Aksum

Aksum was the kingdom of the northern Ethiopian highlands, a trading power connected to the Red Sea and beyond, and it adopted Christianity in the fourth century under King Ezana, which places it among the earliest states anywhere to do so.

The conversion is unusually well evidenced by the standards of the period, because Ezana left inscriptions in Ge'ez, Sabaean and Greek, and the religious language in them changes. Earlier texts invoke the gods of the traditional pantheon; later ones invoke the Lord of Heaven and Earth in monotheist terms without naming the older gods. His coinage changes at the same point, replacing a disc and crescent with a cross, which makes Aksumite coins one of the clearest numismatic records of a state conversion in existence.

The church that resulted was tied to Alexandria: its head was a bishop appointed by the Coptic patriarch of Egypt, an arrangement that lasted until 1959. It followed the Alexandrian christology and therefore stood outside the Chalcedonian settlement of 451 along with the Coptic, Syriac and Armenian churches.

The kingdom declined from the seventh century as trade routes shifted, and the Christian centre moved south into the highlands, where later dynasties built the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and a monastic tradition that has continued without interruption. Ge'ez remains the liturgical language.

The Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion at Aksum holds, according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ark of the Covenant, brought from Jerusalem by Menelik, the son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba.

The claim is set out in the Kebra Nagast, a Ge'ez work compiled in its present form in the fourteenth century, which recounts the queen's visit to Solomon, the birth of Menelik, and the transfer of the Ark to Ethiopia, and which grounds the Ethiopian monarchy's descent from Solomon on that story. The Solomonic dynasty ruled until 1974 and the 1955 constitution stated the descent as a matter of law.

The object is kept in a chapel beside the church and is seen by one man, a guardian appointed for life who does not leave the enclosure and who is succeeded on his death by another. No examination has ever been permitted and the church does not entertain requests for one. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church holds a consecrated tablet, the tabot, understood as a replica of the Ark, which is carried in procession at Timkat and is itself the object that makes a building a church.

The atlas records this as the church's own position, held consistently and publicly, and records that it is not testable. Edward Ullendorff's study of the relationship between Ethiopian Christianity and the Hebrew Bible examines the wider pattern of Israelite elements in Ethiopian practice, of which this claim is one part.