Burnt by the Sun: Ethiopia’s Sacred Art
By Henry Chase
Ethiopian Review, July 1996
Centuries before Europe’s conversion to Christianitycenturies in which Celtic, Germanic and Slavic peoples saw the natural world as magical, with trees, birds and thunder possessing ominous spiritual powerAfrica gave birth to the world’s first Christian state.
Picture in your mind King Ezana, ruler of Aksum, who reigns from Ethiopia’s northern highlands down to the Red Sea and the port city of Adulis, whose knee bends neither to Rome nor to its great rival, Sassinid Persia. He wears a fringed robe and is adorned with necklace, armlets, bracelets and possibly with finger rings. His head is covered with a cloth, tied down with a riborn; or perhaps the occasion is a formal one, and we see him in the high and elaborate royal Aksumite tiara.
The year is A.D. 324a decade after Rome’s co-emperors, Constantine the Great and Licinius, legalized Christianity, making it only one of the Empire’s many recognizedand Axum is a major force in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is one of but four states (Rome, Persia and the Kushan Kingdom in northern India being the others) to issue gold coinage for international trade. It is also poised to become a Christian state, for with Ezana’s personal conversion his subjects are, albeit nominally at first, brought into Christianity’s fold. More than a thousand years earlier, Homer’s proud Achaeans knew of the “most distant of men, the blameless Ethiopians.” And almost two thousand years before the clash beneath the walls of Troy, the Fifth Dynasty pharaoh Sahure sent expeditions to Ethiopia, which he knew as the land of punt. So why is the Christian legacy of Ethiopia so little known in the West? Perhaps because Ethiopian Christianityarguably the extant version of the religion closest to that practiced in the first centuries after Christ’s deathwas always oriented toward Eastern Orthodoxy’s Monophysite tendency, toward the see of Alexanderia, rather than toward Rome or Constantinopel; perhaps because Ethiopia was for so long largely cut off from the European mainstream by the surrounding tide of Islam; perhaps because the Ethiopians (“burnt faces” in the Greek language that named them) are black, and European cultures continue to identify Christianity as a Western religion.
Whatever the reason of the past, the legacy of Aksum and its successor kingdoms in Ethiopia today stands revealed in the United States, thanks to a stunning exhibition, “African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia,” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. On display here, over the Winter solstice (which pagan European custom transformed into the season of Christ’s birth), is an exploration of 1,500 years of Ethiopia’s material and spiritual culture. From third century Aksumite coinage through 18th-century illuminated manuscripts, “Sacred Art” reopens our eyes to twin truths: Africa has always been an active participant in the saga we call civilization, and artistic beauty married to spiritual narrative and imagery is central to that saga.
The exhibit’s coins of Aksum do more than testify to that kingdom’s trade links with Rome, South Arabia and India and its prominence on the Red Sea littoral. They help establish a lineage that lasted half a millennium, give us physical evidence of royal paraphernalia and symbolism, and reveal Christianity’s status as a state religion almost simultaneous with Constantinople the Great’s founding of Constantinople in A.D. 330.
As with most coinage in the ancient world, the ruler is the dominant imagethus we know of Ezana’s fringed robe and tiara. These coins also testify that wheat, two stalks of which typically frame Akum’s kings, was critical to the economy. But from an era when royal rule was divinely ordained, the coins speak of more than the secular world. Above Endubis, the first king of Aksum to issue coins, and his successor, Aphilas, are pagan symbols of divinity, the disc and the crescent; in their hands are the profane symbols of their power, a sword or a spear. Inscribed for all to see is their claim to devinely endorsed absolute rule based on descent from Aksum’s tutelary deity: “Son of Mahrem.” But beginning with Ezana in the mid-fourth century, the cross replaces the disc and crescent, and the Son of Maharem disappears, to be replaced in time with such phrases as, “By the grace of God,” and “By this cross [the king] will conquer.”
Initially, the legends in the coins are in Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean from the days of Alexander the Great through the collapse of Byzantium 1,700 years later. Over time, however, Aksum’s silver and bronze coins begin to bear inscriptions in Ge’ez, a Semitic languge that emerged as Ethiopia’s classical tongue following the influx of peoples from across the Red Sea during the fifth century B.C. Significantly, however, the gold coins used for international trade never lose their legends in Greek, even if they gain them in Ge’ez. Rome, too, influences Aksum; the weight of the Kingdom’s coins closely parallels the empire’s currency, even to the changes introduced following Constantine the Great’s monetary reforms.
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