AXUMITE KINGDOM, THE. About the I st century of the Christian era a new kingdom grew up at Axum (q.v.), of which a king Zoscales is mentioned in the Peri/lus Maris Eryth raei. Fragments of the history of this kingdom, of which there is no authentic chronicle, have been made out chiefly by the aid of inscriptions (see Littmann and Dittenberger cited in bibliog raphy). To the Axumite King Aeizanes the emperor Constantius addressed a letter in A.D. 356.
Aeizanes and his successors style themselves kings of the Axumites, Homerites (Himyar), Raidan, the Ethiopians (Hab asat), the Sabaeans, Silee, Tiamo, the Bugaites (Bela) and Kasu.
This style implies considerable conquests in south Arabia, which, however, must have been lost to the Axumites by A.D. 378. They claim to rule the Kasu or Meroitic Ethiopians; an inscription records an expedition along the Atbara and the Nile to punish the Nuba and Kasu, and a fragment of a Greek inscription from Meroe was recognized by Sayce as commemorating a king of Axum. Except for these inscriptions Axumite history is a blank until in the 6th century the Axumite king appears sending an ex pedition to wreck the Jewish state then existing in south Arabia, and reducing that country to a state of vassalage: the king is styled in Ethiopian chronicles Caleb (Kaleb), in Greek and Ara bic documents el-Esbaha. In the 7th century a successor to this king, named Abraha or Abraham, gave refuge to the persecuted followers of Mohammed at the beginning of his career (see ARA BIA: History, ad init.) . A few more names of kings occur on coins, which were struck in Greek characters till about A.D. 700, of ter which time that language seems to have been displaced in favour of Ethiopic or Geez: the condition of the script and the coins renders them all difficult to identify with the names pre served in the native lists. For the period between the rise of Islam and the beginning of the modern history of Abyssinia there are a few notices in Arabic writers; so we have a notice of a war between Ethiopia and Nubia about 687 (C. C. Rossini in Giorn, Soc. Asiat. Ital. x. 141), and of a letter to George, King of Nubia, from the king of Abyssinia some time between 978 and 1003, when a Jewish queen Judith was oppressing the Christian popu lation (I. Guidi, ibid. iii. 176, 7).
The Abyssinian chronicles attribute the foundation of the king dom to Menelek (or Ibn el-Hakim), son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. The Axumite or Menelek dynasty was driven from northern Abyssinia by Judith, but soon after another Chris tian dynasty, that of the Zagues, obtained power. In 1268 the reigning prince abdicated in favour of Yekuno Amlak, king of Shoa, a descendant of the monarch overthrown by Judith (see