  valuable commodities both in Achaum and in the Roman Empire to their north. These African merchants were vital cogs in this far-reaching trade route, making both them and the kingdom they hailed from all the richer.

• 4:03Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Enchant's on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today, we're exploring the story of the Kingdom of Aksum, situated largely in what is today northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. Incredibly well positioned, with strong contacts to the Roman Mediterranean, India, Arabia and Mesopotamia, the Kingdom of Aksum flourished and became incredibly powerful in the first millennium AD. Today, it is most famous for the gigantic stele obelisks that towered over its main city and for the kingdom's early conversion to Christianity in the 4th century. But, as you're about to hear, there is so much more to Aksum's story.

• 4:47Tristan Hughes?

  To explain all, I was delighted to interview the archaeologist and Aksum expert Dill Singh Basanti, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Dill has worked out in Ethiopia on Aksum's archaeology for several years and holds a particular interest in Aksumite mortuary monuments and burial practices. He's a fantastic speaker and his passion for all the things Aksum shines through, it's infectious. I really do hope you enjoy.

• 5:18Tristan Hughes?

  Dill, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Tristan. I really appreciate you having me.

• 5:23Tristan Hughes?

  And to talk about the Kingdom of Aksum, there is so much to explore with the story of Aksum and its incredible archaeology. There is so much to talk about.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've really had an explosion of work in the last couple of decades. So prior to that, we've just had excavations in a few areas in the capital city and a couple of other cities themselves. But since then, we've had work going on from some of the earliest times. We have a new cultural horizon that stretches back even deeper in time, going on into the medieval times and after. So we're really getting a horizontal and vertical spread across the Aksumite region.

• 6:03Tristan Hughes?

  We've got a big period of time to cover and you mentioned there in passing the capital. So Dill, where are we talking about with the Kingdom of Aksum with modern countries?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the capital itself, Aksum, is in northern Ethiopia in a state called Tigray, in the Tigray Plateau.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  But the actual quality, we don't fully know the boundaries. A lot of the work that's been done, it's as we see in many places where you have roads and where you can actually get to. So a lot of it trends towards the east of Aksum and then we have a lot of older work that was done in Eritrea. So we know that it took up a lot of current Tigray going into Eritrea. There are times in its history that it stretched across the sea and had some sort of influence in South Arabia. There's oral traditions in Uganda that relate to Aksum that we don't really know how those relate. You go down to central, southeast parts of Ethiopia, you'll find oxenite coinage there.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  I've worked in Amhara and the more like central, central north state where you'll have oral traditions of things that different oxenite kings built and things going on there as well. But that full history itself is unexplored, so we don't really know the full boundaries. Right now, we're focused more on the Tigray state and that those northeast regions of Ethiopia going into Eritrea.

• 7:31Tristan Hughes?

  But Dill, thinking about that area of the world in antiquity, if you've got the Red Sea there, connections with Arabia, southern Arabia, as you've mentioned, the Horn of Africa. This feels like an incredibly important and strategic area of the world geographically, where you find this ancient kingdom rising.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it definitely is. It's strategic and it's in a good location for a few different reasons. Because first of all, there is like the political interest and the economic interests over the Red Sea trade and the Indian Ocean trade. There's times when I believe there's Justinian I like sent a letter to Aksum to persuade them to go into South Arabia. And he said it was because the king of the Airdomna was persecuting Christians. But it seems that they're maybe more interested in silk prices and wanted an ally in the region. We find many aspects of the trade that we can go into. You know, we have shipwrecks carrying Ayaka Ba Amphora coming from Jordan in the Red Sea. We find Ayaka Ba all over the place.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  You go into people's homes today, just like the compounds and Amphora litter the floors, right? And we have a monastery, as I was talking about earlier to you, how some of the monasteries keep a lot of the ancient artifacts and. There's a big sort of indigenous component to archaeology and so forth. We have a monastery that literally has a cachet of Buddhist coins from the Krishana empires in Pakistan, Punjab, Afghanistan, like there. And, you know, so you have these economic interests, but before that, there is also a mix of cultures going on in the area, which coming from a Semitic influence.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  So Ghaz, the language, the primary language during Aksum in the area is mostly Semitic language, but mixing in with cultures from Sudan as well, which is where the stele tradition probably comes from. So it was already like an area of interaction that, well, for that reason, became important for economic and political reasons and in many different scales.

• 9:39Tristan Hughes?

  Can you talk to us a bit about the types of source material that we have, that experts and archaeologists like yourself have for learning more about the Kingdom of Aksum?

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Aksum was always kind of internationally known, and that comes from textual material. So we have foreign records and we have had histories of Aksum written just with foreign materials coming from the Greeks and historians. We have poetry from Arabia that talks about Aksum. We have economic works dealing with the trade. That's usually what foreign records are referring to. So the most famous is the Periples of the Red Sea, which is written in the first century and lists the oxymite port Adulis and talks about Aksum as the capital controlling influence over that region. So we have these foreign records. We have internal inscriptions in Ghaz, as well as Sabian and Greek from the various kings in the area.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  And then we also have our tradition that relates to the histories in Aksum. And that's a good way to find sites and that's a good way to get sort of a preliminary idea of the dating in some places, or at least like try to figure out what cultural horizon you're working with. Then we also have coins, which is kind of an international textual material because those are found all over the place. When they're original, we also have counterfeit coins because the Romans are actually making counterfeits of oxymite coins. So we find those in Palestine. We found those in Sri Lanka and so forth, but they're like little smaller through these miniature versions. So we have coinage, which is another big study. And then we have the more traditional historical and archaeological methods.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  So excavations, we had accounts of explorers going back to Francisco Alvarez in the 15th century. But then formal excavations began in the 19th century. And those have continued periodically. We had a big set of records in the early 1900s. And then a set of excavations that weren't were published in the mid 20th century. And then from 1970, we had a good deal of work before interruption with the change in political regimes. Until mid 1990s, where we've had more sustained archaeological work. First in just a few areas, but now there's a lot of teams from all over the place working in Tigri and with Aksum and Aksumite cultures.

• 11:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's explore one of those horizons that it seems, but you hinted at earlier, is being expanded currently, which surrounds the origins of the Kingdom of Aksum. Now, do what do we know about this, how this kingdom emerges?

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this has been one of the things that's been changing in recent years and how people think about Aksum. There used to be a model where Aksum was thought to be colonized by South Arabia sometime in maybe around 800 B.C. The earliest sites in Aksum at that time, which would be the Temple of Yeha, had South Arabian features and was dedicated to a South Arabian pantheon of polytheist gods. So Al Mukab, the god of the moon, was the biggest of those. And then there was another site, Wokor area as well, that was uncovered. You know, when you get to a new archaeological area, the first thing you find are the big things or the first thing you're looking at, the big things.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  So the earliest big things we had were South Arabian, right? But since the archaeological work has accumulated, we have cultural horizons stretching back. There was a wave of sites popping up from around the 900 B.C. to 1200 B.C. range, with Myad Drosia excavated by UCLA, Segalman by University of Napoli, Lower Italy. The Ona culture up in Eritrea around Asmaram was one of the first. By Peter Schmidt and Matthew Curtis and then Gulu Makita, which is a site that's on that route between Aksum and the port city that started, that found out was earlier than the trade and all these sites were earlier than Yeha. In addition to that, that area that I just talked about, Gulu Makita, they recently published in the last couple of

• 13:38Speaker 03

  years, dating that goes back to about 1600 B.C. It shows some of the earliest like agriculture working in the area. So the current idea that we have is that there are movements and migrations and interactions going on a very large scale, going out to the Arabian Peninsula and Semitic influences that would come there, mixing with things that were very local. The earliest place we find the Sida tradition is actually in near Kasala in Sudan. And that's in the second millennium, early second millennium B.C. or so. And so that seems to be the earliest thing that we consider in the complex of the sites or cultural region that we're talking

• 14:23Speaker 03

  about. And it looks like we're having a big interaction sphere with people from there, interacting with people arriving more from coastal regions, probably using what we call the Takaze River Valley, which is one of the feeding rivers into the Blaketown and then the Blue Nile. And so there's probably like agro pastoralist groups that are interacting with subtle communities. And within this big sphere of interaction, you start having complex bulodes emerge.

• 14:51Tristan Hughes?

  So Aksum emerges, and of course, we call it the Kingdom of Aksum, which I'm guessing kind of gives the game away. Dale, do we know much about the whole social and political structure of the Kingdom of Aksum?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we do know they had a king who's called the Nagus.

• 15:09Tristan Hughes?

  Surprise, right, yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's mentioned in the Periples and that's, we see that in the inscriptions and so forth. The different Naguses, the most famous being King Azana, directed inscriptions to his many military victories over surrounding groups, going up to Meraway.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Actually in Sudan. And then we also have a coinage line where the kings were actually imprinting their likenesses on the coins. So we have been able to get a king's list from that. But it's also incomplete. So like some of the kings we know about, because they're, you know, you have to go to India and you find the coins there that talk about kings you didn't really know about in Oksu before. And all of a sudden you find like a coin with a new king on it, right? So we do have like a king's list, but the entire range of kings is not well known. A lot of them are only really known from coinage. And there's a lot of reading between the lines on how the kings talk and how various people talk about the kings. Where it looks like there's something called the Negusa Negast, the king of the kings.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  And then there does seem to be some regional political system that had their own centralized heads as well. So it's not just the king, but there does seem to be a sizable nobility. Now that is for the Oksmide period. Going before that, we don't really know. There's a lot more legendary traditions and oral traditions that relate to kings. But at least from the Oksmide period, we do start seeing a king's list and we do start seeing all these references.

• 16:35Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know then, if you say there evidently was this nobility and almost, I guess, almost a hierarchy of people in control? You mentioned earlier Aksum as the capital. Do we know of many other key urban centers in this kingdom?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  So we know about a few. There's ones that are mentioned in the paraplu. So Adulis is the main port of Oksum. And there's another town they mentioned that I believe they say was like a three days walk away called Kaloi. And there's two sites that that might match up to. One is Matara, which was excavated, I believe in the sixties or seventies. And we haven't really had much work since and not much is known about it. The other one, a more likely one is a place called Kohido. These are both in southern Eritrea. So Kohaedo seems to be another urban center and in the periplice, that's mentioned as the first place where you can get ivory, which was the primary export of the oxen mites. So Kohaedo is a big one. One of my colleagues and professors, Matthew Curtis, was working there in the early 2000s.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  But unfortunately, we had conflicts starting in the regions at that time between the border war and since then, no work has been really done there. So there's many like urban places we know about that people just can't get to. And that's one of them. And then there's just a plethora of sites. So my coworker up at Johns Hopkins has been doing some of the most instrumental work in looking at settlement patterns. And what we actually find is when the change from what we call the pre-oxymite period to the oxymite period, pre-oxymite period has a few centralized sites that appear much more hierarchical. And we see that with some of the Sabian temple features as well, that their entire like spatial syntax is about like restricting access. When we get to the oxymite period, it's not that these cities get bigger. They actually get smaller.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  They decentralize a bit. There's definite population growth and there's a lot more infilling. So it's more like a conglomeration of centers from excavations that we've seen in the 90s under Phillipsen. It looks like there's a bunch of satellite sites that are all interdependent. So you start having these like urban clusters. So you have a few major metropolises that seem to be mentioned along the trade between Oxum, Gulumicata, which I mentioned earlier, or at least like urban areas is how we have to start thinking about them. Going up to Kohaedo and then Adulis. But we have all these other sites too, that just sort of, Matthew Curtis, when we were working out in Shire, he'd go out on survey for like a week and a half and find six settlements and then a cemetery. Everyone lost for like 60 years or something.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  So there's all these other sites that seem to have some urban sense of specialization to them and seem to be interdependent with everything else going on.

• 19:14Tristan Hughes?

  Could we imagine potentially is the G word? Could they potentially be these kind of guilds or something like that?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  They totally could be with the specialization that we're seeing. People that aren't working in Oxum, they're just working on the Indian Ocean trade. Do you talk about those guilds operating on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade? Or some sense of commercial groups or brotherhoods? So there may be something like that going on in Oxum that probably originates in its own way. And then maybe interacting with these larger economic structures. The archaeological core that we can definitely say is that a lot of them do seem specialized, even either for hide working or other types of manufacture and so forth. They do seem to be their own industrial units.

• 19:56Tristan Hughes?

  So let's move on to trade. Highly anticipated this chapter in our conversation, given the hints you've already given regarding how important it is. And if we focus first on maritime trade, because you mentioned the port of Adulis, which does feel to be really, really significant. If you were an Aksimite trader and you had a ship and you were going from somewhere like Adulis, or let's say from Adulis, how far and wide were the Aksimite maritime contacts? How far and why could you trade your goods?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we have a couple of sources for that, a couple of documentary sources. The first is the Periples, which mentions a lot of the ports. But there was another hitchhiker in the sixth, seventh centuries, Cosmos and Dico Placis. So we're not sure if he made it to where he says he made it or implies that he made it. But it looks like from his readings, we can gather that the main ports of Oxum were actually in Sri Lanka. And he seems to mention Aksimite ships themselves. And we do find Aksimite artifacts, coinage and pottery popping up in Gujarat, popping up in Tamil Nadu and other places in southern India. And then popping up in Sri Lanka as well, which I mentioned earlier, we find some of the Roman counterfeits down there, right? So we do find artifacts that are corroborating that to some degree.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  We don't know if Indigo Places himself went down to Sri Lanka himself, but he certainly talks about Aksimite boats. He's actually there when one of the kings, King Khalid, was about to launch those wars into South Arabia, apparently, and is gathering his ships together for that. So that's the direction that we know Aksimite should seem to show direct link. And trade connections. They have very, very strong links and probably a bigger injection of their trade was coming from the upper parts of the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. So Ayakaba, like I said, it's actually a Roman emperor made in Akaba, Jordan. That's probably the second most common pottery type we see in Ocsum itself after the local redwares. But we also find in one of the main sites that's been excavated, Bieta Georgi, they

• 21:55Speaker 03

  have before that late Roman III emperor and the Gauls type. And they can actually identify some of the manufacturers going to production centers in France or in ancient Gaul at the time. We do have redware coming in from Tunisia. So there's a big injection coming from this Mediterranean and Red Sea trade. And that's probably mostly where they're operating. And then there's a bunch of tangential hints that people will overinflate or dismiss this evidence depending on who's talking, but there may be relations with China in terms of some of the Han import lists match up with what's coming up with out of Ocsum. And then there's mentions of kingdoms, Huangqi, which may relate in a lot of circumstantial

• 22:36Speaker 03

  factors to Ocsum. We did find cast steel in Ocsum itself, which at the time is being made in China. But we, you know, with iron production, there might be all sorts of things going on. What seems one of the more likely ones is that there are memoirs written immediately after the decentralization of Ocsum, after the Battle of Talis, where one of the generals from the Tang Dynasty, when you trace out his route, this work by Wilbur Schmidt, when he traced out his route, he seems to have made it to Ocsum and then exited through the port of Adulis. So we're talking about like, where are people interacting completely? You know, there, China may be involved in interactions, but we need to understand that if it is, it's more of an indirect thing. There are much bigger interactions going on between India, Rome, and we do find Sustanianware. So going up into the Sustanian, you know,

• 23:21Speaker 03

  regions in Iran and so forth as well. And we do have Arabic poetry, like I mentioned, from Iraq that talks about the Ossamite ships and it has like very beautiful, it's a, it's a court poet that's basically bragging about their court and in this case bragging about a queen and talks about the Ossamite ships just with imagery of them parting the foam of the water like this caravan they talk about as part is going through the desert and are in the way of the sands. So those are the, so those are the places that are seen to be interacting with Ossum and it's not just that we're talking about debt, direct trade links. We start talking about some of the virtual mechanisms trade, things like cosmopolitanism, globalization, so forth. Well, at least Ayacaba and some of the other amphora are

• 24:04Speaker 03

  very, very common throughout Ossum, but there is one place we don't see any imports at all in Ossum and that is in the Stele Park in the graves. So they do seem, yeah, so they do seem to differentiate between local and foreign there. And we do see the same thing going on in other parts of the trade where like, you know, there's, there's sources in Egypt that talk about like Indians buying wine and getting drunk. There's sources in India that talk about the foreigners that eat way too much black pepper and so forth. So all these sort of categories of like foreignness are being built along these trades and we see it in Ossum as well.

• 24:41Tristan Hughes?

  I'd like to quickly ask because you've highlighted there, I don't need to ask it now because I think we've already covered it, like the importance of Ossum in that, that really significant trade route between the Roman Empire and India that we've covered in, in previous conversations. And also the fact that you highlighted there, Ossamite ships and I'm guessing, I didn't really think of Ossum as a maritime power, but having control of that important stretch of water can make the kings, the rulers of Ossum incredibly, you know, mighty and powerful because of all the trades going through. Alongside, you know, contacts with Sri Lanka and India and Sassanian Persia and the Roman Empire, do we know whether the Ossamites also went down the east coast of Africa to places like Zanzibar and so on?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  That's a good question. We actually don't know. From the periples, I think the last port they mentioned on the east coast of Africa is a place called Rakhda, which may match up with Somalia. We generally don't know how, how far they're going into, down the coast. The Swahili coast trade is some that would pick up after this more antiquity version of the Indian Ocean trade. That seems to be its own independent thing that occurs later or is using, if there's any infrastructure there that they might be using, that's not fully known to us. This is more larger investigative issue. We don't really know how far into the African interior or the parts of Africa going south and southwest that Oxum actually went. Going from the kind of known to the unknown, we have a lot of the excavations have occurred

• 26:08Speaker 03

  from Oxumite east going up to the Red Sea trade. So there's sort of a bias of information just in where we can do work and the best places to do work that kind of point to these international routes. And then we have, you know, the interaction sphere between Sudan, those African routes in the in the immediate region that we are. But going beyond that, that's something that we don't fully know. That's what makes some of these other like chance finds or chance instance references to Oxum, such as oral traditions in Uganda and so forth. That's what makes them interesting. We don't really know much about them and they haven't really been investigated in any way.

• 26:42Tristan Hughes?

  One last thing on the trading contacts. You mentioned ivory earlier, but what were some of the other main goods that the Oxumites were trading in, that they were exporting and those that they were importing?

• 26:55Speaker 03

  They seem to be mostly exporting wall materials, tortoise shell, rhino horn, things like that. Ivory is above and beyond their major one. Myrrh was probably, this is another region that's important for myrrh, so that might have also been involved. As you know, this perishable trade doesn't, you know, preserve as well in the archaeological record. There's what the periples says, but then there's also the additional things to that and the things that happen. Because the periples is about the first century CE. Oxum seems to be most heavily involved in the third and fourth centuries. So by that time, we don't know exactly what shifted. Ivory seems to be the main thing. One of the Byzantine ambassadors to the region records in the area of Yeha about 5,000 elephants

• 27:37Speaker 03

  that he's probably guessing. We believe the Oxumites likely hunted elephants to extinction in the area. The only place that we still have an elephant population in that region today is up in Kafeshara, which I believe is in the few hundreds. And that's the northernmost elephant herd. So they they seem to have hunted them to extinction. So they're importing wine. They're also importing heavy amounts of iron. At least during the time of the periples, they might have their own industry later. But that seems to be something that would be instrumental in the hunting of elephants, especially for spears and so forth. The ivory is actually very interesting because in oxymatric material culture, we see a lot of animal symbology, such as like wally ibexes. And then snakes are one of the biggest ones. And there's a lot more traditions and legends about snakes.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  But we never really see an elephant. So outside of all ivory, the elephant, the animal that's like actually hunted possibly to extinction in the area, or at least endangered to some degree, is what we don't see in any of the symbolism. Either cosmos or another six century historian Procopius also mentioned the oxymatric king's chariot being pulled by two elephants as well. So those are the some of the main things that we're seeing. The biggest import, at least in terms of the artifacts we find, is probably wine. There's probably other elements of trade coming in with like black pepper and so forth. Aksum appears to have its own vineyard to a later time. They're also importing a good amount of steel. And then their major export of all the things listed tends to be ivory.

• 29:07Speaker 04

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• 31:17Tristan Hughes?

  I've also got in my notes something called the Afar Salt Trail. Could you explain what that is?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Afar is interesting. So that's a really cool region in the eastern part of Ethiopia. And it's legendary as like a travel destination because it's the hottest place in the world by average temperatures. I think it averages somewhere around like 140 Fahrenheit.

• 31:40Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, no thank you, no thank you.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  And, oh, but it gets cooler because it's filled with sulfuric acid lakes in some of the regions or some of the areas, as well as like moving lava lakes that are totally, when you see those lava lakes full, it is exactly what you want them to be in like imagination. Yeah, there's salt formations and everything. So people don't really live there, live there. They mostly go just to mine salt and they'll make them in these little blocks that in historic times was used as money and people still barter today. We had always believed that oxymoron somehow involved there. And we find obsidian and other oxymite sites, which Afar is a great obsidian source. I was there about four years ago and there's people that still use obsidian flakes to shade.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  So there was some more recent research by Helena Wodakiris on that area and she did find oxymite sites. And she did trace back a caravan type trade going into the area. So most of her sites date to late Oxnite into medieval times, but she was finding earlier oxymite material in there as well. So it seems to be the verification that we had that they were in that area, likely also mining salt, at least participating in some sort of caravan commerce.

• 32:53Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, you mentioned Helena Wodakiris there. Yeah, I saw her research on this and thought, actually, that's fascinating. So must ask it. And thank you very much for mentioning her name because as I said, she's been leading that research, hasn't she?

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you know, there's like how you do your excavations or expeditions and so forth that we usually talk less about. And Helena being humble is very humble about hers, but she basically formed their own caravan. And so she was like, one of the first, like, I think, female caravans or maybe only female caravan operating in the time, just living in one of the most difficult areas to live in for like five, six months, finding all these oxymite sites and engaging in this. It is some top level work and top level experience. It was very, very arduous undertaking, very impressive.

• 33:37Tristan Hughes?

  Very impressive. What a story. Let's move on to arguably the most well-known symbolic monuments that have survived from the Kingdom of Axum, which are of course these stele. To introduce this, Daryl, can you explain to us how the royal members of the Axumite dynasty, how the elites buried their dead, and then how that relates to these great monuments?

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the stele themselves are burial markers. And that's a tradition going back with agro pastus studies, as I mentioned out in Sudan. So it seems to originate there. And the earliest site that we have with stele in Axum is in Segal Men, which their dates are about 1,500 B.C. for that cemetery area. And then by the time we get to Axum, these stele, which were sometimes like only half a meter or so tall out in Sudan, are now all of a sudden monumental. So the biggest stele there is 32 meters tall. It weighs about 500 tons. Yeah, solid stone, like traditionally what we think of with like an obelisk or stele.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  I think the one in Karnak is bigger, but this is one they, they actually tried to get it up. And the base floor is only about two meters. So it wasn't sufficient to keep the monument standing upright. So it immediately went down. And it seems to have shattered the top of another tomb called the Nefos Moucha. So it only collapsed in ancient times. And so these these stele, they're carved from the volcanic stone. It's a nephiline stone. And so it's very likely that in ancient times, people saw people hauling these giant stones as blanks from this quarry. And then they seem to have worked them in place in the cemetery. Because we find at least one that's incompleted there. So they started erecting these stele in monumental forms. But there's hundreds of stele all across Oxum.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  And that cemetery itself, there's at least like seventy five, seventy six. It's located at the bottom of a hill. So sometimes stele get covered up, sometimes they get exposed. There's a lot of stele that are buried in the tombs as well. And sometimes we use as beds for some of the skeletons.

• 35:40Tristan Hughes?

  Stele buried in the tombs themselves.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so actually, if you walk around that area in the right time of year with the right hydrology, you can see buried stele. And there's one in particular I'm thinking of that marks the entrance to a tomb that you can see there. And it there may have been termination rituals going on with these stele, meaning that after their use life, they were ritually broken, terminated, disposed in some way. And some of them seem to have wound up as beds inside some of the the tombs in the area. And so there there's tons of these stele. Many of them are quite smaller meter to like three or four meters. But there's six of them that were carved like to look like oxymite elite structures.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  So they have multiple rows of windows and timber frames that would stick out of oxymite architecture that we call monkey heads and doorways. So the main symbolism of that is on six of them. And those range in size from about thirteen to the largest one, which was about thirty two meters. And then there's other like proto forms of the symbolism where they make something that looks like a house. Or they have lines and dots that look like the monkey heads as well. But the cool thing about the symbolism too, though, was that it was very heavily ritualized. So that's the that I was talking about, the stele one, which people usually believe that that marks the tomb for the king because it's the largest tomb there. When that collapsed, so so as I mentioned, these steel have little doorways on it.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  When that collapsed, they actually cut out the handle for the doorway to terminate the symbolism. And then you'll see it today and it's collapsed and that doorway. Yeah, it's you you could go see that the door handle is hacked out of the doorway symbolism there. So it's not just that these things are cosmetic. They had some sort of ritual power. They're imbued with a sense of power. They're radiating something or they have this sort of meaning to them. And when you look at where the stele are located, they're in between two hills in front of the central water source. That is the worst place for a cemetery in all of Aksum. Because all the runoff going down those hills that that helps fill up that water source is going into those tombs. So some of those tombs are just always filled with water and something is always falling down.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  But so it's the worst place to preserve skeletons if that is your goal. But it's the best place for monuments because everyone that is going to get water is going to see them. And in addition, those two hills, the hill in front, Maiko, it dips just enough in area that in the morning, the hills are blocking the sun. And there is just, it's like a curtain of light that just comes down the steel in the morning, which people like see this all the time or not sure. It's probably not like ritually purposeful, but there's an aesthetic quality to where if you go there in the morning, like everything is dark out in front, except for the stele, right? Except for the stele and the other Georgie's hill behind it. So they're they're kind of like illuminated.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  And that seems to be the time that they switch to this Nephilim material coming from Gobedera in the in the lifetime of the stele field. So that's why I say they seem to be taking advantage of it to some degree. The whole field seems very improvised, like it's not, well, it it there's an element of planning, an element of improvisation to it. So it's not something I think they set out in the beginning to do to make it like a ritualized feature. But it's certainly an aesthetic effect that you have these like blue stones with these like twinkling phenocrites just radiating in the light while everything in front of it is dark. And you can see that effect today, they're patented a bit now, but you can see the effect of them lighting up in the morning today, or at least that that curtain of light coming down them.

• 39:09Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, I can see on a couple of images like online, just that kind of the sunlight on those stele and how they really just just stand out. And I also, I had no idea, I was about to ask about the decoration, but you've answered my question for me with the doors and the windows and multiple levels of windows. It feels like they've. Accidentally also kind of designed the ancient Axomite concept of what a skyscraper looks like today. They're striking.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's totally right. Yeah, that's a trip. I didn't think about it that way.

• 39:38Tristan Hughes?

  Are those stele then? I mean, do they endure for several centuries? And is it very much a status symbol? So only the richest in Axomite society and the royalty would be able to have a stele erected when they die?

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I actually answered your question quite poorly on that earlier. So traditionally, that has been what's interpreted with the stele. And it's because of just how we think who has the money to make these giant stele, which seems to be quite an undertaking. And then when you know that there is a king in the area, it's like, oh, okay, the largest stele should belong to a king. There's a convenient alliance between those ideas and the oral traditions in the area. So the oral traditions do mark the stele as kings, but they mark them all by one king. They mention a king called Ramhai, which we don't have from any other form material culture referencing, but they believe all the stele were marked by these king. At the same time, oral tradition is a lot more, people usually mark date with people.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  There's an aspect of that going on. But this convenience alliance between our ideas on monument construction and some of the oral tradition has created that impression. And the stele in other areas are markers for individual graves. In the stele park, they are not any longer. The biggest stele does mark two tombs. That seems to be one of them. It marks a tomb we call the mausoleum, which has ten chambers off the central passageway that might have been designed to look like the inside of a stele. Because the cross section looks like a house. And in addition, the real kicker is that the inside was plastered with a lime-based plaster that doesn't have any water, like protection properties or anything.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  But it does have flecks of methylene stone in it, the same stone that the stele are carved from. So they have that tomb. There's another tomb that people couldn't excavate because it's too dangerous called the East Tomb that's also marked and still unknown to us. The two other biggest stele in the area surrounding it has been excavated, don't seem to mark tombs at all. So. The Stele Park is actually one of the best investigative features in African archaeology. And people, because we expect to find king's tombs there, like people are always kind of looking for it. But if you look at what's been excavated, there's not really a lot of areas left around the Stele. So, and, and people still like hold out hope, but it's like, yo, I'm not sure if we're gonna drop a two by two and find a royal tomb here. In, in this area.

• 42:07Tristan Hughes?

  Going on to, I know an area that you find really, really interesting. Perhaps those people are actually missing out on what is arguably even more impressive and interesting when it comes to Axumite burials, which is how everyday Axumites buried their days. Now, you mentioned cemeteries earlier, so do we know a lot about kind of these cemeteries and burial rites and so on? For people who are living in the Kingdom of Axum, everyday people outside of these stele fields?

• 42:33Speaker 03

  We do a bit, so there has been one other Stele Field that has been excavated called the Gudet Stele Field. And that, we usually take that more in reference of things we see in the Stele Park. And the Stele Park is part of a larger Stele Field called the Northern Stele Field. So those are two cemeteries where we kind of get our sources. The problem is, is that the hierarchy in Oxum may or may not be working as we traditionally think. So it's hard to tell what is the communist grave, other than you have simpler grave grids, which the Gudet Stele Field does. But there is some fluidity, because at least one of the Stele there is bigger than maybe some of the royal Stele. And the Stele Park, this is why I say there's a lot more variability going on.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  So people still attached to the kingly interpretation, but their mixture of classes is so fluid that gets, at least from what we see from the mortuary material, that it gets hard to tell. Now, when we were excavating the field, it may be that, so these people were definitely rich, whoever's buried there. They're definitely a, they're probably like a neighborhood-y community. Based on what we see from some of the oxygen isotope research we've done on some of the remains, they're using at least that water source, or at least people that use the central water source. In addition, the people that were buried in the tomb that we have best excavated called Tomb of the Brick Arches, which is one of the larger tombs, and it's usually thought to be a middle-class tomb. One of the things we see from the bones is we can tell they were working outside.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  So they show multiple signs of labor stress throughout their bones, especially in the hamstrings, especially in the biceps areas. And they seem to be a wealthy tomb. If there is a difference between that and the mausoleum, and maybe that they got their ivory from hippos and not from elephants. And this is, this is still more at the level of speculation. This is still something we're investigating. So this is what I mean that the hierarchy is a bit mixed up. It's not working in the ways that traditional norms sort of lend us to think that works. It's more of a community feel. And the big things that we see in death and burial practices is that early on in the Stele tradition, they're very much monuments for ancestor veneration rites, or rites venerating or honoring the dead.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  And that seems to be the main purpose, and that seems to be what's being emphasized in the Stele and in the burials, because we have evidence of people going back into these graves, taking the bones. The new thing that we have in Oxum that we don't have in sites before, such as Segalmen and so forth, is that we start finding cut marks on the bone. So they're taking the bodies out sooner, and we can tell they're ritualized cut marks because we don't see signs of disarticulation. We just see that they're having little systemac nixed on the bone to remove the last remnants of organic tissue to preserve the bones like relics. And the places that they have the most cut marks are the places of labor stress where the muscle tissue was starting to ossify. So that's why they, they had to clean those bones to get the last of that tissue off.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  And what's interesting is that we have some later burials in the Stele Park. That are medieval from about seventh to thirteenth century. They also have the cup marks, but they don't have as much signs of labor stress. So this thing that started off as very technical in the production of an ancestor from the remains in terms of cleaning their body for very technical reasons and these areas where the muscle tissue would ossify later on, that's just a ritual tradition in the medieval times. Right. So something very technical becomes something very ritual by the end of it. At least from what we can see in the window of the two cemetery tombs that we're looking at. So that's kind of what we see going on with the graves and the actual death and burial rites.

• 46:05Tristan Hughes?

  It's such extraordinary research and I'm guessing all that you just mentioned are those key parts of a project that I know you've done a lot of work around for years, the Aksum Bones Project.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the Aksum Bones Project, that was part of my dissertation and it was a bigger project than my dissertation. But what we were looking at is we were looking at three cemeteries. The Stila Park in Aksum as well as the site of Seglemen, the place where we have the basically the oldest Stila cemetery in the area that's excavated by the University of Napoli in Tali, Luiso Sunicola and Andrea Monzo. And then another medieval site called Missus Body, which is actually one of the best bioarchaeological samples we have in all of Africa. That looks like it was a late Oxymite church that was later used as a late Oxymite to post Oxymite, like medieval times cemetery. And so we were trying to look at how these traditional rites changed through time,

• 46:58Speaker 03

  especially with globalization, especially with the advent of Christianity in the area. And just understanding how death and people's experience of death is changing. And it's really more, the point of that is more of a social message in that, you know, when we see ancestor rites or these processing of bodies, these very like exotic looking things initially. People want to ascribe that as something that's like a relic of an archaic belief. But that's not what happens at Aksum because the time when people, when the ancestors have the greatest presence or the dead and the living are most closely connected is during the time of globalization. Is during the time that the stele park becomes an area of the local, the only place where you don't see foreign objects, these stele all suddenly become monuments

• 47:43Speaker 03

  from inside, suddenly become very ritualized, become more like community-ish based to some degree, and we start having this, they're at least taking bodies out sooner and they seem to be processing them more. So that we start seeing that, you know, the ancestor, if that's what we call it, or this, this living dead, if that has a presence, it's really much, it's something that's coming from like modernizing processes like globalization and urbanization and things like that more than anything archaic. So that was the point that we were, or that I was trying to look at and looking at these three sites and seeing how death rites changed in time.

• 48:26Speaker 04

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• 48:50Speaker 01

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• 49:36Tristan Hughes?

  Still, we could cover so many more different themes, whether that be Aksomite mythology, or their art and their pottery, their house styles, the military and so on. I don't think we're going to have enough time to cover all of those, so maybe another chat in the future. However, we must talk about the coming of Christianity that you mentioned there, because it feels so important to the story. Before we actually talk about Christianity in Aksum, do we know much about the religion or religions that the Aksomites followed before Christianity arrived there?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  We know a little bit. So we know that there is a South Arabian pantheon in the area. Al-Mukkah is the most important of the deities that they talk about. And so what happens with the pre-Christian area between the various gods that are in the region is that they're kind of like mixing together, but kind of not. So Al-Mukkah may be an aspect of Ishtar, or maybe an aspect of something they locally call a star, who at other times has some connection with Zeus, or at least the heavens.

• 50:43Tristan Hughes?

  And Ishtar, that's normally linked with Babylon as well, so that's going very far away.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, it's linked to Babylon, and then at times it also has an aspect of like Venus in there as well. So we have this South Arabian pantheon, but Aksomites, they have, it appears there's another version of polytheism in the area. And then there's also cosmopolitanism coming in from the Red Sea. So in Aksum itself, there's three gods that are mainly mentioned. There's a star. The primary god, however, is someone named Mahrem, who may be a version of Al-Mukkah that was later adopted in a different way, but maybe its own thing. And then the Greek sort of cognate is more related to Ares, so that's the war god. So King Azana would claim that he was the son of Mahrem, the war god.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  And then there's another god named Bahar that is also very important in the area. This goes a little bit further, but the Christian word for god is exia bear, and that may have bear a relationship with Bahar, which just means land. So exia bear, the Christian god, just means the lord of the land. So there's this other polytheism that may or may not be related to the South Arabian one. And these are mostly come from inscriptions. But there's various gods that seem to be permutations of the sun and the moon. And have different temple aspects. So there's also Nurru and Habbas. There's Datam Yon and Databadan, which may be the dimming of the sun during different times of the year. So there's different permutations of like the sun and the moon.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  And they may be incorporating an aspect of temporality. And what keeps them different, which may or may not bear a relationship with agricultural cycles. That's sort of like the go to intuitive sort of understanding. But that that's what we have in the area. Maharem is the principal god mentioned in the inscriptions. The Ocmi king claimed to be a descendant or a son of Maharem. At least until Christianity. So King Azana, cutting ahead a little bit, but King Azana is the one that we see converts to Christianity. So Christianity came from connections with the Red Sea trade. And there was probably already Christians in the area long before King Azana converts. Especially in Adulais where they have before, you know, this two two pantheons I was talking about.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  You know, you have the more traditional Zeus, Poseidon, Aries. Mentioned in a in a throne inscription in in Adulais. And then we have some churches, four churches in Adulais that are not well dated. But could be some of the earliest churches in Africa. And maybe somewhere in the third to sixth century range. They're not really well dated, so this is more speculation than anything. But King Azana, we know himself converts to Christianity. Because we can actually see that on his coinage. So he has a crescent and a disc symbol on his earliest coins. And that gets replaced by a cross. And that matches up with some of the old traditions in the area that talk about.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Uh, so in the story, there's a shipwreck with two Syrians that are later captured and brought to the father, King Azana. And one of them has made a tutor for King Azana, Fermentius. And King Azana, from that influence, converts to Christianity. Fermentius becomes the first major patriarch in Ethiopia, and that's how Christianist thoughts begin. So these archaeological correlates match up in that we do see King Azana converting earlier in the coinage. And not only that, but in the inscriptions. And so when King Azana makes inscriptions, he makes them in Gers, Greek, Sapien as well. And the Greek inscriptions, he is very much talking about the Holy Trinity when he references his victories.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  In the same text, in the Gers inscription, he's very, very ambiguous on who he's dedicating his victory to. So he's totally a Christian to foreigners, but he may not be a Christian to people around, at least in Ocsum. But we do see, there is oral tradition that at a later time in the 56 centuries, a migration of nine saints from Syria come and help convert the population in Ocsum. And that is the time that we start seeing crosses made on the pottery. And we do start having datings for more of the earlier churches in the area. So that's how we understand the coming of Christianity and so far, how it's matching up with the archaeological correlates.

• 55:03Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, it's stunning. And King Azana, so 4th century, so about the same time as Constantine the Great, you know, starts embracing Christianity in the Roman Empire as well. So it is pretty early in the scheme of things. And you mentioned there, Gers as well, is that the religious Christian language of Ethiopia or of Ocsum?

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was probably the primary language of Ocsum. So that we see a lot of inscriptions in Gers. And then we also see, one of the cool things to talk about this interaction with Christianity is on the island of Sokotra, near Ethiopia, which was a waypoint for this trade, where we have Gers written alongside Aramaic, the language of Israel, written alongside Brummie and all these other scripts and so forth. So that was the main language of Ocsum, as far as we can tell. And then today it remains as a language of the church. So even today, people will speak in khas or write in khas within the church tradition as well. So it's preserved within within the religion.

• 56:03Tristan Hughes?

  It's so interesting that, you know, you mentioned a dualist there and possible early churches there. I remember talking to William Dalrymple and Steve Sibosom about discoveries of a Buddha in Bereniki. So it's interesting whether there could be evidence of Buddhism there as well at that time, kind of a religious melting pot because of that trade. And also early Christianity is the one that emerges on top.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And going with what I was talking about earlier with the patchiness of Aksum, at least socially and some of these cultural traditions, you probably had different patchiness of that cosmopolitanism throughout the Aksumite area. So someplace like Adulis was very, very cosmopolitan and very heavily involved in the trade. But, you know, Aksum seems to be more of a like regional African injection into the trade. And that's something we're still investigating. The full range of archaeological correlates for that trade, we don't have a full understanding of that Aksum. And thinking through how those mix together is one of the future research questions. But it certainly is a cosmopolitan area, just so we, just

• 57:04Speaker 03

  from how we see the different categories being made. King Azana is one of the first people to use the word Ethiopia or Ethiopia, which historically might have referred to Nubia or something. But he is very much like almost co-opting the name Ethiopia because of the respect that it had to refer to himself. He's almost playing like a propaganda game here on how he gets envisioned to all these foreign powers and the trade in this international sphere, along with the various categories being made. He's very much trying to curate what what his kingdom and what his category is going to be seen as.

• 57:39Tristan Hughes?

  Very quickly, before we end, because I've been, I've used a lot of your time for this wonderful interview and don't want to go on too long. But one more question on Christianity quickly is of course Ethiopia and the kingdom of Aksum becomes strongly associated with

• 57:56Tristan Hughes?

  The Ark of the Covenant and I guess the Queen of Sheba earlier as well. I mean, can you explain a little bit as to why and how these famous names from the Old Testament become so strongly associated with Aksum and Ethiopia more generally?

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that is one of the longest-lived traditions that we see in Ethiopia. And one of the big things that people are really interested in what it's known for. So the, the primary text for that is a later medieval text called the Kebren Agast, which it's more associated with the rise of the Amhar Empire, which is a bit south of Aksum. And itself probably dates to the 13th century in textual form. However, it probably has oral tradition components that go back earlier, maybe during the time of Aksum. Cause there's this one point where they just randomly start talking up and praising an ox my king named Governor Scott for almost no reason at all in the text. So that's the thing that makes people think like, okay, that has to be something earlier that found its

• 58:55Speaker 03

  way in as part of this novel. So that's the primary text. There's all this investigation looking into how it's earlier. We already have these connections going on with the Middle East. Not only I mentioned with their make, but also with some of the crop packages we see in the area. Wheat and barley from the Near East come in pretty early as well. In addition, one of the biggest texts that we were not really sure in the dating of that talks about the Queen of Sheba legend relating to Ethiopia is actually not from Ethiopia. It's from Egypt and is the text Testament of Solomon, which is dated anywhere from like the first century CE to like medieval times. But so, so it's a fake text. It's someone pretending to be Solomon and talking, it's a big test text in the cold.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Because it talks about the various like demons and gins that Solomon was commanding and commanding to build his temple. But there is a brief interlude where a queen from the south, the Queen of Sheba comes to visit him. And that seems to be the first reference, if it does date indeed that early of the Queen of Sheba myth. And it actually doesn't come from Ethiopia. So Wendy Belcher is currently doing research on this and how the Queen of Sheba story that that's not just an Ethiopian tradition relating to medieval ages. It's more of like a Pan African narrative that's emerging between Ethiopia.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  To Egypt. Now, the Ark of the Covenant, the story is that the Queen Ashiba visits King Solomon, and they have a son, who is the first emperor of Ethiopia, King Menelik I. And that bloodline lasts in Ethiopia until Halley Selasi was deposed in 1974. So the story is Queen Menelik visits his father, and he brings back three things. The ring of Solomon, he brings back an instrument like a liar that we do have in Ethiopia today called the Beguna, and he brings back the Bede Israel tribe, which was also in Ethiopia. And in addition to that, either he brings back, or some of his followers go and bring back

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  themselves, but then is later justified somehow, the Ark of the Covenant. And then that is to have rested in Oxum, and you can go see the chapel today where it's kept in Myamseon Church, and you could also see it in the mornings. Ethiopian calendar has 13 months, and the first seven days of each month, they have something called the Mahalela, which they actually take the Ark on a procession around the historic center of Oxum every morning. So you can go see that today. And that has been a long-lived part of the Ethiopian tradition. And there's not only the Ark, but every church has something called a tabo. And a tabo is a copy of the Ark.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  But you know, in the West, we kind of see like a copy as sort of an artificial knockoff, something that's completely sort of against the original. In Ethiopia, it's seen as having aspects of the original. So a church is not a church if it doesn't have a tabo. And so that tradition is long-lived in Ethiopia and centralizes the church and centralizes the Christian tradition. So those are the ways that it matches up with what we see with the presence of the other things that, such as the Beguna that Menelik I was supposed to have had, and the interactions that we see playing out during this time between Oxum and the region of Israel and Middle East.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  And we do find Oxymite coinage in Palestine and Israel as well. And in Palestine particularly, there's Oxymite knockoffs, there's the Roman copies of Oxymite coins, but there's also Oxymite coins. And the key thing is that we see silver in bronze coins in Oxum. So. Oxymite coinage, gold coins were used as international currency, but the silver and bronze forms were not. And so that's been taken to mean that we actually had visitors going between the two regions when we find those coins there.

• 1:02:52Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. Well, Dill, what a way to end it. Thank you for doing those explanations because it feels an important part of the story and of course, the heritage of Ethiopia. We've covered so much in the last hour or so, and I think we'll wrap it up there. As mentioned, we can cover so much more in another chat, whether it's the domestic houses, pottery, art, mythology, and of course, the ultimate fall of the Kingdom of Aksum, although that feels us going a little too far into the medieval period for the ancients' liking. But Dill, this has been absolutely brilliant. And when, when are you next out in Aksum? What's the next big Aksum project for you?

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Um, I will probably be going again next year in the wintertime. I just arrived a couple of months ago from there. Uh, just to see with my colleagues and see what research they're up to. I'm going to do a short bi-archaeological project on a medieval cemetery. Uh, they're looking more into some of how these Christian rites change. Some of those rites of retrieval of bodies and stuff like that seem to continue in the Christian era in their own form. So I'm going to look more at that. And then we're going to start forming our projects with some of the museum specialists and looking at the indigenous archaeologists in the area and this big inventory of, you know, you go to monasteries, you see Ayaka Ba pottery, you see Buddhist coins, things like that. Getting

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  a full idea of exploring that to look at some of these early material heritage traditions in Ethiopia.

• 1:04:18Tristan Hughes?

  Dill, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me Tristan, and thank you so much for your interest. We always get very excited about people's interest in Oxum. It's a big part in the culture today to be able to celebrate heritage, to celebrate Oxymite heritage, and people see that inheritance of that down. So when we see people excited about it, it's very much so that they seem to be engaging in the culture, engaging in the same celebrations or heritage that people prize. So we feel very connected to that. That's very, yeah, it's a very exciting thing to see in people.

• 1:04:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was the archaeologist Dil Singh Basanti giving you a wonderful introduction, an all-rounded introduction to the Kingdom of Aksum. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Leave us a comment. We'd love to hear what you thought about the episode. We love hearing from you. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. Now that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

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• 1:06:10Speaker 01

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