Aksumite currency was coinage produced and used within the Kingdom of Aksum (or Axum) centered in present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia. Its mintages were issued and circulated from the reign of King Endubis around AD 270 until it began its decline in the first half of the 7th century where they started using Dinar along with most parts of the Middle East. During the succeeding medieval period, Mogadishu currency, minted by the Sultanate of Mogadishu, was the most widely circulated currency in the eastern and southern parts of the Horn of Africa from the start of the 12th century.[1]
Aksum's currency serves as an indicator of the kingdom's contemporary cultural influences and religious climate (first polytheistic and later Oriental Christianity). It also facilitated the Red Sea trade on which it thrived.[2] The coinage has also proved invaluable in providing a reliable chronology of Aksumite kings due to the lack of extensive archaeological work in the area.[3]
- ^ Chittick, Neville (1975). An Archaeological Reconnaissance of the Horn: The British-Somali Expedition. pp. 117–133.
- ^ Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: University Press, 1991), p. 155.
- ^ Hahn, Wolfgang, "Coinage" in Uhlig, Siegbert, ed., Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: A-C (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), pp. 767–768.