The ancient kingdom of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea that became one of the ancient world's great trading powers, one of the first states to adopt Christianity as a state religion, and the origin point of a living tradition — the Ethiopian Orthodox Church — that claims an unbroken line to the fourth century.
In the fourth century CE, while Rome was still deciding what Christianity meant, a king at the edge of the known world stamped a cross onto his coins. Ezana of Aksum did not copy Rome. He made the same decision independently — or nearly so — and his kingdom carried that faith forward without interruption into a church that still stands today. What does it mean for Africa to have been there at the very beginning?