Obelisk of Axum

The Obelisk of Axum is a tall, carved stone pillar standing in the town of Aksum (also spelled Axum) in northern Ethiopia. It was made by the people of the Kingdom of Aksum, one of the great states of the ancient world, probably in the fourth century CE. It is about 24 metres high and weighs roughly 160 tonnes, and it was carved from a single block of stone.

Although it is often called an “obelisk”, archaeologists usually prefer the word stele (plural stelae), meaning an upright stone slab or pillar set up as a monument. An Egyptian obelisk is a four-sided shaft that narrows to a small pyramid at the top. The Aksumite pillars are flatter, are carved to look like buildings, and end in a rounded top. They were not copies of Egyptian obelisks but a local tradition of grave markers that grew larger and more elaborate over centuries.

Aksum has more than a hundred stelae of many sizes, from rough, unworked stones to a few gigantic, carefully decorated ones. The Obelisk of Axum, known in scholarly writing as Stele 2, is the second largest of the decorated giants. It stands in the Northern Stelae Field, a burial ground of the Aksumite elite on the edge of the modern town.

Today the obelisk is a national symbol of Ethiopia. Its story reaches from the ancient trade routes of the Red Sea to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s and to one of the most famous cases of cultural property being returned to its country of origin.

The most striking thing about the Obelisk of Axum is that it is carved to look like a tall building. Starting at the bottom, the viewer sees a false door, carved in relief with a lock or door knocker, as if it could open into the tomb or house of the dead. Above it, the pillar is divided into horizontal bands, one for each imaginary storey.

Each storey shows the features of real Aksumite architecture. Rows of false windows are carved into the stone. Between the storeys run horizontal beams, and small round or square knobs stand out from the surface. These knobs imitate the ends of wooden beams that stuck out from the walls of Aksumite buildings; archaeologists nickname them “monkey heads”. Real Aksumite palaces and churches were built with layers of stone and wood in exactly this way, and some later Ethiopian churches, such as the monastery church of Debre Damo, still show this style.

At the top, the stele ends in a rounded, semicircular head. Holes and marks show that metal plaques or frames were once attached there, and scholars think that some of the great stelae once carried metal discs or symbols. What these showed is uncertain; before Christianity, Aksumite coins and inscriptions often used the crescent and disc, symbols of the kingdom’s gods.

Reading the stele from bottom to top, one sees a house for the dead that rises many storeys toward the sky. Whatever its exact religious meaning, it was a powerful statement: the ruler buried here deserved a palace of stone that everyone in the city could see.

The Obelisk of Axum is one of three huge, fully decorated stelae in the Northern Stelae Field. The largest, known as Stele 1 or the Great Stele, was about 33 metres long and has been estimated to weigh more than 500 tonnes. It would have been one of the largest single stones ever raised by any ancient people. But it lies broken on the ground. Many archaeologists think it fell and shattered during or soon after the attempt to raise it.

The third giant, Stele 3, is about 21 metres tall and is often called “King Ezana’s Stele”. This name is a modern tradition, not an ancient inscription; there is no writing on the stele linking it to Ezana. It was the only one of the great decorated stelae still standing when European travellers and archaeologists described Aksum in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it has leaned over time.

Around the giants are many smaller stelae, some carved and some rough, together with underground tombs. The field was used as a cemetery for the elite over several centuries, and the size of each stele seems to reflect the rank of the person buried beneath or near it.

The stelae were cut from a hard, fine-grained volcanic rock found in the hills to the west of Aksum. Archaeologists have identified ancient quarry areas several kilometres from the town, including a partly worked stele still lying where it was abandoned. Stoneworkers probably split the rock using wedges driven into lines of holes, then shaped and polished the block with iron tools and abrasives.

Moving a block of more than 100 tonnes over several kilometres was an enormous task. No written account survives, so all explanations are reconstructions. Most scholars suggest that the stones were dragged on wooden sledges or rollers along a prepared track, pulled by large teams of people with ropes; elephants, which the Aksumites are known to have captured and used, may also have helped. The detailed carving may have been finished only after the stone reached the cemetery.

Raising the stele was the most dangerous step. A likely method is that the base was slid into a prepared pit and the top raised gradually with levers, ropes and earth ramps, while the stone was supported by timber. Large base plates and wedging stones were placed around the foot. The collapse of the Great Stele shows that this technique had limits: the larger the stone, the greater the risk that it would crack under its own weight.

The achievement required a state able to organize hundreds of workers, feed them, and supply them with timber, iron and rope. The stelae are therefore not only works of art but evidence of the economic and political power of the Aksumite rulers.

The Kingdom of Aksum grew up in the highlands of what are now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea around the first century CE. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek guide for merchants written in the mid-first century CE, already mentions Aksum and its port of Adulis on the Red Sea, from which ivory and other goods were exported.

Over the next centuries Aksum became a major trading power between the Roman Mediterranean, Arabia, and India. It exported ivory, gold, incense, animal skins and other goods, and imported cloth, glass, metalwork, wine and oil. In the late third century, King Endubis began to issue coins in gold, silver and bronze, a sign of confidence shared by only a few states of the time. Aksumite coins have been found as far away as the eastern Mediterranean and southern India.

The Persian religious teacher Mani, in the third century, is recorded as listing Aksum among the four great kingdoms of the world, alongside Rome, Persia and China. Aksumite kings used inscriptions in Ge’ez (the classical Ethiopian language, written in its own script), Sabaic (a South Arabian language) and Greek, reflecting a society that looked both to Africa and across the Red Sea.

At its height in the sixth century, under King Kaleb, Aksum even controlled parts of Yemen for a time. The great stelae, however, belong to an earlier period, before Christianity became the religion of the royal court.

The stelae marked the graves of the Aksumite elite. Beneath and around the Northern Stelae Field, archaeologists have found underground tombs cut into the rock or built of stone, some with several chambers. Next to the fallen Great Stele lies a large stone-built tomb known as the Mausoleum, and nearby is the so-called Tomb of the Brick Arches. Many of the tombs were robbed in antiquity, but finds of pottery, glass, metalwork and other objects show that the dead were buried with valuable goods.

The exact beliefs behind the stelae are not known, because the pre-Christian religion of Aksum is poorly documented. Inscriptions and coins mention gods such as Astar, Beher and Mahrem, the last associated with the king, and use the disc and crescent as symbols. Many scholars think the multi-storey form expressed the idea of the tomb as a house or palace for the dead, and that the height of the stele proclaimed the power and status of the ruler and his family.

The stelae also served the living. A dead ruler’s monument, visible across the city, reminded people of a dynasty’s greatness and helped the next ruler claim legitimacy. Raising an ever larger stele may have been a form of competition between rulers or families.

Some offering places, such as stone platforms with channels, have been found near the stelae, which suggests rituals continued at the graves after burial.

In the fourth century King Ezana adopted Christianity, influenced by Frumentius, a Christian from the Roman world who had been brought to the Aksumite court as a young captive and later became its first bishop. Ezana’s coins changed from the old disc-and-crescent symbol to the cross, one of the earliest uses of the cross on any state’s coinage. His inscriptions, including the trilingual Ezana Stone, record military campaigns and, in the later ones, praise the Christian God.

After this change, giant stelae stopped being raised. Most scholars therefore date the great decorated stelae, including the Obelisk of Axum, to the period just before or around Ezana’s conversion, in the fourth century or somewhat earlier. Some historians have suggested that the collapse of the Great Stele, a spectacular failure, may have contributed to the end of the tradition, but this is speculation.

Christianity became the enduring faith of the Ethiopian highlands. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the oldest Christian churches in the world, regards Aksum as its holiest city. The Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum is believed by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians to house the Ark of the Covenant, which is guarded by a single monk; this tradition is central to Ethiopian religious identity.

In the seventh century, according to Islamic tradition, early followers of the Prophet Muhammad fled persecution in Mecca and were sheltered by the Christian king of Aksum. This event, often called the First Hijra, gave Aksum an honoured place in Islamic memory as well.

Aksum declined from the seventh century, as trade routes across the Red Sea shifted and the political centre of the Ethiopian highlands moved south; the kingdom stopped issuing coins around the early eighth century. The town remained a sacred place and the site where Ethiopian emperors were sometimes crowned. At some unknown date the Obelisk of Axum fell and broke into several pieces, which lay on the ground for centuries.

In 1935–36 Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, one of the few African countries that had kept its independence. The war was marked by the Italian use of poison gas against soldiers and civilians, and the occupation that followed included mass reprisals, such as the killings in Addis Ababa in February 1937. In 1937, on Mussolini’s orders, the broken stele was taken from Aksum, shipped to Italy and re-erected in Rome, where it was unveiled on 28 October 1937, the fifteenth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome. It stood at the Piazza di Porta Capena, in front of the building of the Ministry of Italian Africa.

In the 1947 peace treaty after the Second World War, Italy agreed to return objects taken from Ethiopia, but the obelisk remained in Rome for decades, amid arguments about cost, technical risk and ownership. For Ethiopians it became a symbol of the humiliation of occupation, and campaigns for its return continued through changes of government. In May 2002 the stele was damaged by lightning.

In 2003–04 the obelisk was dismantled again into three pieces, and in April 2005 it was flown back to Ethiopia in a series of flights on one of the world’s largest cargo aircraft. Because the ground near its original site contains fragile tombs, reinstallation required careful surveys; with UNESCO supervising the project, the stele was re-erected in the Northern Stelae Field and unveiled on 4 September 2008. Its return is often cited in international debates about restoring cultural objects taken in war or colonial occupation.

Dating. None of the great stelae bears an inscription, so their dates rely on the archaeology of the tombs associated with them, on the comparison of objects found there with dated material elsewhere, and on the general assumption that giant stelae were no longer raised after Christianity was adopted. Most specialists place Stele 2 in the fourth century CE, with some allowing a late third-century date; the relative order of the three giants is also debated. Estimates for the whole Aksumite stelae tradition range across several centuries, from simple markers early in the first millennium CE to the great decorated stelae at its end.

The fall of the Great Stele. Stele 1 lies broken across the area of the Mausoleum. Archaeologists such as David Phillipson have argued that it fell during or immediately after erection, perhaps because its foundations were inadequate, and that it may have been the last of the giant stelae. Others have considered later collapse or deliberate toppling. The question matters because it affects the sequence of the stelae and our understanding of the end of the tradition.

Names and attributions. Popular names that link stelae to specific rulers, such as “King Ezana’s Stele”, are not supported by inscriptions. Local traditions, recorded in later Ge’ez texts and oral history, connect Aksum with the Queen of Sheba and with King Menelik, the legendary founder of the Solomonic line, but these traditions are much later than the stelae and belong to Ethiopian religious and national history rather than to archaeology.

Meaning of the design. Scholars agree that the carved stelae imitate multi-storey buildings, but disagree about how literal this is. Some read them as images of real palaces, others as symbolic “houses” for the dead or as a way of expressing the connection between the tomb below and the sky above. The metal fittings at the top, now lost, might have resolved some questions if they had survived.

The word “obelisk”. The widespread name “Obelisk of Axum” reflects European habits of comparing African monuments to Egyptian ones. Many scholars prefer “stele” or “Stele 2”, both to be more precise and to stress that the Aksumite tradition developed on its own terms.

Early explorations. European travellers described the stelae from the sixteenth century onward. The first systematic study was made by the German Aksum Expedition (Deutsche Aksum-Expedition) of 1906, led by the orientalist Enno Littmann, which recorded monuments, inscriptions and architecture; its drawings and photographs remain valuable, especially for features later altered.

Modern excavations. In the 1970s the British Institute in Eastern Africa, under Neville Chittick, excavated in the stelae field and identified tombs associated with the great stelae. Work was interrupted by the political upheavals in Ethiopia, and resumed in the 1990s under David Phillipson, who excavated tombs such as the Mausoleum and the Tomb of the Brick Arches and studied the quarries. Ethiopian and international teams, including Italian and German archaeologists, have continued fieldwork since then.

Written evidence. Aksum’s own inscriptions, in Ge’ez, Sabaic and Greek, together with coins, provide the names and sequence of some kings, but none mentions the stelae directly. Outside sources, such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Greek and Roman writers, and the sixth-century account attributed to Cosmas Indicopleustes, describe Aksum’s trade and courts. Later Ethiopian texts, such as the Kebra Nagast, record traditions about the city’s sacred past.

Conservation science. The return and re-erection of Stele 2 required engineering studies of its fractures, of the ground and of the tombs below. The 2008 reassembly used modern reinforcement between the sections. Monitoring the leaning Stele 3 and protecting the fragile tombs remain challenges, and the case shows how conservation, archaeology and politics are intertwined at Aksum.