Coin Motto Series Part 3: May This Please The People

Hello coin aficionados! Coin mottoes are short and sweet sayings on coins that capture a nation’s or an empire’s sentiment during a specific time. Today, we travel to the ancient Aksumite Empire for a motto meant to please the people.

At its peak, the Aksumite Empire stretched across modern-day Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, and the Western coast of Saudi Arabia. On the Tigray plateau, evidence of activity near the capital city of Axum dates to the Stone Age. Records became more concrete when the kingdom of D’mt rose to glory between the 8th and 5th centuries BC.

The Aksumite Empire replaced the Kingdom of D’mt but it took centuries to start minting coins. Until they started producing their own coinage, the people of Aksum bartered and used whole-Greek-coins and cut-Greek-coins to manage trade.

In the mid-200s CE, the Aksumite Empire started centrally producing gold, silver, and bronze coins with Greek legends. The silver was imported, or produced as a byproduct of electrum processing for gold. Early Aksum coinage was modeled after Greek, Persian, and Arabian coinage, but Greece provided the greatest influence.

Within the first century of coin production, the Aksum coins were being minted with legends written in Ge’ez, the Askum language. We don’t know a lot about the valuation of the different metal coins but in the early fourth century they were marked with King Ezana’s motto, “May this please the people.”

Thanks for joining us today for a coin motto history!
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Read Part One: Mind Your Business
Read Part Two: New Beginning

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Notes: Aksumite Coinage History: https://ethiopianhistory.com/Aksumite_Coins/