HUNDREDS OF ANCIENT obelisks and stelas are strewn across fields on the outskirts of Aksum, a city in the highlands of northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The largest of these monuments, which lies toppled and broken into sections, was carved with doors and windows to mimic a 13-story building, and once stood around 100 feet high. Weighing more than 570 tons, the Great Stela, as it is known, was hewn from a single block of granite-like rock cut from a quarry two and half miles away. At more than three times the height of the biggest of Easter Island’s moai statues and nearly 20 times heavier than the mightiest of Stonehenge’s sarsens, it is among the largest monolithic sculptures ever created and transported.
These monuments, which date to the third and fourth century A.D., once marked the tombs of kings and high-ranking officials. The names of those who erected them, and the individuals buried beneath, have been lost or forgotten over the centuries. They were the rulers of the Kingdom of Aksum, which dominated the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea region for most of the first millennium A.D. Much like the Romans, their contemporaries and occasional allies, Aksum grew from a single city into an expansive empire whose kings controlled a territory comprising parts of modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the southern Arabian Peninsula. The Aksumites’ transcontinental trade routes stretched from Iberia to India, and perhaps even as far as China. They were a highly literate society, fierce warriors, and accomplished engineers and artists, and they issued their own gold coinage. The third-century A.D. Persian prophet Mani referred to Aksum as one of the world’s four great empires, along with the Romans, Persians, and Chinese. “At that time, Aksum is mentioned as one of the
