Aksum's Ark

We'd been driving through roadwork sites since starting our tour, and now we finally witnessed the fruits of all this labour. The road from our bush camp to our intended destination of Aksum was brand new and we managed to breeze into town before lunch. Give it another 5 years and my guess is that you could drive the length of Ethiopia in a hatchback (as long as you stick to the main roads). Like everywhere else I'd been to north of Botswana, this was another example of "Chinafrica". The machinery, the designers and the engineers all looked suspiciously Asian.

Aksum is one of the main attractions in Ethiopia. This is due to several good reasons: It was the centre of the ancient Aksumite empire, the Queen of Sheba was said to live here, and they claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant. UNESCO agrees (in principle), and has designated the whole area a World Heritage Site.

Dr Neville Chittick described the Aksumite Empire as "the last of the great civilisations of Antiquity to be revealed to modern knowledge". The Aksumite Emipre began to rise as early as 400BC, and by the 1st Century AD Greek merchants knew Aksum as a powerful capital. For almost 1000 years this empire held a strangle hold on the trade routes between Africa and Asia. After this, however, it went into a severe decline that plunged Ethiopia back into the dark ages for hundreds of years. Ethiopians also believe that the ruins on the edge of town represent the palace of the Queen of Sheba, and previous rulers have claimed lineage from King Solomon.

Ethiopians also believe that the local Mary of Zion church contains the Ark of the covenant. More specifically they believe that it is in a chapel out the back. They'll charge you 200birr (about $7) for the privalege of visiting the church, but naturally you can't see the Ark. In fact there is apparently only one guardian, and any other onlooker "bursts into flames". How the Ark knows the person not to torch is a mystery to me. Maybe it gets to vote on it's favourite priest? According to our local guide, most other churches around the country contain replicas of the ark, but you're not allowed to see them either. I didn't have the heart to tell them that I'm actually keeping the real Ark in my basement...but of course they're not allowed to see it.

Aksum has been the most tourist oriented town on our tour so far, and naturally this brought endles touts and scams. By the end of day one we must have been approached by a dozen people with varying scams of one type or another. Coincidentally, all of these touts seemed to be named "Teddy". One of the Teddy's was quite convincing and even came equipped with a tourism authority badge. When we later went to the tourism office they informed us that the real Teddy was currently in Addis on business...at least that explained the choice of name. Fortunately our trip included a tour of Aksum and the following day we saw all the major attractions including the Stelae field and the King Ezana's inscription.

A Stele is the Aksumite equivalent of an obelisk and some contained amazing carvings. Each stele marked the site of an underground tomb and some were over 20m high. It also contains a 33m bohemoth, the Great Stele. It is believed to be the largest single block of stone that humans have ever tried to erect, even dwarfing the obelisks in Egypt. Unfortunately it lies shattered in the ground, exactly where it fell over 1600 years ago. Historians believe that it collapsed during erection...hope noone was standing under that!

King Ezana's inscription sits in a very understated shack. Only uncovered in 1981 by a local farmer, it is the Ethiopian equivalent of the more famous Rosetta Stone. It contains text in Sabaean, the local Ge'ez and most importantly Greek. It apparently translates (a bit more eloquently) to "move this stone and die", so the shack was built around it ,and there is still sits.

While in town we adopted a favourite local restaurant where we discovered Sukwa (no idea how it's spelt). Ethiopian's fast on Wednesday and Friday, and most days in between (a mind-blowing total of 200 days per year) and Sukwa is one of the permissible fasting meals. We wouldn't complain about fasting either, because even when meat became available we stuck to Sukwa. It is a spiced tomato paste/soup that you dip bread into, and we washed it down with freshly blended mango juice for the sum total of about $2...happy days!

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