The Sacred City of the Ethiopians

Includes more than 70 illustrations of the finds, places and locations in Ethiopia and Abyssinia.

“THE FOLLOWING PAGES stand as a record of a four months’ journey, which my wife and I made in Abyssinia at the beginning of this year; Aksum, the sacred city of the Ethiopians, and the ancient capital of the country, being the object towards which our steps were directed.

The impressions of inscriptions which we took, and the photographs of the ruins, now place the Sabæans of Arabia by incontrovertible documentary evidence in the heart of Abyssinia as early as the 7th or 8th century B.C., whilst at the same time they show that paganism continued as the national religion down to a much later epoch than is supposed, and that the Judaic influence in that country and the early conversion to Christianity may be relegated to the chapter of myths, as far as this portion of Ethiopia is concerned.”-Preface

James Theodore Bent, (born March 30, 1852, Leeds, Yorkshire, Eng.—died May 5, 1897, London), British explorer and archaeologist who excavated the ruined Zimbabwe (dzimbahwe; i.e., stone houses, or chiefs’ graves) in the land of the Shona people of eastern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe Rhodesia).

Bent first travelled to islands of the Aegean and, in 1890, to southern Turkey before he began in 1891 to examine the great Zimbabwe remains that he described in The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892). Later archaeological searches took him to Ethiopia, the Nilotic Sudan, and the southern Arabian peninsula.