Inscriptions of Ezana of Aksum
Ezana records his military campaigns, including the conquest of Meroe, as proof first of the traditional Aksumite gods' favor and later, in inscriptions from the same reign, as proof of the Christian god's favor, documenting the kingdom's conversion in his own royal voice rather than through outside report.
- a documented royal shift from traditional to Christian religious language within one reign
- trilingual inscriptions addressing Ge'ez, Greek, and Sabaic-reading audiences
- campaign claims against the Kingdom of Kush at Meroe
- Aksum treated as a distinct civilization from Kush despite regional proximity
A set of royal inscriptions from Aksum, some trilingual in Ge'ez, Greek, and Sabaic and others in Ge'ez alone, recording King Ezana's military campaigns against neighboring peoples, including a campaign that reached and claims credit for weakening the Kingdom of Kush at Meroe. Strikingly, inscriptions from earlier in his reign invoke the traditional Aksumite war god Mahrem, while later inscriptions invoke God in explicitly monotheistic, Christian-influenced language, making Ezana's inscriptions the primary contemporary evidence for Aksum's conversion to Christianity, alongside coinage that shows the same shift from a disc-and-crescent symbol to a cross. Aksum lies well outside the Nile-valley political geography of Kush and Nubia and is treated in this corpus as a distinct civilization, filed here under Other rather than under Kush.
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