Aksumite Conquest of Kush

In the 330s CE, King Ezana of the Kingdom of Aksum, a powerful trading state in the Horn of Africa centered in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, led a military campaign against the much older Kingdom of Kush centered at Meroe in what is now Sudan, whose Nile-valley civilization had endured for many centuries as a power on Egypt's southern border. Ezana's own inscriptions record the campaign's destruction of Meroitic towns and settlements, and archaeological evidence indicates Meroe itself was already in serious economic and political decline before the Aksumite campaign, likely brought on by shifting trade routes, environmental strain and internal fragmentation, so historians generally understand the invasion as delivering a final blow to an already weakened kingdom rather than being solely responsible for its collapse. The end of the Kingdom of Kush closed more than a thousand years of Nile-valley Kushite civilization and left Aksum as the dominant regional power in northeastern Africa, a position it consolidated further when Ezana became one of the first monarchs in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion.