Everything Aksum became, it became because of Adulis.

Adulis (ah-DOO-liss) was a port city on the Red Sea coast, near the modern Eritrean town of Massawa, about 60 miles (100 km) east of the highland capital. It sat on a small inlet protected from the open sea by offshore islands, and by the first century CE it was one of the busiest commercial harbors in the ancient world. Adulis was to Aksum what Ostia was to Rome, what Piraeus was to Athens, what Lothal was to the Indus Valley cities (Indus Valley Chapter 7) — the maritime gateway that connected a landlocked power to the global economy.

The journey from the highland capital down to Adulis was brutal. You descended roughly 7,000 feet (2,100 meters) in about 60 miles (100 km) of trail, switchbacking down the escarpment through climate zones that shifted from temperate grassland to scrubland to scorching coastal desert. Camel caravans took about eight days. The goods went down on the backs of animals: ivory, gold, emeralds, incense, obsidian (a volcanic glass used for making sharp-edged tools and ornaments), animal hides, rhinoceros horn, live animals. The imports came back up: Roman glass, Mediterranean wine and olive oil, Indian spices and cotton, iron and steel from Arabia, and, crucially, information. Adulis was where Aksum plugged into the wider world.

We know what Adulis looked like in the first century CE because a merchant told us.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (PEH-rih-plus, meaning "sailing around," of the Erythraean Sea, the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean) is one of the most valuable documents to survive from the ancient world. It is a merchant's guide, written in Greek around 40–70 CE by an anonymous Egyptian-Greek trader based in Roman Egypt, describing the trade routes from the Red Sea ports south along the East African coast, across to Arabia, and east to India (the same manual's African horizon ran well south of Adulis, past a market town it calls Rhapta in a region it calls Azania — the stretch of coast that would become the Swahili world, see Swahili Coast). It is not literature. It is a practical guide: which ports to stop at, what goods are available, who runs the place, what the local king is like, what the anchorage conditions are. It is the ancient equivalent of a trade-route handbook, and it provides the most detailed outside description of early Aksumite commerce that we have.

The Periplus describes Adulis as a "legally limited marketplace" — a port where trade was regulated by the Aksumite state, with customs duties collected and commerce supervised by officials. The goods available included ivory ("in large quantities," the author notes), rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell from the coast, hippopotamus hide, obsidian, and a modest amount of gold. Imports arriving by ship included undyed cloth, Egyptian glassware, brass and copper for ornaments, iron tools, wine, olive oil, and small amounts of Roman gold and silver coin. The author describes caravans of merchants traveling inland from Adulis to the capital city — an eight-day journey — to trade with the king.

The king the Periplus describes is named Zoskales (ZOS-kah-leez), and the author offers one of those character sketches that makes ancient texts come alive: Zoskales was "miserly in his ways and always striving for more, but otherwise a fine man, and literate in Greek." This is the earliest named Aksumite ruler we can date with any confidence — his reign falls somewhere around 80–120 CE. The fact that he was literate in Greek tells us something important about the Aksumite elite: they were cosmopolitan. Greek was the commercial language of the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean trade, and an Aksumite king who could read Greek was a king who could negotiate directly with Roman merchants, read contracts, and correspond with the wider world. This was not a remote highland chieftain. This was the head of a state that saw itself as part of the international system.

The trade that flowed through Adulis connected Aksum to three separate commercial worlds simultaneously, and the overlap is what made the kingdom rich.

The first was the Mediterranean trade, dominated by the Roman Empire. Roman Egypt was Aksum's biggest trading partner. Roman merchants wanted African ivory (for furniture, art, and the spectacles of the amphitheater), exotic animals (for the same spectacles — lions, elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes), incense (for religious rituals across the Roman world), gold, and gemstones. In return, Aksum received Roman manufactured goods, wine, olive oil, glassware, and coins. Roman coins circulated so widely in the Aksumite kingdom that archaeologists regularly find them in excavations at Aksum and surrounding sites. Roman glass vessels and Mediterranean amphoras (large clay jars used to ship wine and oil) have been found in Aksumite elite residences, confirming that the luxury trade was substantial and ongoing.

The second was the Indian Ocean trade, which had exploded in scale after Greek navigators working for the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt discovered how to ride the monsoon winds — sailing east to India in summer when the winds blow from the southwest, and west back to Africa in winter when the winds reverse. By the first century CE, this was a regular annual shipping cycle, and Adulis was one of the major stops. Indian spices (especially pepper, which Romans consumed in staggering quantities), Chinese silk, Southeast Asian aromatics, and Indian cotton all passed through Red Sea ports on their way to Mediterranean markets. Aksum was both a participant in this trade and a gatekeeper — its control of Adulis meant that a significant portion of the India-to-Rome trade touched Aksumite territory.

The third was the African interior trade, which may have been the most important of all. Aksum sat at the edge of the Ethiopian highlands, which gave way to the lowlands of what is now Sudan, South Sudan, and central Africa. Caravans from the interior brought goods that no other supplier could match: ivory from the elephant herds of the African savanna, gold dust from alluvial deposits in the western highlands, Frankincense and myrrh from the trees of the Horn of Africa (both resins were in constant demand across the ancient world for religious rituals — frankincense was burned in Roman temples, Jewish synagogues, and Egyptian shrines alike, and myrrh was used in medicine and embalming), emeralds from mines in the hinterland, obsidian, animal hides, and enslaved people. The Aksumite kingdom did not produce most of these goods itself. It controlled the point where they entered the international market, and it taxed the flow.

This three-way commercial position is what made Aksum one of the wealthiest states in the ancient world. It was not the only middleman in the global economy — the Nabataean kingdom at Petra (an Arab desert kingdom in modern Jordan that controlled the overland incense trade from Arabia to the Mediterranean) was doing something similar, and Palmyra in the Syrian desert was another trading hub linking Rome to the East. But Aksum's combination of Red Sea access, proximity to the African interior, and a productive highland agricultural base gave it a resilience that pure trading posts lacked. When Petra declined after Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom in 106 CE and redirected trade through its own Red Sea ports, Aksum's position actually improved — one less competitor on the route.

Ivory was the cornerstone.

African ivory was one of the most consistently valuable commodities in the ancient world, and Aksum controlled the primary supply. Elephant herds in the African interior were far larger and more accessible than the remnant populations in Asia, and African elephant ivory was preferred by Roman craftsmen for its larger tusks and finer grain. Aksumite merchants organized caravans that traveled deep into the interior — days or weeks of travel into the lowlands south and west of the highlands — to acquire ivory from hunters and traders who operated in regions Aksum did not govern but could access. The tusks were carried up to the highland capital, sorted, and then sent down to Adulis for export.

The scale was large. Roman demand for ivory was enormous — it was used for furniture inlay, decorative boxes, combs, dice, writing tablets, and carved artwork, plus the practical applications of piano-key-sized pieces for ornamental armor fittings and tool handles. (The modern association between ivory and piano keys comes much later, but the Roman appetite for the material was every bit as voracious.) A single elephant tusk could weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg), and caravans arriving at Adulis with dozens of tusks represented fortunes in raw material. The Periplus notes that ivory was available at Adulis "in large quantities," which tracks with the archaeological evidence of a well-organized supply chain.

Frankincense and myrrh were nearly as important. Both resins come from trees that grow in the arid lowlands of the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian coast. Frankincense (the dried sap of the Boswellia tree) was burned as incense in temples and homes across the ancient world — the biblical gifts of the Magi to the infant Jesus included frankincense and myrrh, which gives some sense of how these products were valued. Myrrh (from the Commiphora tree) was used in perfume, medicine, and embalming. The trade in these resins was ancient — the Egyptians had been importing frankincense from the land of Punt (a mysterious trading partner, probably on the Horn of Africa or the southern Red Sea coast, that Egyptian texts describe from as early as the Old Kingdom) for two thousand years before Aksum existed. Aksum inherited and expanded this trade, and the kingdom's control of the frankincense and myrrh supply was one of its most durable economic assets.

While trade made Aksum rich, expansion made it powerful.

The early Aksumite kings — the generations between Zoskales (around 80–120 CE) and the great builder-kings of the third century — are poorly documented. We know some names from coins and inscriptions, but we cannot reconstruct a complete king list. What we can say is that the kingdom was expanding. A damaged inscription found at Adulis, known as the Monumentum Adulitanum (MON-yoo-MEN-tum ah-doo-lih-TAH-num), records the military campaigns of an unnamed Aksumite king (probably from the early third century CE) who claims to have conquered peoples across the Horn of Africa and parts of southern Arabia. The inscription was copied centuries later by a Byzantine visitor named Cosmas Indicopleustes (Chapter 5), who saw it still standing at Adulis. It describes campaigns against the Beja (nomadic peoples of the lowlands between the Nile and the Red Sea), against peoples in the Semien mountains, against communities in the Afar lowlands, and across the Red Sea into Arabia.

King Gadarat (GAH-dah-raht), who ruled roughly 150–200 CE, is one of the better-attested early kings, known from South Arabian inscriptions that describe him intervening in the politics of the Himyarite kingdom (a South Arabian state in what is now Yemen). The fact that an Aksumite king was meddling in Arabian politics as early as the second century CE tells us that Aksum's ambitions already extended across the Red Sea — a pattern that would culminate spectacularly in the sixth century (Chapter 5).

By the mid-third century CE, one Aksumite king had adopted a title that said everything about those ambitions. Sembrouthes (sem-BROO-theez), around 250 CE, was the first Aksumite ruler known to style himself "King of Kings" — a title borrowed from the Persian imperial tradition (the Achaemenid Persian kings had used it centuries earlier — Persian Empire Chapter 3) and one that signaled not just local dominance but imperial pretensions. An Aksumite King of Kings was claiming to rule over subordinate kings and tributary peoples across a multi-ethnic territory — not just a single highland kingdom but an empire.

Whether Sembrouthes could actually enforce that claim across his entire territory is a fair question. The title may have been aspirational. But the direction of travel was clear. By the late third century CE, Aksum had grown from a highland trading kingdom into something that looked, from the outside, like one of the major powers of the ancient world. Major enough for a Persian prophet to put it on a list with Rome.

Cross-civ check: In the first and second centuries CE, while Aksum was building its trade empire, the rest of the ancient world was at a commercial peak. The Roman Empire under the Antonines (96–180 CE) was at its territorial maximum, and Roman Red Sea trade with India was running at enormous volumes — Pliny the Elder (a Roman naturalist and encyclopedist who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, best known for his sprawling Natural History) complained that Rome was hemorrhaging gold to India for pepper and silk (Ancient Rome Chapter 7). The Kushan Empire in Central Asia was linking Rome, China, and India along the Silk Road. The Han Dynasty in China was producing silk that Roman elites craved (Han Dynasty Chapter 5). The Parthian Empire in Persia was the middleman between Rome and China on the overland route. Aksum's position in this global trading system was neither marginal nor dominant. It was a key node on the maritime southern route — the Red Sea highway that bypassed Persia's overland tolls — and its growth was inseparable from the growth of the system as a whole. When that system contracted, Aksum would contract with it.

Kingdom of Aksum

Where Three Worlds Meet

The Port and the Throne

Stone and Gold

Ezana's Revolution

The King Who Crossed the Sea

The Nine Saints and the Book

When the Routes Went Dark

The Fire and the Memory