Abstract
The Persian prophet Mani, who lived in the third century AD, wrote:
There are four great kingdoms on earth: the first is the Kingdom of Babylon and Persia; the second is the Kingdom of Rome; the third is the Kingdom of the Aksumites: the fourth is the kingdom of the Chinese.1
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Notes
Philip Snow, The Star Raft, China’s Encounter with Africa, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1988, pp. 1–8.
C.F. Beckingham and G.W.B. Huntingford (eds), The Prester John of the Indies, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1961, pp. 145–60.
The stone is illustrated in David W. Phillipson, Ancient Ethiopia, British Museum Press, London, 1998, p. 25.
J. Theodore Bent, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians, Longmans, Green, London, 1893.
Vimala Begley and Richard Daniel de Puma (eds), Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1991.
153 types of Aksumite coins are now known, plus many die variants. More may come to light. The most recent and thorough discussion of the subject is Stuart Munro-Hay and Bengt Juel-Jensen, Aksumite Coinage, Spink, London, 1995.
Celebrated and illustrated by Georg Gerster in Churches in Rock, Phaidon Press, London, 1970, pp. 135ff.
Ibn Hisham, Sira, Cairo, 1937, as cited in J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, Frank Cass, London, 1965, p. 44.
No evidence of a conversion has come to light in Ethiopia from written sources or traditions, but the allegation has continued to be repeated by Muslim writers into modern times. For a discussion of the allegations in the framework of early Islamic relationships see Haggai Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1994, pp. 3–19.
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© 2000 Paul B. Henze
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Henze, P.B. (2000). The Aksumite Empire. In: Layers of Time. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11786-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11786-1_2
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