Daily life in Aksum during the 1st-3rd centuries CE

A grounded look at routines in the Aksumite world, where highland farming, Red Sea trade, stone monuments, households, and markets connected East Africa to wider networks.

The city of Aksum stood in the northern Ethiopian highlands, while the kingdom that developed around it reached into what is now Eritrea. A Greek-speaking merchant's guide written around the mid-first century CE calls Aksum a metropolis and describes ivory travelling from the interior through Koloe to the Red Sea port of Adulis. The text proves that an inland-to-coast trading route existed, although it says little about life in farming households and does not fully explain the political relationship between Aksum and Adulis at that date.[1][4] By the third century Aksum headed a larger, more centralised kingdom; its first coinage appeared only near the end of the period, around 270 CE.[1][7]

Evidence for ordinary life is uneven. Excavated floors, hearths, pottery, grinding stones, animal bones and charred seeds reveal repeated domestic work, while graves and stelae show inequality and commemoration. Written sources instead concentrate on rulers and commodities. Many excavated deposits also span more than one archaeological phase, so practices securely documented in fourth- to seventh-century Aksum cannot simply be projected back into the first three centuries. What can be reconstructed is therefore a range of activities, not a single typical household or daily timetable.[1][2]

Housing and Living Spaces

Ordinary housing in early Aksum is much less securely known than monumental building. Excavation at Ona Nagast on Bieta Giyorgis hill, immediately north-west of Aksum, exposed a substantial residence with stone masonry, compacted-clay and paved surfaces, stairways and a stone-lined drain. Its occupation and rebuilding extended from Early into Middle Aksumite times, however, and its scale makes it a poor model for every home.[2][3] Less durable walls and roofs have survived badly; thatch, timber and earth are plausible materials, but their precise arrangement in most first- to third-century dwellings remains uncertain.

A four-square-metre trial trench elsewhere at Ona Nagast provides a rare, if very small, view of a less wealthy setting: one corner of a structure contained abundant Early Aksumite domestic pottery, a bronze earring and a few flaked-stone tools, but no imported pottery. Two fragments of Roman glass were the only imported finds reported there.[3] This contrast with the larger residence warns against treating elite buildings as normal housing. Families living nearer fields and grazing land also faced different demands from people attached to a residence or craft area, and archaeology does not yet reveal a standard household size or a fixed division of rooms by gender.

Food and Daily Meals

Farming combined crops of south-west Asian and African origin, but the surviving early evidence does not justify a full menu for every century. Wheat, barley, flax and legumes occur in the Aksum-area archaeobotanical record. At Early Aksumite Ona Nagast, only one identified finger-millet grain currently provides direct evidence for that crop; a single sorghum grain at Aksum comes from a broadly dated context beginning in the later third century. Preservation and small samples can make some grains archaeologically scarce, but they also require caution about presenting teff, sorghum or particular pulses as universal staples throughout 1–300 CE.[3][5]

Across the long Bieta Giyorgis sequence, animal bones are dominated by cattle, with sheep and goats also present; donkeys and domestic fowl occur in smaller numbers. Butchery marks demonstrate meat use; cattle also provided traction, while donkeys moved loads.[6] For many households, grain cleaning and hand-grinding, carrying water, tending fires and protecting stores would have taken more time than consuming imported luxuries. The first-century trade guide lists limited amounts of Mediterranean wine and olive oil at Adulis, alongside textiles and metal goods, and distinguishes supplies for the ruler from goods for the wider market. It is evidence for availability at the port, not proof that such foods regularly reached ordinary tables in Aksum.[4]

Work and Labor

Cultivation and herding supported the city, court and specialist work. Excavated material also attests pottery production, stone working, metal working and the continued use of flaked-stone tools alongside metal ones.[1] The labour behind these finds included obtaining clay, fuel, stone and metal; shaping or firing objects; and repairing tools. Exactly who performed each task is seldom recorded, so modern assumptions about a rigid gendered division of work should not be substituted for evidence. Rural producers and urban residents were interdependent: grain and animals moved towards the settlement, while vessels, tools and other goods circulated outward.

Trade added a long chain of transport work without turning most residents into international merchants. The Periplus measures the inland journey in stages—three days from Adulis to Koloe and five more to Aksum—and lists ivory, tortoiseshell and rhinoceros horn as exports. Imported Egyptian and Indian cloth, glass, brass, copper vessels, iron tools, wine and oil entered through the same coastal market.[4] Port workers, carriers, animal handlers and suppliers must have moved and provisioned these loads, but their organisation and status are not described. Season, the condition of tracks and the need to feed pack animals would all affect the pace and cost of the journey.

Social Structure

Aksumite society was unequal, although the evidence cannot supply a complete list of ranks or occupations. By about the second century, burials varied markedly in the quantity and richness of their grave goods. Monumental tombs and the largest carved stelae, dated mainly to the third and fourth centuries, record elite competition at the late edge of this page's period rather than the circumstances of most residents.[1][8] A ruler, court, prosperous households, merchants, craftspeople and food producers can be recognised more confidently than the legal status or family organisation of the wider population. Kin and dependency probably structured labour and care, but surviving sources reveal very little about marriage, inheritance, childhood or the distribution of work between women and men. The disc-and-crescent on Endubis's late-third-century coins belongs to pre-Christian royal imagery; it should not be read as a complete account of household belief.[7]

Tools and Technology

Grinding stones and locally made, hand-built pottery were more pervasive than prestige technology. Pots stored, cooked and served food; some were slipped or burnished, while wheel-thrown vessels were imports.[1] Iron, stone and copper-alloy tools served cutting, building and craft work, but specific implements should not be assigned to every farm without dated contexts. Quarrying, moving and raising stelae demanded exceptional coordination, ropes, leverage and labour. Coinage began only in the late third century under Endubis: early gold and silver issues carried Greek inscriptions and were oriented strongly towards royal display and external exchange, so they did not suddenly replace other forms of local transaction.[1][7]

Clothing and Materials

Textiles rarely survive in Aksum's soil, making ordinary dress especially difficult to reconstruct. The Periplus records Egyptian linen and cloaks and a limited quantity of Indian cotton garments at Adulis, but a port inventory does not show what most highland residents wore.[4] Locally available hides and fibres, together with imported cloth, could be turned into garments, straps, bags and footwear; the relative importance of wool, linen and cotton in these early centuries remains unclear. Hundreds of blue glass beads and pierced pottery discs from an Early Aksumite chamber in a second-century funerary complex at Ona Enda Aboi Zewgé show that adornment varied with access and occasion.[8] Burial display, however, may not reproduce everyday clothing.

Daily life in early Aksum joined rain-fed highland cultivation and herding to a growing political centre and a long route to the Red Sea. The kingdom's expansion depended on recurring work—preparing fields, tending cattle, grinding grain, maintaining floors and drains, making vessels and moving loads—performed by people whom royal monuments and foreign merchants rarely name. Archaeology makes those activities visible, while still leaving household composition, dress and many social roles unresolved.

References

Phillipson, David W. (2001). “Aksum: An African Civilisation in its World Contexts.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 111, 23–59. British Academy PDF.
Bard, Kathryn A., Rodolfo Fattovich, Andrea Manzo, and Cinzia Perlingieri. (1997). “Archaeological Investigations at Bieta Giyorgis (Aksum), Ethiopia: 1993–1995 Field Seasons.” Journal of Field Archaeology, 24(4), 387–403. DOI.
Bard, Kathryn A., Michael C. DiBlasi, Rodolfo Fattovich, Andrea Manzo, Cinzia Perlingieri, A. Catherine D'Andrea, and Louis Chaix. (1998). “The IUO and BU Archaeological Expedition at Bieta Giyorgis (Aksum): 1998 Field Season.” Nyame Akuma, 50, 10–12. Report PDF.
Anonymous. Periplus Maris Erythraei, sections 4–6, in Lionel Casson (ed. and trans.) (1989), The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton University Press. JSTOR/DOI record.
Ruiz-Giralt, Abel, Alemseged Beldados, Stefano Biagetti, Francesca D'Agostini, A. Catherine D'Andrea, Yemane Meresa, and Carla Lancelotti. (2023). “Sorghum and Finger Millet Cultivation during the Aksumite Period: Insights from Ethnoarchaeological Modelling and Microbotanical Analysis.” Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 6(1), 96–116. DOI.
Chaix, Louis. (2013). “The Fauna from the UNO/BU Excavations at Bieta Giyorgis (Aksum) in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia: Campaigns 1995–2003; Pre-Aksumite, 700–400 BC to Late Aksumite, AD 800–1200.” Journal of African Archaeology, 11(2), 211–241. DOI.
British Museum. “Gold coin of Endubis,” Aksumite Kingdom, c. 270–300 CE, museum no. 1969,0624.1. Collection record.
Bard, Kathryn A., and Rodolfo Fattovich. (1997). “The 1997 B.U./I.U.O. Excavations at Bieta Giyorgis, Aksum: A Preliminary Report.” Nyame Akuma, 48, 22–28. Report PDF.