Throne of the Red Sea: The Rise, Zenith, and Fall of the Aksumite Empire - Paperback
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Throne of the Red Sea: The Rise, Zenith, and Fall of the Aksumite Empire
For more than a thousand years, the Kingdom of Aksum was one of the most powerful civilisations on earth. From its heartland on the volcanic plateau of modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, this extraordinary highland empire controlled the western shore of the Red Sea, commanded the trade routes connecting Rome to India, minted gold coins that circulated across three continents, and produced the monolithic granite obelisks that remain among the largest single stones ever raised by human hands. When the Persian prophet Mani catalogued the four great empires of the third century CE, he named Rome, Persia, China, and Aksum.
This book traces the full arc of Aksumite civilisation across a thousand years: the origins of the state in the collapse of the earlier kingdom of D'mt, the conversion to Christianity under King Ezana, the Arabian campaigns of King Kaleb, the role of the Aksumite court in sheltering the earliest followers of the Prophet Muhammad, and the long, compounding catastrophe, commercial isolation, ecological collapse, plague, and the devastating invasion of Queen Gudit, that ended the empire's political life while leaving its cultural inheritance intact.
From the Ge'ez language still chanted in Ethiopian churches to the Ark of the Covenant maintained at Axum to this day, the Aksumite legacy has never died. This is its story, told in full, for the first time, in a single narrative history.
Cahir Dolan grew up in County Leitrim and studied history at University College Dublin, where his interest in the ancient and medieval worlds first found its focus in the civilisations of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea basin. He has spent the better part of two decades reading, writing, and thinking about the great pre-modern empires of northeast Africa, drawn above all to the Aksumite world - its astonishing commercial reach, its theological creativity, and the extraordinary durability of the culture it produced long after the empire itself had dissolved. He is the author of several works of narrative nonfiction spanning ancient Africa, the late antique world, and the history of the Red Sea. He lives and writes in Ireland.
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