A City That Was Old When Rome Was Young
The Aksumite Empire ran from roughly the 4th century BCE to the 7th century CE and at its height controlled trade routes connecting the Mediterranean to India via the Red Sea. The coins it minted in gold are found from Egypt to Sri Lanka. Then it declined, contracted, was largely forgotten by the outside world, and the city of Axum settled into being a mid-sized Ethiopian town with ancient obelisks in a field near the bus station.
I arrived from Adwa in a shared taxi and walked past the Northern Stelae Field before I’d even checked in anywhere. The tallest standing stele — 24 meters of carved granite that reads like a compressed architectural sketch of a multi-story building, with false windows and a carved door at the base — is simply there, on a slight rise, next to the ticket booth and a tree. The largest stele ever quarried here fell and shattered around the 4th century CE, its sections still on the ground. Another was taken to Rome in 1937 by Mussolini’s troops as war loot and returned to Ethiopia in 2008. The homecoming was apparently celebrated as a national event.
The Covenant
At the center of Axum, the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion complex contains the Chapel of the Tablet, a small modern building where a single monk lives permanently and never leaves. Inside, according to Ethiopian Orthodox tradition — and, more relevantly, to the conviction of millions of Ethiopian Christians — is the original Ark of the Covenant. The tablets of Moses. The object that was described in Exodus and which disappeared from historical record after the destruction of the First Temple.
Nobody visits it. No one is permitted inside except the guardian monk. There is nothing to see. And yet the chapel’s presence is not nothing — it’s a focal point for genuine devotion that predates the tourist circuit and doesn’t need validation from it. During my visit, worshippers were circling the compound in early morning prayer. Deacons in white robes moved between buildings. The older church next to the chapel, built by Haile Selassie, has doors covered in embossed metal panels and an interior full of painted saints and hanging lamps and the smell of incense going back centuries.
Queen of Sheba’s Bath and the Tombs
About a kilometer from the stelae field, a large stone reservoir is called locally the Queen of Sheba’s Bath — probably a water storage tank from the Aksumite period, the attribution to Sheba being more poetic than historical. The name doesn’t matter much when you’re standing beside 2,000-year-old stone engineering that still holds its shape.
The Royal Tombs sit near the Northern Stelae Field: underground chambers cut from bedrock and accessed via stairs that go down into the cool dark. The chambers are empty of their original contents — looted during the region’s various upheavals over millennia — but the construction is careful and precise in a way that the best Aksumite stonework consistently is.
The Town Itself
Axum is small and easy to walk. The main street has tej houses and coffee shops and a market that functions regardless of the tourist calendar. On the morning I was there, a wedding procession moved through the street — the groom in a white suit, relatives in shamma shawls, a band playing something I didn’t recognize. Everyone moved around it naturally. A man selling injera from a basket paused to watch and then kept walking.
Axum works best when you give it two full days — one for the main monuments, one to go slower and find the less-visited tombs and the hilltop church of Abba Pentalewon, which requires a sunrise walk and has a view over the whole plain.
When to go: October through March is the dry season and the most comfortable period. Axum’s Maryam Zion feast (around November 30th) draws thousands of pilgrims and is one of the most atmospheric festivals in northern Ethiopia — book accommodation weeks in advance if you plan around it. The town is small; rooms fill fast during festivals.