Why should this be, since among our colleagues in the discipline of history proper, much of the groundwork has already been done to establish significant periodization for great state-building traditions in ancient, medieval, and early-modern eras in places like old Mali, Great Zimbabwe, Aksum and Abyssinia, Morocco, the lower Congo, and elsewhere?

Aksum was on important trading routes between Arabia, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and was a thriving metropolis between the first and seventh centuries AD.

After a dizzying exposition of the treacheries and desperate acts attendant to the last days of Artos, high king of Britain, in which everyone in his family except his daughter Goewin is killed, the story focuses on Goewin's flight to Aksum, in Africa, under the protection of Priamos, the Aksumite ambassador to Britain.