 Hello, everyone. Thank you. My name is Giovanni Ruffini. I'm a professor of classical studies in the Department of History and I am here to introduce our next speaker to you, Jessica Lamont. Jessica is an assistant professor of Classics at Yale University. As I like to call it, the other university in Connecticut, whom we have been lucky enough to have speak at Fairfield actually a number of times now. In fact, I have a little bit of career envy when it comes to Professor Lamont's work, to be honest. She has made a fascinating career writing and teaching about Greek medicine and magic. Her talk here a few years ago on curse tablets from classical Athens was honestly one of the more interesting talks I think I've ever seen. Her work is informed by extensive field experience with years of excavations throughout Greece, but then, somewhere, somehow, she resurfaced in Ethiopia. And I'm still trying to figure out how this works. I want to make that transition myself if I can one day. Today, she's been working on the excavations at Betasamati, which is one of the more important sites in the ancient Axomite Ethiopian Empire, to receive attention in recent years. And I'm really not jealous of her at all about this, honestly. But she has co-authored works on this site with some of the leading figures in Ethiopian Axomite studies. And today is going to give us a little glimpse about what they have been learning from the fascinating material at that site and what it tells us about Ethiopia's ties to the larger world beyond. Please welcome Dr. Lamont. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I've been the one that's been so lucky to come here to Fairfield virtually and in person now. And thank you to the organizers and Kathy in particular. It's such a pleasure to be here. As Giovanni mentioned, I am primarily a Greek historian. I teach Greek history and ancient Greek. And this is a project that, a side project that I started in graduate school. This is an active or it was an active excavation in Ethiopia and the abundance of Greek inscriptions. Greek coinage, for example, led the project directors to seek out somebody who worked on Eastern Mediterranean trade and Greek in particular. So I found this so exciting to work at the interstices of the classical world. And that's also why I'm so excited to speak in this conference today. Towering obelisks that reach toward the sky, a thriving trade and ivory gold and other luxury goods from the Sub-Saharan interior, and multilingual African kings who wrote in Greek and referred to themselves as Baseles, the Greek term for kings. This was the mighty empire of Aksum, an ancient East African kingdom that thrived at the same time as the Roman and Byzantine empires. Centered in the modern Ethiopian highlands in Eritrea, the Aksumite kingdom at its height exercised administrative and economic control over a vast territory, which included much of the mid to southern Red Sea coast, the southern Arabian peninsula, and, after probably having conquered the powerful city of Meroe, eastern Sudan. The kingdom's control over both sides of the southern Red Sea gave it great power over trade routes and maritime commerce, traveling between Rome, Byzantium, and much of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf and India. That the kingdom of Aksum was widely known as powerful by around 250 CE is evident in the writings of the Persian prophet Mani, the founder of Manicheism, who named Aksum as one of the four greatest empires of his day. The others being Persia, Rome, and Silas, maybe China or India, it's debated. The kingdom of Aksum flourished from around 50 CE to 550 CE, and during this time the empire's capital was based at the city of Aksum. Aksum is thus the name of both the empire itself and its capital city. While Aksum was the region's largest metropolis with a peak population of some 20,000 inhabitants, numerous other settlements formed important and sizable urban centers in the wider Aksumite world, all of which employed the same written scripts, coinage, religion, civic and cultic architecture, and other forms of material culture including pottery. Adulis, Aksum's major port on the Red Sea, you can see it right down on the southern western coast of the Red Sea on the map, Adulis, Aksum's major port on the Red Sea was one such site, and a city with which Greek and Roman geographers, travel writers and intellectuals were well familiar. Already by the first century CE, the port of Adulis was known to Pliny the Elder, an elite Roman writer, encyclopedist, and friend of the emperor of Aspasian. Pliny noted that Adulis served as a major market town, quote, distant from Ptolemies, five days sail. To this place they bring ivory in large quantities, horns of the rhinoceros, hides of the hippopotamus, tortoise shell, sphingii, a type of ape, and enslaved persons. Also composed in the first century CE was a document called The Peripluce of the Erythraean Sea. A peripluce is a chronicle, a sort of log book and travel handbook of nautical itineraries with historical, commercial and ethnographic details about the ports visited on a journey by sea. The peripluce of the Erythraean Sea records the maritime itineraries between the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean and frames these regions as a single, united body. Scholars have suggested that the author of the peripluce of the Erythraean Sea was a multilingual Greek merchant living in Egypt as he was well acquainted with the trade routes, markets and peoples along the major Red Sea ports and also the inland centers from which goods derived and advanced to the coast. The account lists ivory as coming out of the African interior to Aksum and from there traveling on to the port of Adulis. From that place to the city of the people called Aksumites there is a five days journey more. To that place all the ivory is brought from the country beyond the Nile through the district called Cayenneum and thence to Adulis. The author of the peripluce also names the ruler of Aksum whose familiarity with Greek literature and surely Greek language and culture more broadly was flagged. Quote, these places from the calf eaters to the other Berber country are governed by Zoskales who is miserly in his ways and always striving for more but otherwise upright and acquainted with Greek literature. End quote. Now in keeping with the theme of this conference this genre of document seems worth commenting on. These sorts of chronicles provide a view of Aksum from a Greco-Roman point of view. Here the Aksumites are confined to a genre of travel literature. They are curiosities, purveyors of luxury goods and exotica from the distant edges of the known world of ivory and elephants and pet chimps for the wives of the wealthiest Romans although their elites could also read Homer and were proficient in Greek. But what about the view from Aksum? Let us place ourselves in Aksum and look outwards toward the Mediterranean and beyond. By the third century CE it was evident across the kingdom of Aksum too that regional power lay in control of the southern red sea through which all maritime commerce funneled between the Mediterranean especially Rome and Byzantium and the Indian Ocean including India, South Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Aksum was also centered along caravan routes that connected the modern region of Sudan to Ethiopia with points farther inland in the African interior. Aksum also engaged in dialogue with South Arabia exchange which began centuries before the kingdom of Aksum emerged as a centralized polity. Early influence from South Arabia was long evident in the Aksumite use of both the ancient South Arabian script Sabian in addition to religious traditions drawn from Southern Arabia already by 500 BCE or so both theities proper like the moon god Almaka in addition to ritual and cultic iconography. We can glean further insights into the worldviews of the Aksumite kings from a handful of monumental inscriptions on stone. Many of these are trilingual recorded in an unvocalized South Arabian Sabian unvocalized and later vocalized Ges the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia which remains the main liturgical language of the Orthodox Ethiopian and Ethiopian Catholic churches today and as I'm showing you on screen in Koine Greek these inscriptions have been found at a range of sites in Northern Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Arabia and even at Meriway. Along with numismatic material coins they provide the main historical evidence about the names, dates and undertakings of the Aksumite kings and in fact some Aksumite kings are known only from third century CE inscriptions from Southern Arabia indicating that during this time the kingdom was particularly active across the Red Sea. Here on screen you can see the so called Azana stone from Aksum but in reality this is only one of several monuments that narrate the exploits of King Azana and document his shifting ideological affiliations from traditional Aksumite beliefs toward the thorough embrace of Christianity. This inscription carries a trilingual set of texts and narrates the king's military undertakings and accolades in the years around 330 CE. On one face is a Greek text and on the other face and the narrow ends of the stone two Semitic inscriptions, one in Sabian characters the other in unvocalized Gez. Azana was the first Aksumite ruler to convert to Christianity His reign saw the introduction of Christianity in the kingdom of Aksum and was also marked by campaigns against hostile neighbors including the Nubians. The Aksumites under King Azana are thought to have dealt the final blow to the kingdom of Kush at its capital city, Merue and stone inscriptions written in Gez have been found there from this period. Of these events these monumental stone inscriptions provide interesting details. Concerning Azana's campaign against the kingdom of Kush for example one Greek narrative runs quite differently from the parallel text in Gez. The Semitic inscription presents additional details that are absent from the Greek text including references to the joint campaign against the Kushites, the path of the Aksumite army details of the military operation, the names of troop corps involved the names of enemies killed or taken captive and the booty seized. The Gez version is still laden with formulas that smack of Aksumite paganism and must have been intended for a wider Aksumite audience still grounded in a pre-Christian religious landscape. The Greek version on the other hand is characterized by its prolixity in religious matters and is resolutely Christian in outlook and I've translated here the first 15 lines or so of the Greek so you get a feel for the flavor of this inscription quote, in faith in God and in the power of the father of the son and of the Holy Spirit to him who has preserved the kingdom for me through faith in his son Jesus Christ to him who has helped me and always helped me. I, Adana, king of the Aksumites, hymnorites, et cetera and servant of Christ I give thanks to the Lord my God and I am unable to fully express his graces for my mouth and my mind cannot express all the graces that he has made me. And this same trajectory that I'm showing you here with these stone monumental inscriptions is also evident in Aksumite coinage. Aksum was the first sub-Saharan African culture to mint its own coinage in gold, silver, bronze and bimetallic, selectively gilded silver and bronze issues. That the adoption of coinage was undertaken with an eye toward trade with Mediterranean is suggested by the fact that Aksumite coins followed a Roman weight standard and were initially inscribed in Greek, the commercial and political lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean. In minting their own coinage, Aksumite kings referred to themselves as Basileis. Here you see two coins of the king and Dubis who reigned around 230 CE. The one at the left reads Aksumitou Basileis, king to Aksum. The one at right reads in Greek and Dubis Basileis, king and Dubis. The conversion to Christianity of King Azzana is also documented in Aksumite coinage as it is in the monumental stone inscriptions previously discussed. In his earliest coinage, Azzana included the disc and crescent symbol of Almaka, the Sabian moon god, but this image was substituted out for the Christian cross in later issues around 330 CE or so. Tradition holds that Azzana was converted to Christianity by Frementius, his enslaved Phoenician tutor from Tyre. So you can see here what's understood as Azzana's earlier issues with again this crescent and disc symbol of the moon god, originally Sabian, we think, Almaka, but this is later substituted out for you see the Christian cross in the reign of a single king. We combine this with the evidence from the monumental inscriptions and we can really see what this looked like on the ground at least in elite strata. This provides a fascinating insight into the process by which Christianity was adopted in the Aksumite kingdom. Christianity was first taken up by the indigenous ruling elite almost as an elite veneer overlaying the indigenous highland religious culture that for the most part continued for some time without interruption. While Azzana's conversion was commemorated on his coinage and in monumental Greek inscriptions, that of his subjects appears only gradually in a top down progression that slowly manifests in the archaeological record in the appearance of, for example, cross designs on everyday objects, especially ceramics. Alongside glass goblets, amphorae filled with wine and olive oil, polished red terraced gelata and other ceramics, Christianity was surely Aksum's biggest and most long lasting Mediterranean import. In 525 CE, for example, the Aksumite king Caleb would attack southern Arabia to protect the Christian community there and in so doing consolidate his control over several Arabian states. The Byzantine emperor sent an embassy to both Arabia and Aksum from Byzantium in 530-31 that underscored his and the Byzantine empire's interest and investment in these events. For the final portion of my talk, I'd now like to show how much we are still learning about the kingdom of Aksum by way of modern archeological work at the site of Beta Samati. Though today, this and other projects have been paused due to the devastating civil war in this very Tigray region and the political volatility and humanitarian crisis that has decimated the area for the past 17 months. This project began back in 2009 when the southern Red Sea Archeological Histories or CIRSA, Prophets, and the southern Red Sea Archeological Histories or CIRSA project led by Michael Harrowar at the Johns Hopkins University, started a survey of a 100 kilometer region surrounding the town of Yeha in northern Ethiopia. Archeological survey in the 1970s had documented numerous sites in the area but the wider region remained underexplored and was presumed to have been abandoned after the pre-Aximite period. Information from local residents led us to Beta Samati, a 20 hectare settlement featuring a 14 hectare central tell or mound that stands up to 25 meters above the surrounding valley. So it was pretty obvious, it wasn't really much looking because this is what it looked like right there in the living landscape today. The excavations in 2011, 12, 15, and 16 revealed massive stone architecture extending more than 3 meters below the ground surface dating from as early as the 8th century BCE. The recent uncovering of Beta Samati is of considerable importance for understanding the development of early complex polities in Africa, demonstrating that Beta Samati was a large densely populated settlement that continued to function as a major node on trade routes that linked the Mediterranean to Adulis and Aksum during the classic middle and late Aksumite periods. During Aksum's Acme, state business was often administered from palatial compounds such as those at Dungor near Aksum and Matara and Adulis in modern-day Eritrea. What we found at Beta Samati is another such complex which changed markedly in nature with the Kingdom's conversion to Christianity. And I'm just showing you here what we found at Beta Samati compared to other known Aksumite sites and you can see the clear parallels in just the type of structure and the architectural form. Excavations at Beta Samati have revealed a residential or workshop precinct in Area A, so these are the two regions on that tell or hill that we've explored. Here's Area A. I'll focus my comments today on our work in Area B, which uncovered a basilica with a rectangular tripartite-syriac indented plan characterized by interior recessed and rebedded walls with projecting corners and dressed cornerstones emblematic of the Aksumite tradition. The layout is similar to the middle and late Aksumite basilicas at Aksum, although the rectangular plan rather than the apsidal sanctuary plan at Beta Samati suggests an earlier date. The basilica shows evidence for ritual and administrative activities, international trade, and differential access to high-value food stuffs. A Gez inscription found just outside the structure reads, two or four this entrance or atrium, Christ, be favorable to us. And at the right, one of the more perplexing finds from the site was this soft stone pendant with incised designs and letters recovered just outside the eastern wall of the basilica. The letters found within the right-hand frame can be interpreted as Gez, if one accepts that they are rotated and meant to be read in a radial pattern. And this has been read by an Italian colleague as a venerable, i.e., the venerable cross, and you can see in the left-hand panel and on top crosses. Several artifact types found in area B, but not area A, are important in that they reveal long-distance trade. We have a terrace gelata, a glass bead, and amphora shirts. A gold bezel and carnelian intaglio ring was discovered 90 mm beneath the level of the stone-paved floor. Although the composition of the Beta Samata ring is of Roman influences, its iconography is distinctly regional. Although a few artifacts were found in direct association with the ring, an acuba amphora shirt uncovered nearby underscores the importance of long-distance trade. Also found in area B, but not area A, were bucrania, stamp seals, and enigmatic small disc cone and cross-shaped ceramic objects, which were referred to as tokens. Many are pierced by a hole for stringing together, possibly suggesting a role in trade-related accounting or administrative activities. Small stone-worked pieces, seemingly anthropomorphic, also emerged in area B. Area B also yielded 49 ceramic zuomorphic figurines and bucrania, which broadly resembled terracotta bull figurines and stone bucrania from Ona period sites in Eritrea that are much older. It is unexpected to find figurines and bucrania in a basilica, the presence of which suggests a mixing of pagan and early Christian traditions. Beta Samata is also beginning to help clarify the nature of axomite political religious authority. In Ethiopia, the form seems to have first appeared in conjunction with Christianity. The basilica at Beta Samata, however, shows this complex blurring of secular trade and administration. Coinage, tokens, stamp seals, then there are the pagan rituals, figurines and bucrania, and early Christian traditions, incense burners, crosses. What then was the view of the Greco-Roman civilization from Beta Samata? For the great majority of persons in the axomite empire, knowledge of the distant Mediterranean with its chariot races and Roman emperors must have been hazy at best, at least on the day to day. The classical and Byzantine Mediterranean was a distant world from which luxury goods were imported by wealthy nobles, high-ranking regional officials, and high-ranking to glass goblets. Yet by the later third century CE, this started to change, at least for some. The kingdom of axom began minting its own coinage on the Roman weight standard, a clear sign of increasing wealth, centralized administration, the organization of labor and economic oversight, and a Mediterranean-leading commercial orientation. And these coins carried Greek text. These did African kings identified as Basileis in the Greek language and script. What did a pastoralist outside of Beta Samata make of this? When and if he encountered it? Or what did he think when he passed the azana stele, when he went to axom, or any of the other monumental inscriptions that carried Greek text? Was this understood as just another trapping hand for the king's grandeur and cosmopolitanism? One suspects that the axomites must have entered into closer dialogue with the Eastern Mediterranean, with the kingdom's formal conversion to Christianity, which required participation in and the circulation of ritual traditions and narratives that were developed by Christ followers in the Greco-Roman-Jewish Mediterranean. Byzantine emperors like Justinian engaged actively with the axomite kings, encouraging their support of common Christian missions. But more intimately, axom's early adoption of Christianity formed a huge part of how the kingdom understood the classical and Byzantine Mediterranean and what it meant for and could promise them both in this life and the next. Answers to many of these questions are still being worked out, and I'm grateful to Fairfield University to be able to discuss them with you all today. Thank you. And now we have time for questions. So, I have never heard of the kingdom of axom before this talk. And I was wondering if there was a sort would you say that there was sort of an erasure of the kingdom and when would that have begun in history? Oh, I don't think there's been an erasure per se. The sources that I showed you, at least the Greek and Latin sources have been there for quite a while. People have been reading plenty in Latin for a long time. But you're certainly right to point to the lack of dialogue that axom has had with the broader Greco-Roman Eastern Mediterranean. And I think, you know, the question of how to remedy that such that people don't, you know, was there an erasure? How could I not have heard about this? That's part of the work that this conference is doing. I lived and did graduate school in Baltimore in Maryland, and the state of Maryland has just started incorporating discussion of the axomite kingdom within a sixth grade public world history textbooks. And why wouldn't you? Of course, this makes great sense. So as Professor Bagnell said yesterday, you know, this is the kind of tedious, laborious work in cross-disciplinary conversations that hopefully one day will make it such that, you know, that this isn't a lacuna in the historical tradition. Thank you for your question and insights. I'm going to back up a little bit, because I have an ideologically loaded question for you. I've taken a side on this team already, so I'm going to ask you about your model of the Christianization of Ethiopia to the top-down. And I want to see if you can imagine a hypothetical alternative that looks a lot in the following way. I think that the Indian studies were slowly tossing out the top-down model because we've been doing a lot more dating. And the more we dig, the more we find that it's clearly Christian, clearly indigenous that predates the top-down model. And I wonder if the Ethiopian top-down model is still viable only because there isn't enough digging. In other words, if you do more, like, maybe somebody prints a work even a dozen times, you're going to start finding third-century, early fourth-century Christian stuff in Ethiopia that's indigenous that might have actually given the king a little push. Yeah, it's a great point and certainly no confrontation needed. I think that's very possible. Of course, you know, so much of this is still being sorted out by fieldwork, field survey. And I don't think it's entirely top-down because the narrative that we both mentioned of Frementius, he was an enslaved Phoenician from Tyre who converted the king, Azana, whom he was tutoring. So there's already threads of, you know, was this top-down model king-down? Clearly it's there. The tutor, the enslaved tutor is there and a fervent believer such that he's able to convert his king. I think it's very possible that that model can fade. I do see, even at Beta Sumati and the materials that I showed you, where we see prominent crosses, it is on these elite objects, the soft stone pendant, for example, in the monumental narratives of Azana and the transition of the coinage. So maybe that's the hinge at which we can capture it, that kind of 330 date. You know, here's Azana firmly grounded in a pre-Christian tradition. Here we see evidence of the ideological shift of what that would look like on the ground before in a kind of ground-up model. You know, the crosses on ceramics. How would you look for that? You know, I don't see that on the ground and what we know thus far. The Mediterranean imports are there. So maybe this too has yet to appear. But I would say that is still where scholarship is in thinking about it. And a parallel is, in the much earlier pre-Aximite or Diamat culture, it's thought that something similar happened with elites in drawing in Sabian South Arabian religion cultic influences. So that elite top-down model is there in other kind of parallel ritual traditions as well. So I don't know what to say except, so let's see. Great, thanks. There's a question for both of you. And following on this discussion immediately, whether you see any value in thinking about this question from the contemporary Christianizations of Armenia and Georgia I think we're both going to play dinner and so on. But one thing I would point out is that there are always indigenous traditions that exist outside of the historiographical mainstream. Certainly Ethiopia that continue to insist on direct Armenian connections. And I've blown some of the indigenous knowledge off before. Maybe I won't do it in this case. We'll keep digging. I would say to Roger that again speaking to what I know from Ethiopia, which is not a lot. The question of the introduction of Islam gives us another parallel for thinking about the entry of an external religious system within Axonite society. And that is right around the time at base money in Axon that we see things stopping, slowing, changing. And so I think I'm trying to think more broadly about what happens and what it looks like on the ground when new religious systems really make inroads into Axon in this case or pre-Axonite society in the case of civilian religion. But we could at least look how this happens in other religious systems, Islam in particular. And big round of applause for us.