Aksum An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity Stuart Munro-Hay



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From 450-800AD Michels envisages an "explosive growth in the number of settlements 
and in the size of the overall regional population . . . Axum itself must now be viewed as a 
metropolitan entity consisting of fourteen towns and villages within a three-kilometer 
radius". The district-scale chiefdoms have vanished, and almost all the élite structures are 
now within metropolitan Aksum. On Amba Beta Giyorgis above the town, and in other 
places, were workshops marked by the presence of flaked stone tools. These are 
identified possibly, and plausibly, as tools for dealing with the ivory brought into the 
town before its re-export abroad (though the presence of these stone scrapers might also 
indicate that the commerce in leather attested in later times had already begun, since such 
tools could be used for preparing the skins). In this period Michels now accepts the 
concentration of the ruling and merchant classes at Aksum, while in the surrounding 
territory were many village communities, practising dry- farming, defining the capital's 
immediate sustaining area.  
Except for the dates, which take us long past the end of the coinage and into a period 
when the archaeological evidence indicates that many of the élite residences were in ruins 
or at least subject to squatter occupation (Munro-Hay 1989), the depiction of a large 
town, with its "concentration of economic, demographic and political assets", represents 
Aksum at its zenith. But Michels also attributes to this period an `explicit neglect' of the 
royal tombs of the `confederate phase' which apparently "dramatizes the consolidation of 
power by a single royal lineage".  
A very different analysis of events is possible. In this book, the tombs and stelae, 
developing along traceable architectural lines, are considered to represent rather the 
continuity of a "true state-level monarchy" at Aksum over a long period, culminating in 
the great stelae and tombs of the late third and fourth centuries. Michels quotes Butzer 
(1981) in observing that the main stelae field was "covered over by an extensive 
residential community during this phase". In fact, there were no dwellings among the 
stelae and platforms in the Stele Park except those very much later ones (nineteenth 
century?) found there by the DAE (Littmann 1913) which were removed around 1965 for 
the construction of the Stele Park. The French archaeologist, Henri de Contenson (1959i) 
— whom in his turn Butzer quotes for his information — specifically notes "les rares 
éléments architecturaux attestés dans ce niveau". He found traces of occupation dating to 
after the fall of the largest stele in or after the time of the probably late fourth century 
king Ouazebas, in the form of a single room built near the main terrace wall on deposits 
covering the nearby large tomb called Nefas Mawcha (
Ch. 5: 5
). But this one structure, 
which was, it must be emphasised, not even in the cemetery as defined by the main 
terrace wall, but outside it, does not mean that the whole cemetery was abandoned, and in 
no way resembles the debris of an `extensive residential community'. All that it indicates 
is that outside the cemetery wall, in the area above and north of the Nefas Mawcha — a 
tomb which was anyway designed to be buried (
Ch. 5: 5
), — there was some late fourth 
century occupation on the wash layers which had partly covered the terrace wall. It seems 
more likely that with the advent of Christianity and the collapse of the largest stele, which 
obviously demonstrated the impracticability of erecting yet larger monuments, a new type 
of mortuary structure, of a type illustrated by the Tomb of the False Door (
Ch. 5: 5
), was 
then adopted (Munro-Hay 1989). This may have meant that no more stelae were erected, 


but does not imply `explicit neglect' of the older monuments, since it was built in the 
same cemetery.  
The last Aksumite phase proposed by Michels, like the previous one, follows the 
expected pattern, but is far removed in its suggested date. Reduction of population, the 
end of the factory-scale workshops, and an emphatic shrinkage of the city boundaries, 
combined with the re-emergence of small-scale chiefdoms in the region, occurs in this 
phase. All of this would reflect the decline of Aksum, and the eventual departure of the 
government to another more suitable centre for the reasons proposed in 
Ch. 15
 below.  
An interesting detail noted in Michels 1986 paper was that in the Late Aksumite period a 
new factor was introduced; for the first time, consideration was apparently given to 
selecting defensive sites for the palaces or élite residences. If this was not caused simply 
by the fact that all the prime sites were by now occupied, it might have been in response 
to such troubles as those mentioned in the hatsani Danael texts (
Ch. 11: 5
). If the 
structures were built after Aksum ceased to be the centre of government, these dwellings 
might represent the remnant who stayed on to administer the region dependent on the old 
capital.  
  
4. Cities, Towns and Villages 
 
Within the expanded Aksumite kingdom, a number of flourishing urban communities 
appear to have grown up. Adulis, the chief Aksumite, and probably pre-Aksumite, port, 
and Aksum itself are special cases; but it seems, from archaeological and literary 
evidence, that a number of other towns became established on trade routes or crossroads, 
or wherever particularly favourable conditions were encountered. Water availability was 
an evident precondition (Anfray 1973i: 15, n. 5). The development of some degree of 
urbanism in Aksumite Ethiopia is an interesting phenomenon, but one which is not yet 
even partially documented. All that survives of many of the `towns' are the traces of a 
few monumental structures such as temples, churches or élite residential/administrative 
buildings, and scatterings of pottery on the surface. These have been reported from the 
time of the earliest explorations in Ethiopia, but have only rarely been properly surveyed, 
much less excavated and planned. Excavation may yet provide some surprises, as it has 
already done at Matara, but in general these towns may not have been very large, perhaps 
of little more than large village status, though Matara certainly seems to have been a 
sizeable community (Anfray 1963, 1974; Anfray and Annequin 1965). Such communities 
were probably much more intimately associated with the surrounding countryside than 
are, for example, modern manufacturing towns. But even so their existence bespeaks an 
agricultural output sufficient to provide the surplus necessary to support at least some 
town dwellers engaged in specialist pursuits, and the availability of more or less efficient 
exchange and transport facilities on a regional scale. The urban setting throughout 
Ethiopia, including port, capital and market or trading towns, implies the development of 


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