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Ezana

King of the Kingdom of Aksum, One of the Earliest African Monarchs to Convert to Christianity

One Legend Remembered for Life · Small Roles, Famous Names

The Kingdom of AksumOne of the Earliest Christian Monarchs of AfricaThe Obelisks of Aksum

Who they are

Ezana (reigned c. 320–c. 360) was king of the East African Kingdom of Aksum (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea), during whose rule Aksum was at the height of its power, controlling important trade routes along the Red Sea coast and keeping active trade with the Roman Empire, Persia, and India, one of the acknowledged major commercial powers of the ancient world. During his reign he formally converted to Christianity, making Aksum one of the earliest regimes in sub-Saharan Africa to establish Christianity as the official faith at the state level, a point in time even earlier than the Roman Empire’s formal establishment of Christianity as the state religion. The coins he minted at first bore traditional pagan symbols of sun and moon, thereafter gradually replaced by the cross, and this historic change of coin imagery is an important material evidence by which archaeologists date his conversion to Christianity. The giant granite obelisks of the Kingdom of Aksum surviving to this day (the tallest about 33 meters high, one of the tallest known single-stone monuments of the ancient world) are still important historical witnesses to the once-brilliant prosperity of this ancient African civilization.

Primary sourcesAksumite inscriptions (trilingual steles in Greek, Ge’ez, and Sabaean)The indirect accounts of Byzantine historians

Key stories

The Change of Faith on the Coins

Through systematic study of the changes in the coin imagery of the Kingdom of Aksum minted in different periods, archaeologists found that the coins of the early part of Ezana’s reign still bore traditional pagan symbols of sun and moon, thereafter gradually replaced by the Christian cross, and this historic change of coin imagery provided precious first-hand archaeological evidence for scholars to date his conversion to Christianity approximately, Aksum thereby becoming one of the earliest known regimes of sub-Saharan Africa to establish Christianity as the official faith.

The Obelisks of Aksum

The giant granite obelisks of the Kingdom of Aksum surviving to this day, the tallest about 33 meters high, are one of the tallest known single-stone monuments of the ancient world; these obelisks marked the underground tombs of members of the royal house, and the fineness and complexity of their carving and the skill of their transport and raising fully display the highly developed architectural engineering capacity of Aksumite civilization — one obelisk had earlier been looted by Italian colonizers and carried to Rome, and only in 2005, after much difficulty, was it returned to its original Ethiopian site and re-erected.

Relationships

Ally

💎The Queen of Sheba　Both are closely bound to the historical and cultural tradition of the Ethiopian region

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The historical source of the Ethiopian Orthodox ChurchKing Ezana’s conversion to Christianity and its establishment as the state religion is the historical starting point of the religious tradition the Ethiopian Orthodox Church still continues, and Ethiopia thereby became one of the earliest states in the world to have Christianity as its state religion, an identity still an important part of Ethiopian national identity.

Appears in

The Roman Peace and the Two Ends of the Silk RoadJustinian, Attila, and Aksum

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