South of Egypt, past the cataracts,
past Kush and Meroe's pyramid dead,
the Kingdom of Aksum rose in highland
of what is now Ethiopia's head.
They traded with Rome, India, Arabia,
from Adulis on the Red Sea coast.
Their script was Ge'ez, their language Semitic,
cousin of Arabic from distant host.
Ezana, king in the fourth century,
converted to Christianity around
three-thirty, through the Syrian missionary
Frumentius, captured then renowned.
Frumentius had been shipwrecked as a boy,
served in the royal court, was trusted,
returned to Alexandria and was consecrated
bishop by Athanasius, who encrusted
him with authority to evangelize.
He returned to Ethiopia and preached.
Ezana became Christian, and the kingdom
became the second Christian state reached.
(After Armenia. Before Rome.
Ethiopia was the second nation
in history to adopt Christianity
as its official state declaration.)
The Ethiopian Church took Monophysite
position at Chalcedon in four-fifty-one,
holding that Christ had one nature, divine,
absorbing the human into the one.
This put it outside Western orthodoxy
but aligned with Alexandria and Antioch's stance.
The Oriental Orthodox communion formed:
Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Ethiopians' dance.
Ethiopia has a tradition that the Ark of the Covenant
rests at Aksum in the Church of St. Mary of Zion,
brought there by Menelik I, son of
Solomon and Sheba, the kebra nagast scion.
The Kebra Nagast, "Glory of the Kings,"
tells how the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon,
bore his son Menelik, who returned to Ethiopia
taking the Ark back to his own dominion.
Whether or not this is literally true,
the Ethiopian royal line claimed descent
from Solomon for three thousand years
until Haile Selassie's twentieth-century bent.
Ethiopia was never colonized
in the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa —
held off the Italians at Adwa in 1896,
the only African state that defeated Europa.
The country has Jewish communities too,
the Beta Israel, who practice a Judaism
older than the Talmud, based on the Torah,
preserved in highland isolation from racism.
Most were airlifted to Israel in the 1980s
in Operations Moses and Solomon.
A three-thousand-year lineage exiled
to the ancestral homeland at last come.
Aksum declined in the seventh century
as the rise of Islam cut trade routes.
The kingdom moved south and became
the medieval Ethiopian kingdom of roots.
Lalibela in the twelfth century
would carve eleven churches from solid rock,
each one hewn down from a single stone,
a New Jerusalem, a pilgrim's dock.
Ethiopia's story is the African Christian kingdom,
ancient, persistent, mystical, strange,
isolated but connected, deeply rooted,
surviving every political change.
Stand.