Yeha
the historic tales of Ethiopia starts with a review of the appealing remnants of Yeha-the hub of the very first civilization within northern Ethiopia .this historical journey leads you to the rugged tracks over the remarkable highland scenery concluding in a peaceful agricultural town- Yeha that is found north-east of Axum. Yeha is the site of the renowned “Temple of the Moon”, which is the oldesting stunding building in Ethiopia.
It’s in general agreed that the Temple of the Moon was constructed in the era of the D’mt Kingdom back in the Eighth and Seventh centuries BC. This D’mt Kingdom came before the Axumite Kingdom. How and exactgly when the cross over from the D’mt Kingdom to Axumite Kingdom took place hasn’t yet been established. The most ancient standing building in Ethiopia is found in Yeha – the Great Temple. It is a tower constructed in the Sabaean fashion, and dated through assessment with dated buildings in Southern Arabia to approximately 700 BC; even though no testing using radiocarbon dating has been carried out on samples got from Yeha, this predictated date for this Great Tower is backed up by local thoughts and dreams.
David Phillipson credits its “outstanding preservation” to 2 factors, “one the caution with which its very first builders guaranteed an even foundation, strongly placed on the not level bedrock; and secondly to its rededication may be as early as the 6th century AD; to be used as a church for Christians. Two additional archeological sites found in Yeha are: the Grat Beal Gebri, a wrecked complex recognized by a portico Ten meters wide and 2 groups of square pillars, as well as a graveyard that contains a number of rock-hewn length tombs initially investigated at the beginning of the 1960s. One authority has presumed that one of the tombs enclosed a royal burial, whilst another claims the original residential area was probably a kilometer to the east of their modern village.
Yeha is as well the site of an ancient Ethiopian Orthodox monastery, started in accordance with tradition by Abba Aftse, who was among the 9 Saints. Francisco Álvares In his profiling of Ethiopia, talks about visiting this very town back in 1520 (which town he actually referred to as “Abbafaçem”), and offers a description of the very ol local church, tower as well as the monastery. This local church was possibly the re-dedicated Great Temple, or currently a destroyed building that the Deutsche Aksum-Expedition referred to during the early Twentieth century.
(The present structure, that exhibits Aksumite architectural attributes, was constructed around 1948 to 1949).
Yeha has as well been the location for several archaeological excavations, by the Ethiopian Institute of Archeology starting in 1952. Even though disrupted throughout the Derg regime, the excavations were started again in by a group of French archaeological 1993.