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 was its power broken and its people shut up in their mountains, there to preserve, for hundreds of years unknown to the rest of the outside world, their Monophysite Christianity.

The Abyssinian Chronicles make Zoscales at the time of the Periplus, the successor of a long line of kings at Axum. It is probable that Habashat had frequented the country for a century before, as the power of Egypt receded, but as colonists rather than state-builders, until driven from Arabia; and that most of Zoscales' predecessors were local chiefs and not tribal kings. The final migration Glaser places not far from the Christian era.

The Abyssinians were converted to Christianity about 330 A.D. Before that time their strongest outside influence may have been Buddhism. James Fergusson (History of Architecture, I, 142–3) notes

Periplus 064 Axum.png Monoliths at Axum.

that the great monolith at Axum is of Indian inspiration; "the idea Egyptian, but the details Indian. An Indian nine-storied pagoda, translated in Egyptian in the first century of the Christian era!" He notes its likeness to such Indian temples as Bodh-Gaya, and says it represents "that curious marriage of Indian with Egyptian art which we would expect to find in the spot where the two people came in