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Æ22 - Armeh
| Issuer | Aksum |
|---|---|
| Year | 535-550 |
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| Composition | Bronze |
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| Obverse description | Bust of King Armeh facing right in the central field, rendered in the stylized manner characteristic of late Aksumite coinage. The effigy is accompanied by a Ge'ez legend naming the king, disposed to the left and right of the bust. The flan is irregular and shows typical characteristics of hammered production, with green patination across the surface. The overall fabric is coarse, reflecting the debased bronze coinage of the later Aksumite period. |
|---|---|
| Obverse script | Ge'ez |
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| Additional information |
Armeh is one of the more obscure Aksumite kings, known almost entirely through his coinage rather than any surviving textual record. His reign falls within a turbulent stretch for the kingdom — the mid-sixth century saw Aksum overextended following Kaleb's costly campaigns into South Arabia, and the royal treasury bore the consequences. Bronze issues from this period show a kingdom in fiscal retreat, having already abandoned the gold and silver denominations that earlier kings used to project commercial power across Red Sea trade networks.
The BMC Aksum attribution places this squarely in the corpus assembled by S.C. Munro-Hay, whose cataloguing of Aksumite bronzes remains the foundational reference for the series.