History Does Not Belong to Those Who Shout the Loudest

by David Yeh

Civilizations do not grant political inheritance certificates, and monuments do not confer modern entitlement. Yet in the Horn of Africa today, ancient history is increasingly conscripted into contemporary power struggles, stripped of context and pressed into service as ideological proof. Few examples illustrate this abuse more clearly than the selective invocation of the Kingdom of Aksum as a civilizational trump card, detached from the geography, chronology, and diversity that actually produced it. When examined carefully, the historical record tells a very different story, one that places Eritrea at the core of ancient Red Sea civilization, recognizes Aksum as a product rather than a progenitor of that landscape, and rejects the notion that any modern group must borrow another civilization’s past to validate its own present.

Aksum and the Red Sea World: Power Built on Trade, Not Isolation

The Kingdom of Aksum ranks among the most influential civilizations of ancient Africa, flourishing roughly between the first and seventh centuries CE across the northern Horn of Africa. Its achievements are often summarized through its monumental stelae, early coinage, and adoption of Christianity, but these visible symbols obscure the deeper source of Aksumite power. The true foundation of Aksum’s rise was its integration into long-distance commercial networks anchored in the Red Sea world.

At the heart of this system stood Adulis, the great port city on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea. Adulis long predated the emergence of Aksum, existing as a major commercial hub well before Aksum rose to prominence. Recent archaeological findings increasingly confirm that it functioned as a central node of regional and intercontinental trade centuries prior to Aksum’s political ascendancy. Adulis was the center and Aksum the periphery. Through Adulis flowed ivory, gold, frankincense, animal products, and luxury goods exchanged with merchants from the Mediterranean, South Arabia, Persia, and the Indian Ocean basin. Later Adulis functioned not merely as a harbor but as the economic and diplomatic engine of the Aksumite state. It connected the African interior to global trade circuits and supplied the material base that sustained imperial administration, military capacity, and cultural production. Without Adulis, Aksum’s influence would have been geographically constrained and economically fragile.

This commercial system was reinforced by administrative cohesion, particularly through the use of Geʽez as the official written language of governance, inscriptions, and religious texts. Geʽez provided a durable literary and bureaucratic framework that outlived Aksum itself. Yet this cultural legacy did not emerge in isolation. It developed within a dense network of urban centers along the Red Sea corridor, many of which were located squarely within what is now Eritrea. To understand Aksum, therefore, one must look beyond Axum city itself and toward the broader Eritrean landscape that made its rise possible.

This wider perspective leads to a crucial correction: Aksum was not the origin point of civilization in the region, but its culmination.

Eritrea Before Aksum: The Deep Foundations of Northeast African Civilization

Eritrea is not a peripheral appendage to ancient Northeast African history. It is one of its deepest foundations. Long before Aksum rose to imperial prominence between the first and seventh centuries CE, the territory of modern Eritrea was already densely inhabited, economically integrated, and culturally sophisticated. Decades of archaeological research by the National Museum of Eritrea, in collaboration with international institutions, have documented an extraordinary concentration of sites spanning nearly every phase of human history. This record demonstrates that Aksum emerged from within an older and broader Northern Horn of Africa cultural landscape rather than standing above or apart from it.

By the first millennium BCE, today’s Eritrea hosted complex pre-Aksumite societies whose scale, engineering, and political organization rivaled later imperial achievements. Sites such as Qohaito, Metera, and Keskese form an interconnected archaeological landscape along ancient trade routes linking the interior highlands to the Red Sea port of Adulis. These were not marginal settlements but major urban, political, and ceremonial centers marked by monumental architecture, temples, palaces, obelisks, and sophisticated water-management systems.

Qohaito, often identified with the ancient city of Koloe mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, exemplifies this early prominence. Situated on a high plateau, it contains the remains of the pre-Christian Temple of Mariam Wakiro, extensive residential complexes, and the Safira Dam, an advanced water reservoir still functional after nearly three millennia. Metera, near Senafe, functioned as a major administrative and political center, featuring palace ruins and the Hawulti (Obelisk) Belew-Kelew, which bears the oldest known inscription in the Geʽez script. Keskese appears to have served primarily ritual and ceremonial functions, distinguished by towering monolithic stelae and inscriptions in South Arabian script.

Adulis itself, as mentioned above, predates Aksum’s imperial zenith and was among the most important commercial centers in sub-Saharan Africa. Contemporary with the Greco-Roman world, it anchored regional and intercontinental trade long before Aksum consolidated political dominance inland. For much of early antiquity, Aksum was one participant in this Eritrea-centered network rather than its unquestioned center.

Taken together, this evidence overturns narratives that treat Eritrea as historically derivative. Aksum did not arise in isolation or supremacy over this landscape. It rose from within it, building upon centuries of innovation, urbanism, and connectivity rooted in Eritrea’s Red Sea corridor and southern highlands.

If history is to be respected, it must be read forward from evidence, not backward from political ambition.

History, Identity, and the Dangers of Civilizational Appropriation

It is precisely this historical complexity that contemporary political narratives often seek to flatten. Efforts to invoke Aksum as a civilizational justification for modern territorial or ideological claims distort both history and identity. This distortion becomes especially harmful when Aksum is invoked in the name of the Oromo people, whose own history requires no validation from an unrelated ancient empire.

Oromo civilization followed its own trajectory, shaped by distinct ecological, linguistic, and political conditions. Institutions such as the Gadaa system reflect a sophisticated social and political order that developed independently of Aksumite influence. Oromo northward expansion into regions such as Wollo and southern Tigray occurred centuries after Aksum had already declined. There is no credible historical evidence that the lands of modern Oromia were ever administered by the Aksumite state.

The Oromo’s Cushitic linguistic heritage, social organization, and modern use of the Latin-based Qubee script represent an independent cultural evolution rather than a derivative of Geʽez or northern Semitic traditions. An PP Oromo attempting to fabricate continuity where none exists do not strengthen Oromo identity. It diminishes it by implying that legitimacy must be borrowed rather than owned.

The same distortion occurs when Eritrea, Somalia or Djibouti is erased from historical narratives to manufacture claims of civilizational inheritance. Respecting Aksum’s monuments, including Axum, Adulis, and Metera, does not require asserting ancestral or political ownership over them. As with ancient civilizations worldwide, admiration and preservation are acts of respect, not claims of sovereignty or descent.

Aksum and the Oromo civilization represent distinct chapters within the Horn of Africa’s layered history. Neither diminishes the other. What diminishes both is the instrumentalization of history to serve contemporary power.

Conclusion: Plural Histories, Not Borrowed Legitimacy

The Kingdom of Aksum was a Red Sea–oriented civilization rooted in trade, administration, and cultural synthesis across the northern Horn of Africa. Eritrea was central to that world long before Aksum’s rise and remained foundational throughout its development. Oromo civilization, like that of many other peoples in the region, emerged elsewhere, at a different time, shaped by its own internal logic and historical experience.

No single civilization monopolizes legitimacy in the Horn of Africa. Its richness lies precisely in its plurality. History does not belong to those who shout the loudest, nor to those who weaponize the past to compensate for insecurity in the present. Preserving historical truth requires resisting fabricated continuities, rejecting civilizational appropriation, and respecting each people’s past on its own terms.

Only by doing so can the region honor its inheritance without turning history into a battleground for power.