History
This obelisk, properly termed "stele" or the native "hawilt/hawilti" (as they do not end in a pyramid), was carved and erected in the 4th century A.D. by subjects of the Kingdom of Aksum, an ancient Ethiopian civilization. The function of these stelae is supposed to be that of "markers" for underground burial chambers. The largest of the grave markers were for royal burial chambers and were decorated with multi-story false windows and false doors, while nobility would have smaller, less decorated ones. King Ezana's Stele is, likely, the last example of this practice, outdated after the conversion of Axumites to Christianity. It is named after King Ezana, the first monarch of Axum to embrace Christianity, following the teachings and examples of his childhood tutor Frumentius. King Ezana's Stele is also the only one of the three major "royal" obelisks (the others being the Great Stele and the Obelisk of Axum) that never broke off. The Italians seriously damaged one of these, breaking the monument into three parts and shipping it away to Rome, in one of the most bizarre exploits of colonial plunder. King Ezana's Stele has been structurally consolidated in 2007/2008 by the team led by engineer Giorgio Croci, during the reassembling of the Obelisk of Axum. After decades of pleading for the return of their monument, the Ethiopians finally got back their national historic treasure.
Read more about this topic: King Ezana's Stele
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)