Ezana Stone

The Ezana Stone is a stele from the ancient Kingdom of Aksum. It was discovered in 1982. It is a stone monument that documents the conversion of King Ezana to Christianity and his conquest of various neighboring areas, including Meroë (today North Sudan).

From AD 330 to 356, King Ezana ruled the ancient Kingdom of Aksum centered in the Horn of Africa. He fought against the Nubians and commemorated his victories on stone tablets in praise of God. These liturgical epigraphs were written in various ancient languages, including the Ethiopian Semitic Ge’ez, the South Arabian Sabaean, and Greek. The king’s engravings in stone provided a trilingual monument in different languages, similar to the Rosetta stone.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church had its beginnings during this period. Ecclesiastical History narrates that Saint Frumentius, a slave and tutor for the very young King, converted him to Christianity. Towards the end of his reign, King Ezana launched a campaign against the Kushites around 350 AD which brought down the Kingdom of Kush. Various stone inscriptions written in Ge’ez (using the Ge’ez script) have been found at Meroë, the central city of the Kushites.

Definition of Rosetta stone. 1 : a black basalt stone found in 1799 that bears an inscription in hieroglyphics, demotic characters and Greek and is celebrated for having given the first clue to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. 2 : one that gives a clue to understanding.

The word hieroglyphics refers to an Egyptian writing system that was unintelligible to later civilizations until an inscribed stone about the size of a coffee table was discovered over 200 years ago in an Egyptian town called Rosetta (“Rashid” in Arabic). The Rosetta stone, as it came to be called, held a key to the ancient writing system. Probably written by Egyptian priests in the 2nd century B.C., its hieroglyphic text repeated a text written in familiar Greek. As a result, Egyptologists were able to decipher the symbols. Today”Rosetta stone” is used figuratively, as since the early 20th century, there are other methods and devices that provide clues to help understand something that otherwise would be undecipherable.