Destinations: City of Obelisks

The northern Ethiopian town of Axum has to be the world’s only tourist destination where the most famous attraction is something nobody is allowed to see.

According to local tradition, Axum is the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, the gilded wooden chest containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians believe the Ark was brought to Ethiopia 3,000 years ago by Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It now resides, say the faithful, within the walls of Axum’s St. Mary of Zion chapel, off limits to all but a solitary priest who serves as the Ark’s custodian.

Like countless other visitors to Axum, I got no closer to the Ark than the wrought-iron fence surrounding the chapel’s squat, mausoleum-like exterior. Had I tried, I was told, I would have burst into flames.

Axum’s fertile agricultural land attracted early settlers to the region in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E., including Nubians from southern Egypt and northern Sudan and Arabs from Saba (now modern Yemen). From the first century B.C.E. until the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E., Axum was the bustling capital of a wealthy trading empire that stretched from the Nile Valley to southern Arabia. The third-century C.E. Persian writer Mani ranked Axum with Rome, Persia and China as one of the four great kingdoms of the world.