Aksum, Ethiopia, Day 309

Life in the Hilton hotel in Addis Ababa is just swell. Christi and I continue to kick back and live like royalty. Perhaps in our entire Year of Wonder we have never had two days off in a row (from sightseeing, traveling, planning, and doing chores). In some ways it is addictive. Our bodies have been running on adrenaline for months and now that we’ve stopped, albeit briefly, the adrenaline levels are falling and Christi and I are in danger of collapsing from sheer fatigue. Fortunately we move on again tomorrow, assuming we can drag our tired bodies out of bed. But rather than dwell on the massage that Christi has scheduled or my sunbathing by the pool with a cold soda in my hand, let’s continue our reveries. The third of the major Christian towns in northern Ethiopia after Gonder and Lalibela is Aksum.

Aksum is considered to be the holiest city in Ethiopia and is an important destination of pilgrimages. The reason being The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims (but will not agree to external verification) that the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion (the most important church in the country) is the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant (which means that the one uncovered by Indian Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a fake!). For those of us whose biblical knowledge is a bit sketchy, the Ark of the Covenant supposedly contains the stone tablets on which God wrote the 10 Commandments and then gave them to Moses on Mt. Sinai. There is some evidence to support the claim that the Ark may have traveled to Ethiopia, perhaps even to Aksum. Local history suggests that the Queen of Sheba came from modern-day Ethiopia and journeyed to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon. One thing led to another and 9 months later out popped Menelik I (who became the first Solomonic King of Ethiopia around 950 BC). Menelik grew up in Ethiopia but traveled to Jerusalem as a young man to visit his father’s homeland. He lived for several years in Jerusalem before returning to Aksum with the Ark of the Covenant. Furthermore, the (unimpressive) ruins of what are believed to be the palace of the Queen of Sheba have been excavated around Aksum.

Christianity was certainly not the only game in town, however. Between the 2nd century AD and the 10th century AD the Kingdom of Aksum flourished at the same time the Kingdom of Kush went into decline. And rather than use pyramids for their tombs as they did in Sudan and Egypt, the Aksumite kings built stelae (or obelisks) to mark their underground burial chambers. The largest of the grave markers were for royal burial chambers and were decorated with multi-story false windows and false doors, while nobility would have smaller, less decorated ones. King Ezana’s Stela is 70 feet (21 m) tall and weighs 160 tons. It is the second largest still standing now that the Italians repatriated the Obelisk of Aksum (24 m tall) a few years ago. The largest of all the stelae, the 33-m tall Great Stele, is believed to have never stood, but instead toppled over as it was being erected. It weighed in excess of 500 tons and once again boggles the mind as to how this single piece of granite could be excavated, transported from a quarry 4 km away, and erected with only the odd donkey to aid man’s ingenuity. Some say the ancient Aksumite Kings harnessed the celestial power of the Ark of the Covenant to erect these massive stone obelisks. I say it’s too hot to worry about such things and waiter, can I have another cold soda please. Just bill it to the room, there’s a good chap.