The throne was cut from a single piece of gleaming white marble. The visitors were surprised to see this, because they knew of such stone only in the Mediterranean, from the island of Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople. The throne’s base was square, with four delicate columns at the corners and one more supporting the seat at the center. The obelisk was carved of basalt on a square base and stood behind the throne. Both objects were inscribed in Greek.
The manuscript illustration we have of the scene (a copy of an original from an eyewitness) makes it hard to get at their sizes, but the throne was perhaps human-size, and the obelisk not out of scale with it. In a future era, Mussolini would take another of Axum’s obelisks from Ethiopia to Italy to stand as a token of his imperial aspirations in Rome. A few years ago its fragments were disassembled and returned to Ethiopia.
Mountainous Axum was a venerable Christian
Mountainous Axum was a venerable Christian city by then (the 520s CE), and if any place on the planet could ever reasonably claim to be the home of the Ark of the Covenant, Axum would be it. Ellatzbaas, king of the Axumites, was as Christian as his ancestors had been for a century at least, though his brand of Christianity was falling out of favor elsewhere and would gradually lose touch with most of the Christian worlds in the years to come Ellatzbaas launched his invasion from Ethiopia. Now Ellatzbaas prepared to descend from his capital 7,000 feet above sea level and go to war across the Red Sea against the Himyarites, dwellers in what is now Yemen. Fastidious in preserving and pro-claiming royal glories, he sent to Adoulis to have the inscriptions on the throne copied for him and placed at the gates of Adoulis. This required craftsmanship and intelligence and led Asbas, the governor there, to ask our two traveling merchants to do the copying for him.
They were Menas, who later became a monk in Sinai and died there; and Cosmas, who came from Alexandria. From their visit, Cosmas kept his own copy of the inscriptions, and he included them in his descriptive twelve-volume book about such places. The two travelers also found sculptured images of Heracles and Hermes on the back of the throne and disagreed over their symbolic interpretation. They represented power and wealth to the merchant who would become a monk, but Cosmas thought they stood for deeds and words instead. Merchants like Menas and Cosmas traveled to Adoulis because they knew that sellers brought incense down from the mountains there and that one could buy it at a good price to transport across and around Arabia to Roman and Persian markets. This was good business, supplementing what Yemen produced across the water.
