Burnt by the son: Ethiopia's sacred art - The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, Cleveland Museum of Art, OH, coins, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, gold crosses, and other antiquities - includes a related article on the next exhibition at the museum, The Pharaohs, from the Louvre

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

Picture in your mind King Ezana, master of Axum, who reigns from Ethiopia's northern highlands down to the R 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 overspreaded with a cloth, tied down with a ribbon; or perhaps the occasion is a formal individual 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 solitary one of the Empire's many recognized religions--and Axum is a major force in the Eastern Mediterranean. it is single 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 make submissives are, albeit nominally at first, brought into Christianity's fold

More than a thousand years earlier, Homer's conceited Achaeans knew of the "most distant of men the blameless Ethiopians." And almost sum of two units 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 on what account is the Christian legacy of Ethiopia thus 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 scope toward the see of Alexandria, rather than toward Rome or Constantinople; perhaps because Ethiopia was for with equal reason long largely cut off from the European mainstream by means of the surrounding tide of Islam; perhaps because the Ethiopians ("burnt faces" in the of greece language that named them) are black, and European tillages 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. upon display here, over the winter solstice (which pagan European custom transformed into the season of Christ's birth), is an exploration of 1500 years of Ethiopia's material and spiritual tillage From third-century Axumite coinage end 18th-century illuminated manuscripts, "Sacred Art" reopen our organ of sights 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 southerly Arabia and India and its prominence upon 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 greatest in quantity coinage in the ancient world, the master is the dominant image--thus we know of Ezana's fringed robe and tiara. These coins also testify that wheat, sum of two units stalks of which typically frame Axum's kings, was critical to the economy. on the other hand from an era when royal government 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 emblems of divinity, the disc and the crescent; in their hands are the profane signs of their power, a sword or a spear. Inscribed for all to diocese is their claim to divinely endorsed absolute domination based on descent from Axum's tutelary deity: "Son of Mahrem." on the other hand beginning with Ezana in the mid-fourth hundred the cross replaces the disc and moon in her first quarter and the Son of Mahrem disappears, to be replaced in time with like phrases as, "By the grace of God" and "By this cros [the king] will conquer"

Initially, the fables on the coins are in hellenic the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean from the days of Alexander the Great [i]or[/i] part of to the other the collapse of Byzantium 1700 years later. above time, however, Axum's silver and alloy of copper coins begin t6 bear inscriptions in Geez a Semitic language that emerg as Ethiopia's classical tongue following the influx of clans from across the Red Sea during the fifth hundred B.C. Significantly, however, the gold coins used for international trade not ever lose their legends in grecian even if they gain them in Geez Rome too, influences Axum; the weight of the kingdom's coins closely parallels the empire's publicity even to the changes introduced following Constantine the Great's monetary reforms.