Girls at Tesfa Hiwot Elementary School
Tsion Mariam Church with Ark of the Covenant
Stelae
Stelae
Underground vault, Stelae Field
Inside church next to Tsion Mariam Church
Queen of Sheba's pool
Part of Enzana inscription
Blocks at King Kaleb's crypt
Children selling baskets from outside Queen of Sheba's Palace
Queen of Sheba's Palace
Original fireplace, Queen of Sheba's Palace
Wall of Queen of Sheba's Palace
Site of throne, Queen of Sheba's Palace
Our bus driver
We had a leisurely start to the day with a 9.30 am flight from Lalibela to Axum which is about 350km north of Lalibela; the flight taking just over half an hour in a rather old and decrepit Bombardier Q400.
Axum is the most ancient of Ethiopian capitals and is the holiest city of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church because of the Ark of the Covenant.
Our first activity in Axum was to visit a central elementary/primary school and present the Principal with a collection of pens, pencils and writing pads we’d all brought with us in anticipation of there being a deficiency in basic stationery in schools. The teachers were very appreciative and when we visited three classrooms the children sang songs and acted out short conversations in English much to the delight of all present. The students were enthusiastic and very well behaved and we departed the school with a feeling of cautious optimism as we all acknowledged that the key to Ethiopia’s future is through education.
After lunch at our hotel that took forever to appear, we drove in our yellow bus to the main stelae field opposite the church of Tsion Maryam.
The stelae field is barely any larger than a football field and contains around 75 stelae of various shapes and sizes. Most are giant headstones linked to specific kings and emperors and their families.
The second largest stele standing is a solid granite obelisk 23 metres high and engraved with elaborate symbols. The stele was dedicated to the second century King Ezana. The granite was quarried 4km away and probably transported by elephants and wooden rollers. Erecting it must have been an incredibly difficult and dangerous task. The stele is now being supported by wire ropes anchored to concrete blocks as there’s concern about its stability. This stele has an interesting history although no-one is sure who built it. During the Italian occupation (1936 – 1941) the 26m high obelisk was stolen and cut into three pieces and then shipped and re-erected in the Piazza in Rome. After much negotiating the looted stele was returned to its rightful home in 2005 with the three pieces each being returned by air-transport!
The largest of Axum’s stele is supposedly credited to the 3rd-century King Remhai. It was to have been about 500 tons of engraved granite 33m high but something went terribly wrong with the size and design of the supporting base that was to go in the ground and the whole thing toppled over and now lies there smashed into four main pieces each about the size of a large bus! Its decorations reveal a door and twelve windows.
We then visited a number of underground vaults/crypts lined with finely cut granite blocks; the precision of the stone masonry being near perfect.
We then crossed the road and entered the very new and garishly decorated church adjacent to the legendary Tsion Mariam Church. It is claimed to be the final resting place of Moses’ Ark of the Covenant, used to transport the tablets on which the Ten Commandments are written. There is only one man alive allowed to view this Ark and he stays as a recluse in the church until death and then a replacement is determined, a bit like the Papal election. Underneath the Tsion Mariam Church is a museum displaying numerous gold and silver crowns, precious jewels, elaborate robes, ancient Bibles and other artefacts from the early dynastic period. Of special interest were three stone tablets each about a metre high engraved with writing in three languages namely Sabaean, Ge’ez and ancient Greek. Just as the Rosetta Stone gave clues to the link between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the ancient Greek languages, these stones have enabled archaeologists to have a better understanding of Ethiopian history by providing a stone-age dictionary!
Another nearby archaeological museum gave an interesting overview of the history of Axum. At around 500 BC or even 300 years earlier the Queen of Sheba supposedly ruled over Ethiopia (Abyssinia) which in those days included Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Eretria, Djibouti and African countries as far south as Madagascar. She visited Jerusalem to meet King Solomon and this encounter resulted in her producing a son who went on to become King Menelik I. This led to the myth that there was an unbroken Solomonic Dynasty of 237 emperors right up to the last one, King Haile Selassie who was deposed and killed during the revolution of 1974 -1991.
In the late afternoon we visited Mai Shum, a small lake about 200m long which was supposedly The Queen of Sheba’s swimming pool although there was plenty of evidence of recent repairs and modifications. It is now used as a men’s only swimming and washing area but the water is anything but clean looking!
We drove further up the hill to the necropolis of the 6th century Kings Gebre-Meskel and King Kaleb. These two underground crypts are fashioned from granite blocks that are locked together in a way very similar to the Inca buildings in Peru.
As a final piece of Ethiopian history we drove a short distance out of town to the Ruins of Dungar where there is a further stelae field but more significantly we saw the ruins purporting to be the Queen of Sheba’s Palace. There is relatively little remaining apart from the plinth for her enormous throne, a kitchen oven and some stonework associated with walls, steps and drainage. There were apparently more than 50 rooms in this palace.
Our day of exploring this famous city has given us an ideal way of ending our visit to Ethiopia as it ties the very beginning of this country’s ancient history with that of today’s 21st century developing nation.
Ethiopia is an absolutely fascinating country indeed and maybe best described a “living history”!!