Burnt by the son: Ethiopia's sacred art

American Visions, Dec-Jan, 1995 by Henry Chase

Centuries before Europe's conversion to Christianity--centuries in which Celtic, Germanic and Slavic peoples saw the natural world as magical, with trees, birds and thunder possessing ominous spiritual power--Africa gave birth to the world's first Christian state.

Picture in your mind King Ezana, ruler of Axum, 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 ribbon; or perhaps the occasion is a formal one, and we see him in the high and elaborate royal Axumite tiara.

The year is A.D. 324--a decade after Rome's co-emperors, Constantine the Great and Licinius, legalized Christianity, making it only one of the Empire's many recognized religions--and 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 Christianity--arguably the extant version of the religion closest to that practiced in the first centuries after Christ's death--was always oriented toward Eastern Orthodoxy's Monophysite tendency, toward the see of Alexandria, rather than toward Rome or Constantinople; 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 reasons of the past, the legacy of Axum 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 Axumite 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 Axum 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 paraphemalia and symbolism, and reveal Christianity's status as a state religion almost simultaneous with Constantine the Great's founding of Constantinople in A.D. 330.

As with most coinage in the ancient world, the ruler is the dominant image--thus we know of Ezana's fringed robe and tiara. These coins also testify that wheat, two stalks of which typically frame Axum'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 Axum 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 divinely endorsed absolute rule based on descent from Axum'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 Mahrem 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 on 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, Axum's silver and bronze coins begin t6 bear inscriptions in Geez, a Semitic language 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 Geez. Rome, too, influences Axum; 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.