Northern Ethiopia’s ancient city of Axum is the country’s oldest extant urban settlement. Once the capital and a major religious center, it remains the site of many remarkable antiquities, including the famous monolithic obelisks, or stelae, important stone inscriptions, the remains of spectacular palaces and graves, and a special gold-silver-and-bronze currency. The city, with its historic church of St. Mary of Tseyon (Zion), is a must for the tourist and any serious student of Ethiopia’s history and culture. Axum grew to importance in classical antiquity – the millennium which included the birth of Christ. The Axumite kingdom emerged as the most powerful Red Sea state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia, a great commercial power trading with Egypt, probably Palestine, Arabia, India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The Axumites also had significant trading land contacts with religions to the west and south, some of which were gradually brought into Axum’s economic and later political orbit. After its conversion to Christianity, early in the fourth century, Axum emerged as an important religious centre: the site of the country’s most important and revered Church of St Mary of Tseyon, which, according to Ethiopian tradition, is the repository of the biblical Ark of the Covenant-housed in its own separate building; Axum’s importance survived its political decline, between the seventh and 10th centuries. A number of years later Ethiopian Emperors – all who could do so – went to the city for their coronation. Axum so impressed 19th-century British traveler, Theodore Bent, that he described it at length in his classic travelogue The Sacred City of the Ethiopians.