The British Museum Excavations at Adulis, 1868

Abstract

In 1868, during the British military expedition to Magdala in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), an archaeological excavation was undertaken, under the auspices of R. Holmes, a representative of the British Museum, at the ancient port-city of Adulis a few kilometres from the Red Sea coast. The excavation, of which some details were reported in a War Office Publication of 1870, was one of the earliest undertaken in Africa south of the Sahara. As a result an ancient church was discovered and cleared. Among the finds were a number of items of ecclesiastical furniture, some apparently imported in a prefabricated state from the Roman eastern Mediterranean. Some of these pieces, now lodged in the British Museum, are here published for the first time.