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- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [00:45]
Dil Singh Basanti
BetterHelp Online Therapy bought this 30 second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath in and out. Feels better, right? That's 15 seconds of self care. Imagine what you could do with more visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of therapy. No pressure, just help. But for now, just relax. Out here we feel things the sore calves that lead to epic views, the cool waterfall mist during a hot hike, and the breeze that hits just right at the summit. But hey, don't just listen to us. Experience it for yourself. Alltrails makes it easy to discover the best of the outdoors with more than 450,000 trails around the world, points of interest along the trail, and offline maps for always on navigation. Download the free app today and find your next outdoor adventure.
- [02:13]
Tristan Hughes
It's the 4th century A.D. a merchant ship sails out of the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden along one of the busiest maritime routes in the world, the trade route that connected the Roman Empire and its ports in Egypt with India. But this ship and its crew are neither Roman nor Indian. They are Aksumite. Hailing from the bustling port of Edulis in present day Eritrea. Their destination? The flourishing ports along India's west coast. The boat is filled to the brim with Aksumite goods to sell ivory, tortoiseshell, rhino horn and gold. In exchange, they hope to acquire steel and spices, valuable commodities both in Axum and in the Roman Empire to their north. These African merchants were vital cogs in this far reaching trade route, making both them and the kingdom they hailed from all the richer. It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the story of the kingdom of Aksum, situated largely in what is today northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. Incredibly well positioned with Strong contacts to the Roman Mediterranean, India, Arabia, and Mesopotamia, the Kingdom of Aksum flourished and became incredibly powerful in the first millennium A.D. today, it is most famous for the gigantic stelae, obelisks that towered over its main city, and for the kingdom's early conversion to Christianity in the 4th century. But as you're about to hear, there is so much more to Aksum's story. To explain all, I was delighted to interview the archaeologist and Aksum expert Dil singh Basanti. A PhD candidate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Dil has worked out in Ethiopia on Aksum's archaeology for several years and holds a particular interest in Aksumite mortuary monuments and burial practices. He's a fantastic speaker, and his passion for all things Aksum shines through. It's infectious. I really do hope you enjoy, Dill. It is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [04:32]
Dil Singh Basanti
Thank you so much, Tristan. I really appreciate you having me.
- [04:35]
Tristan Hughes
And to talk about the Kingdom of Axum, there is so much to explore with the story of Axum and its incredible archeology. There is so much to talk about.
- [04:45]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, we've really had an explosion of work in the last couple of decades. So prior to that, we've just had excavations and a few areas in the capital city and a couple of other cities themselves. But since then, we've had work going on from some of the earliest times. We have a new cultural horizon that stretches back even deeper in time, going on into the medieval times and after. So we're really getting a horizontal and vertical spread across the Aksumite region.
- [05:14]
Tristan Hughes
We've got a big period of time to cover. And you mentioned there in passing, the capital. So, Dil, where are we talking about with the Kingdom of Axum, with modern countries?
- [05:27]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah. So the capital itself, Aksum, is in northern Ethiopia in a state called Tigray, the Tigray Plateau. But the actual polity, we don't fully know the boundaries. A lot of the work that's been done, it's as we see in many places, where you have roads and where you can actually get to. So a lot of it trends towards the east of Aksum. And then we have a lot of older work that was done in Eritrea, so we know that it took up a lot of current Tigray going into Eritrea. There are times in its history that it stretched across the sea and had some sort of influence in South Arabia. There's oral traditions in Uganda that relate to Aksum that we don't really know how those relate. You go down to Central Southeast parts of Ethiopia. You'll find Aksumite coinage there. I've worked in Amhara in the more like central, central north state where you'll have oral traditions of things that different Oxumite kings built and things going on there as well. But that full history itself is unexplored. So we don't really know the full boundaries right now we're focused more on the Tigray state and that those northeast regions of Ethiopia going into Eritrea.
- [06:42]
Tristan Hughes
But Dyl, thinking about that area of the world in antiquity, you know, if you've got the, the Red Sea, there's connections with Arabia, southern Arabia as you've mentioned, the Horn of Africa. This feels like an incredibly important and strategic area of the world geographically where you find this ancient kingdom rising.
- [07:02]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, it definitely is. It's strategic and it's in a good location for a few different reasons because first of all there is like the political interest and the economic interests over the Red Sea trade and the Indian Ocean trade. There's times when I believe it was Justinian the first like sent a letter to Aksum to persuade them to go into South Arabia. And he said it was because the king of the er, Donawas was persecuting Christians. But it seems that they're maybe more interested in silk prices and wanted an ally in the region. We find many aspects of the trade that we can go into. You know, we have shipwrecks carrying Aqaba amphora coming from Jordan in the Red Sea. We find Aqaba all over the place. You go into people's homes today just like the compounds and amphora littered the floors. Right. And we have a monastery as I was talking about earlier to you, how some of the monasteries keep a lot of the ancient artifacts and there's a big sort of indigenous component to archeology and so forth. We have a monastery that literally has a cache of Buddhist coins from the Krishana empires and Pakistan, Punjab, Afghanistan, like there. And you know, so you have these economic interests but before that there is also a mix of cultures going on in the area which coming from a Semitic influence. So cuz the language, the primary language during Oxum in, in the area is mostly a Semitic language but mixing in with cultures from Sudan as, as well, which is where the stela tradition probably comes from. So it was already like an area of interaction that well, for that reason became important for economic and political reasons and many different scales.
- [08:51]
Tristan Hughes
Can you talk to us a bit about the types of source material that we have that experts and archaeologists like yourself have for Learning more about the kingdom of Aksum.
- [08:59]
Dil Singh Basanti
Axum is always kind of internationally known, and that comes from textual material. So we have foreign records, and we have had histories of Aksum written just with foreign materials coming from the Greeks and historians. We have poetry from Arabia that talks about Aksum. We have economic works dealing with the trade. That's usually what foreign records are referring to. So the most famous is the Periplus of the Red Sea, which is written in the first century and lists the Aksumite port a Julius and talks about Aksum as the capital controlling influence over that region. So we have these foreign records. We have internal inscriptions in Gez as well as Sabian and Greek from the various kings in the area. And then we also have or tradition that relates to the histories in Aksum. And that's a good way to find sites, and that's a good way to get sort of a preliminary idea of the dating in some places, or at least like, try to figure out what cultural horizon you're working with. Then we also have coins, which is kind of an international textual material because those are found all over the place when they're original. We also have counterfeit coins because the Romans are actually making counterfeits of oxamite coins. So we find those in Palestine. We found those in Sri Lanka and so forth. But they're. They're like a little smaller. They're these miniature versions. So we have coinage, which is another big study. And then we have the more traditional historical and archeological methods. So excavations. We had accounts of explorers going back to Princess garvares in the 15th century. But then formal excavations began in the 19th century, and those have continued periodically. We had a big set of recordings in the early 1900s, and then a set of excavations that weren't published in the mid 20th century. And then from 1970, we had a good deal of work before interruption with the change in the political regimes until mid-1990s, where we've had more sustained archeological work, first in just a few areas. But now there's a lot of teams from all over the place working in Tigray and with Aksum and Oxumi cultures.
- [11:09]
Tristan Hughes
Well, let's explore one of those horizons that it seems, whether you hinted at earlier, is being expanded currently, which surrounds the origins of the kingdom of Axum. Now, D what do we know about this? How this kingdom emerges?
- [11:23]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah. So this has been one of the things that's been changing in recent years and how people think about Aksum. There used to be a model where Aksum was thought to be Colonized by South Arabia sometime In maybe around 800 B.C. the earliest sites in Aksum at that time, which would be the Temple of Yeha, had South Arabian features and was dedicated to a South Arabian pantheon of polytheistic gods. So Al Mukab, the God the moon, was the biggest of those. And then there was another site, Woko area as well, that was uncovered. You know, when you get to a new archeological area, the first thing you find are the big things, or the first thing you're looking at the big things. So the earliest big things we had were South Arabian. Right. But since the archeological work has accumulated, we have cultural horizons stretching back. There was a wave of sites popping up from around the 900 BC to 1200 BC range with Mahadrasha excavated by UCLA Segliman by university of Napoli. Laurie, Italy. The Ona culture up in Eritrea around Asmara was one of the first by Peter Schmidt and Matthew Curtis. And then Gulu Makita, which is a site that's on that route between Oxum and the port city that started, that found out, was earlier than the trade, and all these sites were earlier than Yeha. And in addition to that, that area that I just talked about, Gullah Makeda, they recently published in the last couple of years dating that goes back to about 1600 B.C. it shows some of the earliest, like, agricultural working in the area. So the current idea that we have is that there are movements and migrations and interactions going on a very large scale, going out to the Arabian Peninsula and Semitic influences that would come there, mixing with things that were very local. The earliest place we find the Sila tradition is actually near Kassala in Sudan, and that's in the second millennium, early second millennium BC or so. And so that seems to be the earliest thing that we consider in the complex of the sites or cultural region that we're talking about. And it looks like we're having a big interaction sphere with people from there, interacting with people arriving more from coastal regions, probably using what we call the Teza River Valley, which is one of the feeding rivers into the Blake Tana and then the Blue Nile. And so there's probably like agropasturalist groups that are interacting with settled communities. And within this big sphere of interaction, you start having complex polities emerge.
- [14:03]
Tristan Hughes
So Axum emerges. And of course, we call it the Kingdom of Axum, which I'm guessing, kind of gives the game away. Dill, do we know much about the whole social and political structure of the Kingdom of Axum?
- [14:17]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so we do know they Had a king who's called a negus.
- [14:20]
Tristan Hughes
Surprise. Yeah, yeah.
- [14:22]
Dil Singh Basanti
And that's mentioned in the Peripolis. And that's. We see that in the inscriptions and so forth. The different Neguses, the most famous being King Ghazana, erected restrictions to his many military victories over surrounding groups going up to Meroe, actually in Sudan. And then we also have a coinage line where the kings were actually imprinting their likenesses on the coin. So we have been able to get a king's list from that, but it's also incomplete. So like some of the kings we know about because they're, you know, you have to go to India and you find the coins there that talk about kings you didn't really know about in Oxu before. And all of a sudden you find like a coin with a new king on it. Right. So we do have like a kings list, but the entire range of kings is not well known. A lot of them are only really known from coinage. And there's a lot of reading between the lines on how the kings talk and how various people talk about the kings, where it looks like there's something called the Negusa Nagast, the king of the kings. And then there does seem to be some regional political system that had their own centralized heads as well. So it's not just the king, but there does seem to be a sizable nobility. Now that is for the Oxamine period going before that. We don't really know. There's a lot more legendary traditions and, or traditions that relate to kings. But at least from the Aksumite period, we do start seeing a king's list and we do start seeing all these references.
- [15:47]
Tristan Hughes
Do we know then if you say there evidently was this nobility and almost, I guess almost a hierarchy of people in control. You mentioned earlier Axum as the capital. Do we know of many other key urban centers in this kingdom?
- [16:02]
Dil Singh Basanti
So we know about a few. There's ones that are mentioned in the Peripolis. So A Dulis is the main port of Aksum. And there's another town they mentioned that I believe they say was like a three days walk away called Koloe. And there's two sites that, that might match up to. One is Matara, which was excavated, I believe in the 60s or 70s, and we haven't really had much work since and not much is known about it. The other one, and more likely one is a place called Kohaito. These are both in southern Eritrea. So Kahaido seems to be another urban center. And in the Periplus, that's mentioned as the first place where you can get ivory, which was the primary export of the oxumites. So Kahaido is a big one. One of my colleagues and professors, Matthew Curtis, was working there in the early 2000s. But unfortunately we had conflicts starting in the regions at that time between the border war and since then, no work has been really done there. So there's many like urban places we know about that people just can't get to. And that's one of them. And then there's just a plethora of sites. So my career up at John Hopkins has been doing some of the most instrumental work in looking at settlement patterns. And what we actually find is from the change from what we call the Preoximite period to the Oxamite period. Preoximite period has a few centralized sites that appear much more hierarchical. And we see that with some of the Sabian temple features as well, that their entire like spatial syntax is about like restricting access. When we get to the Oxamai period, it's not that these cities get bigger, they actually get smaller, they decentralize a bit. There's definite population growth and there's a lot more infilling. So it's more like a conglomeration of centers. From excavations that we've seen in the 90s under Philipson, it looks like there's a bunch of satellite sites that are all interdependent. So you start having these like urban clusters. So you have a few major metropolis that seem to be mentioned along the trade between Aksum, Gula, Makeira, which I mentioned earlier, or at least like urban areas, is how we have to start thinking about them. Going up to Kaido and then a Doulas. But we have all these other sites too that just sort of. Matthew Curtis, when we were working out in Shire, he'd go out on survey for like a week and a half and find six settlements and then a cemetery. Everyone lost for like 60 years or something. So there's all these other sites that seem to have some urban sense of specialization to them and seem to be interdependent with everything else going on.
- [18:26]
Tristan Hughes
Could we imagine potentially is the G word. Could they potentially be these kind of guilds or something like that?
- [18:32]
Dil Singh Basanti
They totally could be. With the specialization that we're seeing people that aren't working in Aksum, they're just working on the Indian Ocean trade. Do talk about those guilds operating on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade or some sense of commercial groups or brotherhoods. So there may be something like that. Going on in Auxum that probably originates in its own way and then maybe interacting with these larger economic structures. The archaeological correlate that we can definitely say is that a lot of them do seem specialized, even either for hide working or other types of manufacture and so forth. They do seem to be their own industrial units.
- [19:07]
Tristan Hughes
So let's move on to trade. Highly anticipated this chapter in our country conversation, given the hints you've already given regarding how important it is and if we focus first on maritime trade, because you mentioned the port of a due list, which does feel to be really, really significant. If you were an Axamide trader and you had a ship and you were going from somewhere like a doulas. Well, let's say from a doulas. How far and wide were the Axumite maritime contacts? How far and why could you trade your goods?
- [19:37]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so we have a couple of sources for that, a couple of documentary sources. The first is the Periplus, which mentions a lot the ports. But there was another HitchHiker in the 6th, 7th centuries, Cosmas and Dicoplastis. So we're not sure if he made it to where he says he made it or implies that he made it. But it looks like from his readings we can gather that the main ports of Auxum were actually in Sri Lanka. And he seems to mention Oxumite ships themselves. And we do find Oxumite artifacts, coinage and pottery popping up in Gujarat, popping up in Tamil Nadu, in other places in southern India, and then popping up in Sri Lanka as well, which I mentioned earlier. We find some of the Roman counterfeits down there. Right. So we do find artifacts that are corroborating that to some degree. We don't know if Indigo Places himself went down to Sri Lanka himself, but he certainly talks about Oxumite boats. He's actually there when one of the kings, King Caleb, is about to launch those wars into South Arabia apparently, and is gathering his ships together for that. So that's the direction that we know. Oxamites seem to show direct link and trade connections. They have very, very strong links. And probably a bigger injection of their trade was coming from the upper parts of the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. So Aqaba, like I said, it's actually a Roman emphora made in Aqaba, Jordan. That's probably the second most common party type we see in a local red wares. But we also find in one of the main sites that's been excavated by Georges, they have before that late Roman III emperor and the Galles type. And they can actually identify some of the manufacturers going to production centers in France or in ancient Gaul at the time. We do have redware coming in from Tunisia, so there's a big injection coming from this Mediterranean and Red Sea trade. And that's probably mostly where they're operating. And then there's a bunch of tangential hints that people will overinflate or dismiss this evidence, depending on who's talking. But there may be relations with China in terms of some of the Han import lists match up with what's coming up with out of Aksum. And then there's mentions of kingdoms, Huang Chi, which may relate in a lot of circumstantial factors to Axum. We did find Castile in Aksum itself, which at the time is being made in China. But we, you know, with iron production, there might be all sorts of things going on. What seems one of the more likely ones is that there are memoirs written immediately after the decentralization of Aksum, after the Battle of Talus, where one of the generals from the Tang dynasty, when you trace out his root, this work by Wilbur Schmidt, when he traced out his root, he seems to have made it to Aksum and exited through the port of the duelist. So we're talking about, like, where are people interacting completely, you know, there. China may be involved in interactions, but we need to understand that if it is, it's more of an indirect thing. There are much bigger interactions going on between India, Rome, and we do find Sassanian ware. So going up into the Sassanian, you know, regions in Iran and so forth as well. And we do have Arabic poetry, like I mentioned, from Iraq that talks about the Oxumite ships. And it has, like, very beautiful, deep. It's a. It's a court poet that's basically bragging about their court and in this case, bragging about a queen. And talks about the Oxamite ships just with imagery of them parting the foam of the water. Like this caravan that he's talking about as part is going through the desert and parting away the sands. So those are the. So those are the places that are. Seem to be interacting with Auxum. And it's not just that we're talking about direct trade links. We start talking about some of the virtual mechanisms, trade things like cosmopolitanism, globalization, so forth. While at least Akaba and some of the other amphora are very, very common throughout Aksum. And. But there is one place we don't see any imports at all in Aksum, and that is in the Stela park in the graves. So they do seem to. Yeah, so they do seem to differentiate between local and foreign there. And we do see the same thing going on in other parts of the trade where, like, you know, there's. There's sources in Egypt that talk about, like, Indians buying wine and getting drunk. There's sources in India that talk about the foreigners that eat way too much black pepper and so forth. So all these sort of categories of, like, foreignness Are being built along these trades, and we see it in a. As well.
- [23:52]
Tristan Hughes
I'd like to quickly ask. Because you've highlighted there. I don't need to ask it now Because I think we've already covered it, like, the importance of axum in that. That really significant trade route between the Roman empire and India that we've covered in previous conversations. And also the fact that you highlighted there Axumite ships. And I'm guessing I didn't really think of Aksum as a maritime power, but having control of that important stretch of water can make the kings, the rulers of Aksum incredibly, you know, mighty and powerful because of all the trades going through Alongside, you know, contacts with Sri Lanka and India and sassanian Persia and the Roman empire. Do we know whether the Aksumites also went down the east coast of Africa to places like Zanzibar and so on?
- [24:36]
Dil Singh Basanti
That's a good question. We actually don't know if. From the periplus, I think the last port they mention on the east coast of Africa Is a place called rapta, which may match up with Somalia. We generally don't know how. How far they're going into down the coast, the Swahili coast. Trade is something that would pick up after this more antiquity version of the Indian ocean trade that seems to be its own independent thing that occurs later or is using. If there's any infrastructure there that they might be using. That's not fully known to us, that this is more a larger investigative issue. We don't really know how far into the African interior, Other parts of Africa going south and southwest, that oxum actually went, Going from the kind of known to the unknown. We have a lot of the excavations have occurred from oxumite east, going up to the red sea trade. So there's sort of a bias of information Just in where we can do work in the best places to do work that kind of point to these international roots. And then we have, you know, the interaction sphere between Sudan, those Afghan roots in the. In the immediate region that we are. But going beyond that, that's something that we don't fully know. That's what makes some of these other, like chance finds or chance instance references to Aum, such as oral traditions in Uganda and so forth. That's what makes them interesting. We don't really know much about them and they haven't really been investigated in any way.
- [25:54]
Tristan Hughes
One last thing, on the trading contacts, you mentioned ivory earlier, but what were some of the other main goods that the Aksumites were trading in that they were exporting and those that they were.
- [26:06]
Dil Singh Basanti
Importing, they seem to be mostly exporting raw materials, tortoise shell, rhino horn, things like that. Ivory is above and beyond their major one. Myrrh was probably. This is another region that's important for myrrh. So that might have also been involved. As you know, this perishable trade doesn't, you know, preserve as well in the archaeological record. There's what the Periplus says, but then there's also the additional things to that and the things that happen. Because the Periplus is about the 1st century CE, Aksum seems to be most heavily involved in the 3rd and 4th centuries. So by that time we don't know exactly what shifted ivory seems to be the main thing. One of the Byzantine ambassadors to the region records in the area of Yeha about 5,000 elephants that he's probably guessing. We believe the Oxumites likely hunted elephants to extinction in the area. The only place that we still have an elephant population in that region today is up in Ka Sharar, which I believe is in the few hundreds, and that's the northernmost elephant herd. So they, they seem to have hunted them to extinction. So they're importing wine, they're also importing heavy amounts of iron, at least during the time of the Periplus. They might have their own industry later, but that seems to be something that would be instrumental in, in the hunting of elephants, especially for spears and so forth. The ivory is actually very interesting because in Oxymite material culture we see a lot of animal symbology such as like walia, ibexes and then snakes are one of the biggest ones. And there's a lot of war traditions and legends about snakes, but we never really see an elephant. So outside of the raw ivory, the elephant, the animal that's like actually hunted possibly to extinction in the area, or at least endangered to some degree, is what we don't see in any of the snakes symbolism. Either cosmas or another 6th century historian, Procopius, also mentioned the Oxumite king's chariot being pulled by two elephants as well. So Those are the some of the main things that we're seeing. The biggest import, at least in terms of the artifacts we find, is probably wine. There's probably other elements of trade coming in with, like black pepper and so forth. Aksum appears to have its own vineyards. At a later time, they're also importing a good amount of steel, and then their major export of all the things listed tends to be ivory.
- [28:17]
Tristan Hughes
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- [29:57]
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- [30:27]
Dil Singh Basanti
Better Help Online therapy bought this 30 second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath in and out. Feels better, right? That's 15 seconds of self care. Imagine what you could do with more. Visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of therapy. No pressure, just help. But for now, just relax. Out here, it's not only the amazing views, but the way time stretches out a little longer. How laughter bellows louder among friends, and how the breeze hits just right at the summit. With alltrails, you can discover and experience the best of nature. With over 450,000 trails worldwide and navigation right at your fingertips, Find your outside with alltrails. Download the free app today and find your next outdoor adventure.
- [31:52]
Tristan Hughes
I've also got in my notes something called the Afar Salt Trail. Could you explain what that is?
- [31:58]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah. So Afar is interesting. So that's a, that's a really cool region in the eastern part of Ethiopia and it's legendary as like a travel destination because it's the hottest place in the world by average temperatures. I think it averages somewhere around like 140Fahrenheit.
- [32:15]
Tristan Hughes
Okay. No, thank you. No, thank you.
- [32:19]
Dil Singh Basanti
And oh, but it gets colder because it's filled with sulfuric acid lakes in some of the regions or some of the areas, as well as like moving lava lakes that are totally. When you see those lava lakes flow, it is exactly what you want them to be in, like, imagination. Yeah, there's salt formations and everything. So people don't really live there, live there. They mostly go just to mine salt and they'll make them in these little blocks that in historic times was used as money. And people still barter today. We had always believed that oxime was somehow involved there. And we find obsidian and other oxymite sites, which Afar is a great obsidian source. I was there about four years ago and there's people that still use obsidian flakes to shave. So there was some more recent research by Helena Wodakiris on that area, and she did find oxamite sites and she did trace back a caravan type trade going into the area. So most of her sites date to late Oxmite into medieval times, but she was finding earlier oxamite material in there as well. So it seems to be the verification that we had that they were in that area, likely also mining salt, at least participating in some sort of caravan commerce.
- [33:28]
Tristan Hughes
Yes, you mentioned Helena Wodakiros there. And yeah, I saw her research on this and thought, actually that's fascinating. So must ask it. And thank you very Much for mentioning her name, because I said, she's been leading that research, hasn't she?
- [33:37]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah. And, you know, there's like, how you do your excavations or expeditions and so forth that we usually talk less about. And Helena, being humble, is very humble about hers, but she basically formed their own caravan. And so she was like one of the first, like, I think, female caravans, or maybe the only female caravan operating in the time. Just living in one of the most difficult areas to live in for like, five, six months. Finding all these Oxmite sites and engaging in this. It is some top level work and top level experience. It was very, very arduous undertaking. Very impressive.
- [34:11]
Tristan Hughes
Very impressive. What a story. Let's move on to arguably the most well known symbolic monuments that have survived from the kingdom of Axum, which are, of course, these stele. To introduce this, Dyl, can you explain to us how the royal members of the Aksumite dynasty, how the elites buried their dead and then how that relates to these great monuments?
- [34:35]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so the stele themselves are burial markers, and that's a tradition going back with agropathosites, as I mentioned, out in Sudan. So it seems to originate there. And the earliest site that we have with stela is in Aksum is in Seglimen, which their dates are about 1500 BC for that cemetery area. And then by the time we get to Aksum, these stela, which were sometimes like only half a meter or so tall out in Sudan, are now all of a sudden monumental. So the biggest stele there is 32 meters tall. It weighs about 500 tons. Yeah, solid stone. Like traditionally what we think of with like an obelisk or steel, I think the one in Karnak is bigger, but this is one they. They actually tried to get it up. And the base for it is only about 2 meters, so it wasn't sufficient to keep the monument standing upright, so it immediately went down and it seems to have shattered the top of another tomb called the Nefos Mountja. So, you know, it collapsed in ancient times. And so these, these stelae, they're carved from a volcanic stone. It's a Nephilim stone. And so it's very likely that in ancient times, people saw people hauling these giant stones as blanks from this quarry. And then they seem to have worked them in place in the cemetery because we find at least one that's incomplete there. So they start erecting the stela in monumental forms. But there's hundreds of stele all across Aksum. And that cemetery itself, there's at least like 75, 76. It's located at the bottom of a hill. So sometimes stele get covered up, sometimes they get exposed. There's a lot of stelae that are buried in the tombs as well. And sometimes we use this beds for.
- [36:14]
Tristan Hughes
Some of the skeletons, stela buried in the tombs themselves.
- [36:18]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so actually if you walk around that area in the right time of year, with the right hydrology, you can see buried stela. And there's one in particular I'm thinking of that marks the entrance to a tomb that you can see there. And there may have been termination rituals going on with these stele, meaning that after their use life, they were originally broken, terminated, disposed in some way. And some of them seem to have wound up as beds inside some of the tombs in the area. And so there's tons of these stela. Many of them are quite smaller meter to like three or four meters. But there's six of them that were carved like to look like oxumite elite structures. So they have multiple rows of windows and timber frames that would stick out of Aksumite architecture that we call monkey heads and doorways. So the main symbolism of that is on six of them. And those range in size from about 13 to the largest one, which was about 32 meters. And then there's other like proto forms of the symbolism where they make something that looks like a house or they have lines and dots that look like the monkey heads as well. But the cool thing about the symbolism too though was that it was very heavily ritualized. So that stele, I was talking about the stele one, which people usually believe that that marks the tomb from the king because it's the largest tomb there when that collapsed. So. So as I mentioned, the stele have little doorways on it. When that collapsed, they actually cut out the handle for the doorway to terminate the symbolism. And then you'll see it today and it's collapsed. And that doorway, yeah, it's you. You could go see that the door handle is hacked out of the doorway symbolism there. So it's not just that these things are cosmetic. They had some sort of ritual power. They're imbued with a sense of power. They're radiating something or they have this sort of mean to them. And when you look at where the stela are located, they're in between two hills in front of the central water source. That is the worst place for a cemetery in all of Aksum, because all the runoff going down those hills that that helps fill up that water source is going into those tombs. So some of those tombs are just always filled with water and something is always falling down, but. So it's the worst place to preserve skeletons, if that is your goal. But it's the best place for monuments because everyone that is going to get water is going to see them. And in addition, those two hills, the hill in front, my Coho, it dips just enough in an area that in the morning, the hills are blocking the sun. And there is just. It's like a curtain of light that just comes down the steel in the morning, which people, like, see this all the time. We're not sure if it's probably not, like, ritually purposeful, but there's an aesthetic quality to where if you go there in the morning, like, everything is dark out in front except for the stela. Right. Except for the steel, and via the Georges hill behind it. So they're kind of like, illuminated. And that seems to be the time that they switched to this Nephilim material coming from Gilberdera and the. In the lifetime of the steel field. So that's where I say they seem to be taking advantage of it to some degree. Their whole field seems very improvised. Like, it's not. Well, there's an element of planning, element improvisation to it. So it's not something I think they set out in the beginning to do, to make it like a ritualized feature. But it's certainly an aesthetic effect that you have these, like, blue stones with these, like, twinkling phenocrysts just radiating in the light while everything in front of it is dark. And you can see that effect today. They're patented a bit now, but you can see the effect of them lighting up in the morning today. Or at least that. That curtain of light coming down.
- [39:44]
Tristan Hughes
Absolutely. I can see on a couple of images, like, online, just that kind of the sunlight on those steel and how they really just this just stand out. And I also. I had no idea. I was about to ask about the decoration, but you've answered my question for me. With the doors and the windows and multiple levels of windows, it feels like they've accidentally also kind of designed the ancient Aksumite concept of what a skyscraper looks like today. They're striking.
- [40:10]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's totally right. Yeah. That's a trip. I didn't think about that way.
- [40:13]
Tristan Hughes
Are those steely, then? I mean, do they endure for several centuries and is it very much a status symbol? So only the richest in Axumite society and the royalty would be able to have a stelae? Erected when they die.
- [40:27]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so I actually answered your question quite poorly on that earlier. So traditionally that has been what's interpreted with the stela. And it's because of just how we think who has the money to make these giant stele, which seems to be quite an undertaking. And then when you know that there is a king in the area, it's like oh, okay, the largest stele should belong to a king. There's a convenient alliance between those ideas and, and the oral traditions in the area. So the oral traditions do mark this stele as kings, but they mark them all by one king. They mention a king called Ramhai, which we don't have from any other form material culture referencing. But they believe all the stele were marked by these kings at the same time. Oral tradition is a lot more people usually mark date with people. There's an aspect of that going on. But this convenience alliance between our ideas on monument construction and some of the ore tradition has created that impression. And the stela in other areas are markers for individual graves in the stela park they are not any longer. The biggest stela does mark two tombs. That seems to be one of them. It marks a tomb we call the mausoleum, which has 10 chambers off the central passageway that might have been designed to look like the inside of a stela because the cross section looks like a house. And in addition the, the real kicker is that the, the inside was plastered with a lime based plaster that doesn't have any water like protection poppies or anything. But it does have flecks of nephilim stone in it. The same stone that the steel are carved from. So they have that tomb. There's another tomb that people couldn't excavate because it's too dangerous, called the east tomb. That's also marked and still unknown to us. The two other biggest stela in the area surrounding it has been excavated don't seem to mark tombs at all. So the stele park is actually one of the best investigative features in African archaeology and people, because we expect to find king's tombs there. Like people are always kind of looking for it. But if you look at what's been excavated, there's not really a lot of areas left around the stela. So. And people still like hold out hope. But it's like yo, I'm not sure if you're gonna drop a two by two and find a royal tomb here in, in this area.
- [42:42]
Tristan Hughes
Going on to, I know an area that you find really, really interesting. Perhaps those people are actually missing out on what is arguably even more impressive and interesting when it comes to Aksumite burials, which is how everyday axumites buried their days. Now, you mentioned cemeteries earlier. So do we know a lot about kind of these cemeteries and burial rites and so on for. For people who are living in the kingdom of Axum, everyday people outside of these steely fields?
- [43:08]
Dil Singh Basanti
We do a bit. So though there has been one other stela field that has been excavated called the Gude stela field, and that we usually take that more in reference of things we see in the stela park. And the stela park is part of a larger stela field called the northern stela field. So those are two cemeteries where we kind of get our sources. The problem is, is that the hierarchy in Aksum may or may not be working as we traditionally think. So it's hard to tell what is the commonest grave, other than you have simpler grave grids, which the good stele field does. But there's some fluidity because at least one of the stela there is bigger than made it some of the royal stela and the stela park. This is where I say there's a lot more variability going on. So people still attach to the kingly interpretation, but their mixture of classes is so fluid. That gets at least from what we see from the mortuary material that it gets hard to tell. Now when we were excavating steel field, it may be that. So these people were definitely rich. Whoever's buried there, they're definitely a. They're probably like a neighborhoody community. Based on what we see from some of the oxygen isotope research we've done on some of the remains, they're using at least that water source, or at least people that use the central water source. In addition, the people that were buried and the tomb that we have best excavated called Tomb of the Brick Arches, which is one of the larger tombs. And it's usually thought to be a middle class tomb. One of the things we see from the bones is we can tell they were working outside. So they show multiple signs of labor stress throughout their bones, especially in the hamstrings, especially in the biceps areas. And they seem to be a wealthy tomb. If there is a difference between that and the mausoleum. And maybe that they got their ivory from hippos and not from elephants. And this is. This is still more at the level of speculation. This is still something we're investigating. So this is what I mean, that the hierarchy is a bit mixed up. It's not working in the ways that traditional norms sort of Lend us to think that works. It's more of a community feel. And the big things that we see in death and burial practices is that early on in the stele tradition, they're very much monuments for ancestor veneration rights or rights venerating or honoring the dead. And that seems to be the main purpose, and that seems to be what's being emphasized in the stela and in the burials, because we have evidence of people going back into these graves, taking the bones. The new thing that we have in Oxym that we don't have in sites before, such as segment and so forth, is that we start fighting cup marks on the bone, so they're taking the bodies out sooner. And we can tell they're ritualized cut marks because we don't see signs of disarticulation. We just see that they're having little systematic nicks down the bone to remove the last remnants of organization, organic tissue to preserve the bones, like relics. And the places that they have the most cut marks are the places of labor stress, where the muscle tissue was starting to ossify. So that's why they. They had to clean those bones to get the last of that tissue off. And what's interesting is that we have some later burials in the stela park that are medieval, from about 7th to 13th century. They also have the cut marks, but they don't have as much signs of labor stress. So this thing that started off as very technical in the production of an ancestor from the remains in terms of cleaning their body for very technical reasons, and these areas where the muscle tissue would ossify later on, that's just a ritual tradition in the medieval times. Right. So something very technical becomes something very ritual by the end of it, at least from what we can see in the window of the. The two cemetery tombs that we're looking at. So that's kind of what we see going on with the graves and the actual death and burial rites.
- [46:40]
Tristan Hughes
It's such extraordinary research. And I'm guessing all that you've just mentioned are those key parts of a project that I know you've done a lot of work around for years. The Axum Bones Project.
- [46:50]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah. So the Oxum Bones Project, that was part of my dissertation there, and it was a bigger project than my dissertation. But what we were looking at is we were looking at three cemeteries. The stela park in Aksum, as well as the site of Seglimen, the place where you have the. Basically the oldest stela cemetery in the area that's excavated by the University of Napolo in tale Luis so Nicola and Andrea Monzo and then another medieval site called Mysta's body, which is actually one of the best bioarcheological samples we have in all of Africa. That looks like it was a late oxumite church that was later used as a late Aksumite to post Oxumite like medieval times cemetery. And so we were trying to look at how these traditional rites change through time, especially with globalization, especially with the advent of Christianity in the area and just understanding how death and people's experience of death is changing. And it's really more the, the point of that is more of a social message in that, you know, when we see ancestor rights or these processing of bodies, these very like exotic looking things, initially people want to ascribe that as something that's like a relic of an archaic belief. But that's not what happens at Aksum. Because the time when people, when the ancestors have the greatest presence or the dead and the living are most closely connected is during the time of globalization, is during the time that the stela park becomes an area of the local. The only place where you don't see foreign objects, these steel all suddenly become monuments. One side suddenly become very ritualized, become more like community ish based to some degree. And we start having this. They're at least taking bodies out sooner and they seem to be processing them more so that we start seeing that you know, the ancestor, if that's what we call it or this, this living dead if that has a presence. It's really much. It's something that's coming from like modernizing processes like globalization and urbanization and things like that more than anything archaic. So that was the point that we were or that I was trying to look at and looking at the these three sites and seeing how death threats change the time.
- [49:01]
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- [49:31]
Tristan Hughes
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash, Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Still, we could cover so many more different themes, whether that be Aksumite mythology or their art and their pottery, their house styles, the military and so on. I don't think we're going to have enough time to cover all of those. So maybe another chat in the future. However, we must talk about the coming of Christianity that you mentioned there because it feels so important to the story. Before we actually talk about Christianity in Axum, do we know much about the religion or religions that the Aksumites followed before Christianity arrived there?
- [50:38]
Dil Singh Basanti
We know a little bit. So we know that there is a South Arabian pantheon in the area. Al Mukah is the most important of the deities that they talk about. And so what happens with the pre Christian area between the various gods that are in the region is that they're kind of like mixing together, but kind of not. So Al Makab may be an aspect of Ishtar or maybe an aspect of something they locally call a star, who at other times has some connection with Zeus or at least the heavens.
- [51:11]
Tristan Hughes
And Ishtar, that's normally linked with Babylon as well. So that. That's going very far away, right?
- [51:15]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, it's linked to Babylon. And then at times it also has an aspect of like Venus in there as well.
- [51:20]
Tristan Hughes
Yes.
- [51:21]
Dil Singh Basanti
So. So we have. We have this South Arabian pantheon, but Oxumites, they have. It appears there's another version of polytheism in the area. And then there's also cosmopolitanism coming in from the Red Sea. So. So in. In Aksum itself, there's three gods that are mainly mentioned. There's a star. The primary God, however, is someone named Maharm, who may be a version of Almaka that was later adopted in a different way, but maybe its own thing. And then the Greece sort of cognate is more related to Aries. So that's the war God. So King Azana would claim that he was the son of Mahrem, the war God. And then there's another God named Beher that is also very important in the area. This goes a little bit further. But the Christian word for God is Exia bear, and that made Haber a relationship with Behr, which just means land. So Exe bear, the Christian God, just means the lord of the land. So there's this other polytheism that may or may not be related to the South Arabian one. And these are mostly come from inscriptions. But there's various gods that seem to be permutations of the south sun and the moon and have different temple aspects. So there's also Nuru and Habas, there's Datmyan and Datu Badan, which may be the dimming of the sun during different times of the year. So there's different permutations of like the sun and the moon. And they may be incorporating an aspect of temporality and what keeps them different, which may or may not bear a relationship with agricultural cycles. That's sort of like the go to intuitive sort of understanding. But that, that's what we have in the area. Maha Ram is the principal God mentioned in the inscriptions. The Oxumite king claimed to be a descendant or son of Maharam, at least until Christianity. So King Gazana, cutting ahead a little bit, but King Gazana is the one that we see converts to Christianity. So Christianity came from connections with the Red Sea trade. And there was probably already Christians in the area long before King Gazana. Converts, especially in a due list where they have before, you know, in addition to the two pantheons I was talking about, you know, you have the more traditional Zeus, Poseidon, Aries mentioned in a, in a throne inscription in. In a Doulas. And then we have some churches, four churches in a due list that are not well dated, but could be some of the earliest churches in Africa. And maybe somewhere in the third to sixth century range. They're not really well dated. So this is more speculation than anything. But King Azana, we know himself converts to Christianity because we can actually see that on his coinage. So he has a crescent and a disc symbol on his earliest coins and that gets replaced by a cross. And that matches up with some of the oral traditions in the area that talk about. So in the story, there's a shipwreck with two Syrians and that are later captured and brought to the father, King Gazana. And one of them is made a tutor for King Azana, Fermentius and King Ezana. From that influence converts to Christianity. Frumentius becomes the first major patriarch in Ethiopia. And that's how Christianity's thoughts began. So these archeological correlates match up in that we do see King Azana convert converting earlier in the coinage and not, not only that, but in the inscriptions. And so when King Azana makes inscriptions, he makes them in Greek Sabian as well. And the Greek inscriptions. He is very much talking about the Holy Trinity when he references his victories in the same text in the Gez inscription. He's very, very ambiguous on who he's dedicating his victory to. So he's. He's totally a Christian to foreigners, but he may not be a Christian to people around at least Knox him. But we do see there is. There is oral tradition that at a later time in the 5th or 6th centuries, a migration of nine saints from Syria come and help convert the population in a. And that is the time that we start seeing crosses made on the pottery and we do start having datings for more of the earlier churches in the area. So that's the. That's how we understand the coming of Christianity. And so far, how it's matching up with the archaeological correlates, it's stunning.
- [55:32]
Tristan Hughes
And king aana, so 4th century, so about the same time as Constantine the Great, you know, starts embracing Christianity in the Roman Empire as well. So it is pretty early in the scheme of things. And you mentioned their gears as well. Is that the religious Christian language of Ethiopia or of Aksum?
- [55:49]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so it was probably the primary language of Aksum, so that we see a lot of inscriptions in Kursk. And then we also see. One of the cool things to talk about this interaction with Christianity is on the island of Socotra near Ethiopia, which was a waypoint for this trade where we have Gez written alongside Aramaic, the language of Israel written alongside Brahmi and all these other scripts and so forth. So that was the main language of Aksum, as far as we can tell. And then today it remains as a language of the church. So even today people will say speaking or writing within the church tradition as well. So it's preserved within. Within the religion.
- [56:31]
Tristan Hughes
It's so interesting that, you know, you mentioned to do list there and possible early churches there. I remember talking to William Dalrymple and Steve Cybossum about discoveries of a Buddha in Berenice. So it's. It's interesting whether there could be evidence of Buddhism there as well at that time. Kind of a religious melting pot because of that trade. And ultimately Christianity is the one that emerges on top of.
- [56:52]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, and going with what I was talking about earlier, with the patchiness of Auxum, at least socially and some of these cultural traditions, you probably had different patchiness of that cosmopolitanism throughout the Oxmite area. So some place like a Doulas was very, very cosmopolitan and very heavily involved in the trade. But, you know, Axum seems to be more of a, like, regional African injection into the trade. And that's something we're still investigating. The full range of archeological correlates for that trait we don't have a full understanding of at Oxen. And thinking through how those mixed together is one of the future research questions. But it certainly is a cosmopolitan area. Just so we just from how we see the different categories being made. King Azana is one of the first people to use the word Ethiopia for Ethiopia, which historically might have referred to Nubia or something, but he is very much like almost co opting the name Ethiopia because of the respect. Respect that it had to refer to himself. He's almost playing like a propaganda game here on how he gets envisioned to all these foreign powers and the trade in this international sphere along with the various categories being made. He's very much trying to curate what. What his kingdom and what his category is going to be seen as.
- [58:07]
Tristan Hughes
Still very quickly before we end, because I've been. I've used a lot of your time for this wonderful interview and don't want to come gone too long. But one more question on Christianity quickly is of course Ethiopia and the kingdom of Axum becomes strongly associated with the Ark of the Covenant and I guess the Queen of Sheba earlier as well. I mean, can you explain a little bit as to why and how these famous names from the Old Testament become so strongly associated with Axum and Ethiopia more generally?
- [58:38]
Dil Singh Basanti
Yeah, so that is one of the longest lived traditions that we see in Ethiopia. And one of the big things that people are really interested in what it's known for. So the. The primary text for that is a later medieval text called the Kebernagast, which it's more associated with the rise of the Amhara Empire, which is a bit south of Voxim and itself probably dates to the 13th century in textual form. However, it probably has all tradition components that go back earlier, maybe during the time of Aksum, because there's this one point where they just randomly start talking up and praising an Oxumite king named Gabor Maskal for almost no reason at all in the text. So that's the thing that makes people think like, okay, that has to be something earlier that found its way in as part of this novel. So that's the primary text. There's all this investigation looking into how it's earlier. We already have these connections going on with the Middle east. Not only I mentioned Aramaic, but also with some of the crop packages we see in the area. Wheat, barley from the near east coming pretty early as well. In addition, one of the biggest texts that we were not really sure in the dating of that Talks about the Queen of Sheba legend relating to Ethiopia is actually not from Ethiopia, it's from Egypt and is the Testament of Solomon, which is dated anywhere from like the first century CE to like medieval times. But so, so it's a fake text. It's someone pretending to be Solomon and talking. It's a big test text in the occult because it talks about the various like demons and jinns that Solomon was commanding and commanding to build his temple. But there is a brief interlude where a queen from the south, the Queen of Sheba, comes to visit him. And that seems to be the first reference, if it does date indeed that early, of the Queen of Sheba myth. And it, it actually doesn't come from Ethiopia. So one of the. Wendy Belcher is currently doing research on this and how the Pina Sheba story, that that's not just an Ethiopian tradition relating to medieval ages. It's more of like a Pan African narrative that's emerging between Ethiopia to Egypt. Now, the Ark of the Covenant. The story is that the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon and they have a son who is the first emperor of Ethiopia, King Menelik the first. And that bloodline lasts in Ethiopia until Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974. So the story is Queen Menelik visits his father and he brings back three things. The Ring of Solomon. He brings back an instrument like a lyre that we do have in Ethiopia today called the beginning. And he brings back the Beta Israel tribe which was also in Ethiopia. And in addition to that, either he brings back or some of his followers go and bring back themselves, but then is later justified somehow the Ark of the Covenant. And then that is to have rested in Aksum. And you can go see the chapel today where it's kept in Mayam Sion church. And you can also see in the mornings, the Ethiopian calendar has 13 months and the first seven days of each month they have something called the mahalela, which they actually take the ark on a procession around the historic center of Oxum every morning. So you can go see that today. And that has been a long lived part of the Ethiopian tradition. And there's not only the ark, but every church has something called a tabo. And a tabo is a copy of the ark. But you know, in the west we kind of see like a copy as sort of an artificial knockoff, something that's completely sort of against the original. In Ethiopia, it's seen as having aspects of the original. So a church is not a church if it doesn't Have a tabul. And so that tradition, tradition is long lived in Ethiopia and centralizes the church and centralizes the Christian tradition. So those are the ways that it matches up with what we see, with the presence of the other things that. Such as the beginning that Menelik the first was supposed to have had and the interactions that we see playing out during this time between Aksum and the region of Israel, Middle east, and. And we do find Oxmite coinage in Palestine and Israel as well. And in Palestine particularly, there's Doxmite knockoffs, there's the Roman copies of Oxmite coins, but there's also Oxmite coins. And the key thing is that we see silver and bronze coins in Oxum. So Oxamite coinage, gold coins were used as international currency, but the silver and bronze forms were not. And so that's been taken to mean that we actually had visitors going between the two regions when we find those coins there.
- [63:20]
Tristan Hughes
Wow. Well, Dill, what a way to end it. Thank you for doing those explanations because it feels an important part of the story and of course, the heritage of Ethiopia. We've covered so much in the last hour or so and I think we'll wrap it up there. As mentioned, we can cover so much more in another chat, whether it's the domestic houses, pottery, art, mythology, and of course the ultimate fall of the kingdom of Axum, Although that feels us going a little too far into the medieval period for the ancients liking. But, Dyl, this has been absolutely brilliant. And when, when are you next out in Axum? What's the next big Axum project for you?
- [63:59]
Dil Singh Basanti
I will probably be going again next year in the winter time. I just arrived a couple of months ago from there just to see with my colleagues and see what research they're up to. I'm going to do a short bioarchaeological project on a medieval cemetery. They're looking more into some of how these Christian rites change. Some of those rights of retrieval of bodies and stuff like that seem to continue in the Christian era in their own form. So I'm going to look more at that and then we're going to start forming our project with some of the museum specialists and looking at the indigenous archaeologists in the area and this big inventory of, you know, you go to monasteries, you see Ayakaba pottery, you see Buddhist coins, things like that. Getting a full idea about exploring that to look at some of these early material heritage traditions in Ethiopia.
- [64:46]
Tristan Hughes
D It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
- [64:50]
Dil Singh Basanti
Thank you so much for having me, Tristan, and thank you so much for your interest. We always get very excited about people's interest in Oxymoon. It's a big part in the culture today to be able to celebrate heritage, to celebrate Aksuma heritage and people see that inheritance of that down. So when we see people excited about it, it's very much so that they seem to be engaging in the culture, engaging in the same celebrations of heritage that people prize. So we feel very connected to that. That's very. Yeah, it's a very exciting thing to see in people.
- [65:26]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there you go. There was the archaeologist Dil Singh Basanti giving you a wonderful introduction and all rounded introduction to the Kingdom of Axum. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow the Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you leave us a rating as well. We'd really appreciate that. Leave us a comment. We'd love to hear what you thought about the episode. We love hearing from you. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe now, that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.
- [66:14]
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- [66:44]
Tristan Hughes
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.