Aksum An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity Stuart Munro-Hay



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Much of the interpretation of these mottoes is subjective, but they were evidently chosen 
with a purpose, and it is of value to at least suggest possible motives for them. It may be, 
for example, that the change of emphasis in the mottoes towards the end of the coinage 
hints at unrest in the country. After the Christian mottoes which we interpret as part of 
the propaganda to spread Christianity, the kings Armah, Israel, and Hataz all use mottoes 
asking for mercy or peace for the people. Occasional references seem to indicate military 
activity; Gersem, perhaps the last or penultimate of the coin- issuers, employs the phrase 
`He conquers (shall conquer) through Christ'.  
 


Illustration 52. Drawings of the coinage of king Gersem of Aksum, consisting of two 
gold types (d. c. 17mm), a silver type (d. c. 16mm) which sometimes shows vowelling on 
some of the letters, and two bronze types (d. c. 16mm); the first of the bronze types bears 
the motto `He conquers through Christ'.  
5. The End of the Coinage 
 
From the introduction of the `tremissis', the Aksumite coinage denominations seem to 
have changed very little. The gold continued into the seventh century, stable in weight 
but more and more debased with silver, and increasingly degenerate in appearance, with 
often badly-written Greek legends. Probably, by this period, the internal decline of the 
country represented by the debasement of the gold coins was supplemented by the 
closure of trade routes by Persian and then Muslim activity, marking the end of the old 
Red Sea commerce. How long money continued to be used in preference to other 
currency goods such as salt blocks or cloth (which al-Muqaddasi says was used as a 
medium of excha nge in Ethiopia in the 10th century; Vantini 1975: 176) is not known. 
The end of the coinage may have been gradual, or resulted from an Aksumite military 
defeat. At any rate, severance of the trading links which had given the original impetus to 
the coinage, or instability in the country's internal affairs, seem to have ended Aksum's 
long experience of a monetary system not many decades after 600AD.  
 
Illustration 53. Drawings of gold coins (d. c. 16mm) of kings Ella Gabaz and Ioel; the 
Greek legends are beginning to grow more barbarous at this period.  
6. Modern Study of the Coinage 
 


The rediscovery of the Aksumite coinage has been a slow process. Nathaniel Pearce, who 
was in Ethiopia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, may have been the first to 
describe Aksumite coins (although parts of his descriptions are hard to reconcile with the 
Aksumite series, and may have referred to Roman coins found at Aksum instead). He 
says, speaking of the wells at Aksum, "I was told . . . that in clearing out the rubbish of a 
well which, (the Greek Apostella) had discovered, he found some gold coins which he 
shewed me; and indeed, two of the same kind came into my possession several months 
afterwards, but, unfortunately, having forwarded them to Mr. Salt, they were lost upon 
the road. One of them had a bald man's head upon one side and apparently arms upon 
the reverse, the second had a woman's head, with a forked crown on it, and something 
imitating a balance or scales; the characters were Greek. The coin was as thick in the 
middle as an English half crown, though not thicker than a shilling round the edges, and 
in circumference about the size of a guinea" (Pearce 1831: 163). The thicker central part 
of the flan sounds like a description of the coins of Endubis, as does the `bald man's 
head', whilst the forked crown might be a description of the Aksumite tiara; but neither of 
the reverses sounds Aksumite.  
As the nineteenth century progressed, a few scholars noted a coin here and there; Halévy 
in 1837, Rüppell in the 1840s, Langlois in 1859, Kenner, von Heuglin, Longperier and 
d'Abbadie in the 1860s, Friedländer in 1879, Drouin, Prideaux, von Sallet and 
Schlumberger in the 1880s. In 1913 Littmann published the DAE report, with a chapter 
on the coins. Much more significant were the publications of Arturo Anzani in 1926, 
1928, and 1941, and of Carlo Conti Rossini in 1927. Since then there has been a steady, 
though sparse, appearance of publications gradually enlarging the known corpus of coins, 
and commenting on their historical and numismatic significance. A full bibliography is 
given in Munro-Hay (1984).  
10. Religion 
 
1. The Pre-Christian Period 
 
We are fortunate in having translations into Greek of the names of some of the gods 
mentioned in the Aksumite inscriptions (
Ch. 11: 5
). These indicate the identifications the 
Aksumites themselves found for their gods among the deities of the Greek pantheon. Of 
these, Astar was associated with Zeus, and Mahrem was paralleled with Ares. Beher, if 
his name is cognate with the Arabic word bahr, the sea, may be Poseidon, who was 
certainly worshipped in some equivalent form in Aksum, as the Monumentum 
Adulitanum (
Ch. 11: 5
) indicates. This interpretation is uncertain, however, since the 
names of the two deities Beher and Meder seem to derive from words meaning land or 
country in Ge`ez (see the note in Ullendorff 1973: 94, 1). It seems, therefore, that when 
they are joined with Astar (see below) the three form an Ethiopian trinity of either 
heaven, earth and sea, or one with a possibly agricultural significance. The trinity 


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