Ebana ruled Aksum during the mid-fifth century, a period when the kingdom controlled both sides of the Red Sea and extracted substantial revenue from the Adulis trade routes linking the Roman world to India and Arabia. The gold tremissis denomination itself was borrowed directly from Byzantine coinage practice — Aksumite kings adopted it as a deliberate signal of equivalence with Constantinople, their principal trading partner and diplomatic counterpart.
MHAC #73 places this squarely within the corpus documented by Munro-Hay and Juel-Jensen, the foundational reference for Aksumite numismatics. Ebana issues are among the scarcer royal coinages of the fifth-century sequence.
Ebana ruled Aksum during the mid-fifth century, a period when the kingdom controlled both sides of the Red Sea and extracted substantial revenue from the Adulis trade routes linking the Roman world to India and Arabia. The gold tremissis denomination itself was borrowed directly from Byzantine coinage practice — Aksumite kings adopted it as a deliberate signal of equivalence with Constantinople, their principal trading partner and diplomatic counterpart.
MHAC #73 places this squarely within the corpus documented by Munro-Hay and Juel-Jensen, the foundational reference for Aksumite numismatics. Ebana issues are among the scarcer royal coinages of the fifth-century sequence.