Aksum An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity Stuart Munro-Hay

About one hundred years later, after Ethiopia had passed through the great convulsions of 
Gragn's wars, Manoel de Almeida described the town in his chapter XXI, Acçum and its 
Antiquities (Beckingham and Huntingford 1954: 90ff);  
It is situated on the edge of very broad meadows in a gap where they come in between 
two hills. Today it is a place of about a hundred inhabitants. Everywhere there ruins are 
to be seen, not of walls, towers, and splendid palaces, but of many houses of stone and 
mud which show that the town was formerly very large.  
Much of this was presumably the remains of the early sixteenth century town.  
A church of stone and mud, thatched, is to be seen there built among the ruins and walls 
of another, ancient, one, the walls of which are still visible and were of stone and mud 
too (for in no part of Ethiopia is there any sign or trace that lime has ever at any time 
been seen there, or any building, large or small, constructed with it) but very wide apart. 
From what is visible, the church seems to have had five aisles. It was 220 spans long and 
100 wide, it has a big enclosure wall of stone and mud and inside it a very handsome 
courtyard paved with large, well cut stones, ending, on the side the church is, in a flight 
of 8 or 9 steps, also made of well cut stones. At the top is a platform of 10 or 12 covados 
in the space before the façade and principal door of the church.  
Outside this church's enclosure is another in which five or six big pedestals of black 
stone are to be seen. Near at hand are four columns of the same stone 10 or 12 spans 
high. Among them is a seat on which the Emperors sit to be crowned after first having 
taken his seat on the pedestals I mentioned and after various ceremonies have been 
performed on them  
(see 
Ch. 7: 6
 for an account of the coronation).  
What is most worth seeing here, a display of presumptuous grandeur, is many tall stones 
like obelisks, needles and pyramids. They are in a meadow lying behind the church. I 
counted some twenty that were standing and seven or eight that have been thrown to the 
ground and broken in many fragments. The tallest of those standing, if measured by its 
shadow, is 104 spans. Its width at the base is ten spans, it becomes thinner as it goes up, 
like a pyramid, but it is not square; it has two sides broader and two narrower than the 
other two. It is carved as though in small panels each of which is like a square of two 
spans. This is the style of all those which have this carving, which are the taller ones. The 
rest are rough and unshaped slabs without any carving at all. The shortest are from 30 to 
40 spans; the rest are all taller. It can be seen from the fragments of three or four of 
those that have been overthrown, that they were much bigger than the tallest of those now 
standing, which I said was a hundred and four spans, and some can be seen to have been 
over two hundred. The old men of this country say that a few years ago, in the time of 
King Malaac Cegued, and the Viceroy Isaac who rebelled and brought in the Turks to 
help him against the Emperor, they overthrew the six or seven that lie on the ground in 
fragments.  
No one can say what was the object of the former kings who raised them up. It may well 
be thought that they were like mausoleums erected near their tombs, since this was the 
object of the Egyptians. It was no doubt from them, through their proximity and the 

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constant communication there was between them, that they learnt about, and that the 
workmen came to make, these barbarous and monstrous structures. A bombard shot 
away from this spot is a broad stone not much higher than a man on which a long 
inscription can be seen. Many Greek and some Latin letters are recognisable, but when 
joined together, they do not make words in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or any other known 
language, and so the meaning of the writing is not discoverable.  
Balthasar Tellez also added a little to the picture of Aksum in the seventeenth century, in 
his book published in Portugal in 1660, and later translated into English (1710); much of 
his information  repeats de Almeida's.  
At this time there is no settled city in all Ethiopia; formerly the town of Aczum was very 
famous among the Abyssinians, and still preserves somewhat of its renown; and this 
place seems to have been a city, at least they look upon it as most certain, that the Queen 
of Sheba kept her court there, and that it was the residence of the emperors for many 
ages after, and they are crown'd there to this day . . . this is the city Aczum, or Auxum . . . 
at present it is only a village of about 100 houses. There are to be seen many ancient 
ruins, particularly those of a spacious church. . . . The most magnificent thing that 
appears here, are certain very tall stones, in the nature of obelisks, or pyramids, the 
biggest of them 78 foot in length, the breadth at the foot seven foot six inches. It is cut as 
it were in small cushions, each of them about half a yard square; the smallest of them 
being between 25 and 30 foot high are rude misshapen stones. Some of those which seem 
to have been tallest are thrown down, and they say, the Turks entering Ethiopia 
overthrew them. The end of erecting them may reasonably suppos'd to have been for 
monuments, near their graves; which was the design of the Egyptians in their so famous 
pyramids. Here is also a stone set up with a large inscription, in Greek and Latin 
characters, but they do not make any sense.  
Illustration 20. View of part of the central pavilion at Dungur, showing the granite 
corner-blocks, one of the re-entrants, and the rebates in the walls.  
4. Aksumite Domestic Architecture 
The general style of the élite domestic buildings of Aksum has been described above (
Ch. 
5: 2
), and reconstructions have been attempted (in Littmann 1913; and, more modestly, 
by Buxton and Matthews 1974). The pavilions in their domestic enclosures are the most 
typical examples of the unique Aksumite form of construction, and embody most of the 
characteristics of Aksumite architecture. The podia (the only parts of these buildings 
which survive, except in very rare cases) were built according to a style whereby the 
walls exhibited no long straight stretches, but instead were indented, so that any long 
walls were formed by a series of recesses or re-entrants and salients. These, considering 
that the building material was mostly random rubble (coursed stonework is rarely found), 
bound only with mud mortar, must have been designed to strengthen walls with low 
cohesion inclined to sag, and to deal with expansion and contraction caused by widely-
ranging temperatures. Later structures, such as the Lalibela churches, show that the 
indentations were not used only on the podia, but extended to roof level.  

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