A Tyranny of Sources: The History of Aksum from its Coinage

bibliographic database
Line

Periodical article

Title:	A Tyranny of Sources: The History of Aksum from its Coinage
Author:	Munro-Hay, Stuart C.
Year:	1981
Periodical:	Northeast African Studies
Volume:	3
Issue:	3
Pages:	1-16
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Ethiopia
Subjects:	numismatics history Axum polity History and Exploration
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/43661096
Abstract:	Aksumite historical sources are meagre in the extreme. The available sources refuse to yield information on the sequence of kings and their approximate place in the chronological setting, save in the most equivocal fashion. There is hardly a source whose interpretation is not subject to several possible external factors, and the selection of the most likely of these interpretations is necessarily highly subjective. The author has been: occupied recently with introducing a primary governing factor to the survey of these sources, by the close study of the only surviving material, save for the inscriptions, which provides a contemporary source, that is, the coinage of the Kings of Aksum. Before outlining the rich information which can be derived from coinage when modern numismatic techniques are employed, the author shows the main points of obscurity for the primary and secondary sources and demonstrates how the information they provide is in each case bedevilled with doubts. Notes.