Aksum: The African Empire a Persian Prophet Ranked Alongside Rome

In the 3rd century CE, the Persian prophet Mani, founder of Manichaeism, wrote in his religious text the Kephalaia that four kingdoms ruled the earth: Babylon and Persia, Rome, “the Kingdom of the Aksumites,” and China. It’s a genuine, citable claim, not an internet-era exaggeration, and it captures something real about the Aksumite Empire’s standing in its own era, even if its exact territorial size is harder to pin down than that comparison suggests.

Aksum rose in the highlands of what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, likely from the 1st century CE, growing out of earlier Iron Age societies in the region. Its rulers minted their own gold, silver and bronze coinage beginning under King Endubis around 270-310 CE, a rare achievement among ancient states and a sign of the kingdom’s integration into Red Sea and Mediterranean trade. The empire’s best-documented ruler is Ezana, who took the throne as a child in the 320s CE with his mother serving as regent, and whose own surviving inscriptions record his military campaigns and, most significantly, his conversion to Christianity around 325-328 CE, making Aksum among the earliest states anywhere to adopt Christianity as official policy and putting a Christian cross on Aksumite coinage for the first time.

A second peak came under King Kaleb, who around 520-525 CE led a military campaign across the Red Sea into Himyar, in modern Yemen, following the persecution of Christians there. Aksum controlled the territory afterward, first through an appointed viceroy and then through a looser tributary relationship after a usurper seized power in Himyar, a distinction worth noting because popular territorial-size claims for Aksum often count this Arabian holding as directly administered land, when the historical relationship was closer to overlordship than to occupation.

Aksum’s decline unfolded over roughly a century and had more than one cause. Early Islamic expansion into the Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean from the 630s CE onward displaced Aksum from trade routes that had underpinned its wealth. Some historians argue the Himyar campaign itself, decades earlier, had already overextended the kingdom’s resources, a costly high point rather than a lasting gain. Coin production, the clearest datable marker of state capacity, stopped in the early 7th century. By the late 8th or 9th century the classical Aksumite state had effectively dissolved into a much smaller successor kingdom, which persisted in reduced form until a traditional end date around 940-960 CE, closing out an empire that a foreign prophet had once ranked beside Rome.