From Community to State: The Development of the Aksumite Polity (Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea), c. 400 BC–AD 800

Abstract

The so-called Kingdom of Aksum in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea was the dominant African polity along the southern Red Sea in the first millennium AD. The polity emerged in central Tigray (northern Ethiopia) in the late first millennium BC, incorporated eastern Tigray and central Eritrea in the mid-first millennium AD, and eventually declined in the late first millennium AD. The adoption of Christianity as a state religion in the fourth century AD was a crucial event in the history of the polity. At present, the development of this polity is uncertain, as no real effort to understand the process of formation, consolidation, and decline has been made. In this paper I suggest that a local polity based on kinship emerged at Aksum in the fourth century BC to second century AD, incorporated most of the highlands in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea in the third century, and consolidated as a kingdom organized on the same state-church relationship of other eastern Mediterranean Christian states in the fifth–sixth centuries AD. The inclusion of the polity in Roman-Byzantine long-distance trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, warfare, and adoption of Christianity were the crucial factors that sustained the main transformations of the polity through time.