Baby Website - Axum Raleigh

Kamau has selected the name Axum for our first born son. Any parent, so we’ve learned through our process, can tell you that selecting a name for a child is not an easy task. Kamau and I discussed quite some time ago that when we had a child that we would like for the first name to be of African derivation. In fact, Kamau’s name is derived from the Kikuyu of Kenya, West Africa. My parameters for a name were centered on semantics of letters in which the name ended and began. I wanted to make sure that the name was strong and masculine rather than unisex.

Kamau started his name finding process long before I did. He looked at common and unique Afican names, antique deities, and even places in Africa. Once I started, between us, I think we exchanged over 200 names. We researched online, ventured to the Shrine of the Black Madonna on Ralph D. Abernathy in Atlanta to buy books, etc. At two-thirds of the way through the pregnancy, we still did not have a name. When Kamau mentioned the name Axum to me, I liked it immediately – which was a first for my reactions on the names that he suggested. We didn’t settle on it immediately, because there were also other names we were considering. However, we had the strongest affinity for this name after uncovering the following:

§ Axum, also spelled “Aksum,” was a city in northern Ethiopia named after the long lived Kingdom of Aksum, a naval and trading power that ruled from the region ca. 400 BC into the 10th century—nearly a millennium and a half. The Aksumites spoke a strongly Semitic language and wrote in Semitic characters; Ethiopia, in fact, has one of the longest continuous literate traditions in Africa.

§ Aksum lay centered in the path of the growing commercial trade routes between Africa, Arabia, and India. As a result, it became the most important cosmopolitan center in the ancient world serving as a crossroads to a variety of cultures: Egyptian, Sudanic, Arabic, Middle Eastern, and Indian. Perhaps an indication of this cosmopolitan character can be found in the fact that the major Aksumite cities had Jewish, Nubian, Christian, and even Buddhist minorities.

§ The Aksumites controlled one of the most important trade routes in the world and occupied one of the most fertile regions in the world. The Aksumites first began producing coins around 270 CE. Aksum was the first African civilization, not including African cities colonized under the Roman Empire, to produce coins.

§ To the faithful of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, it is the place where the Arc of the Covenant was brought and is kept by Menelik I, son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon of Israel, as detailed in the thirteenth-century Kebra Negast, "The Book of the Glory of Kings.”