IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 268

Visitors approaching the town of Aksum in the highlands of northern Ethiopia pass a field of granite monuments. Several obelisks stand upright; others lie toppled, and the largest of all is a single block more than thirty metres long that fell, broke and has never been raised. Each obelisk is carved to resemble a tower of several storeys, with false doors and windows. They were raised by the people of a kingdom that took its name from the town, and they are among the most ambitious structures to survive from the ancient world.

By the first century AD Aksum was the dominant power in the region. Its heartland lay in the highlands of what is now Tigray, but its wealth came from the sea. The kingdom's main port, Adulis, stood on the coast of what is now Eritrea, and it is described in a Greek trading handbook known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The Periplus lists the goods that passed through Adulis, and Manichaean writings of the third century rank the kingdom beside Rome, Persia and China among the four great powers of the world.

From Adulis, ships carried Aksumite products north to Egypt and east to Arabia and India. The exports named in ancient sources include ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, gold and salt, while wine, olive oil, glass and fine cloth came back in return. Roman coins have been found at Aksumite sites, and Aksumite coins have been dug up as far away as India. Control of this traffic made the kingdom rich, and its rulers spent the proceeds on stone buildings, tombs and monuments on a scale that few states of the period could match.

The dead were buried in tombs cut into the rock beneath the obelisks, and several of these were excavated in the twentieth century. The largest obelisk appears to have been quarried, dragged from the quarry and raised with enormous effort, only to collapse, perhaps while it was being erected. One explanation is that it was too heavy for the structure supporting it, but no inscription records the reason. Some scholars have read the monuments as images of palaces, though the people buried beneath them remain unidentified.

Aksum was one of the very few states of antiquity to issue its own coinage, which it did from about the third century AD. Coins were minted in gold, silver and bronze, and they carried the name and portrait of the reigning king. The gold pieces were of a high and consistent weight, which suggests that they were trusted far beyond the kingdom's borders. The coinage is also a vital source for historians, because the sequence of rulers, and the gradual appearance of Christian symbols on the coins, can be dated with some confidence.

The best-known Aksumite ruler is Ezana, who reigned in the fourth century. Inscriptions set up in his name record campaigns against neighbouring peoples and the dedication of captives to the gods of his ancestors. At some point in his reign, however, Ezana adopted Christianity, and the change can be seen both in his inscriptions and in the design of his coins, on which a cross replaces earlier symbols. Ethiopian tradition credits the conversion to Frumentius, a Syrian brought to the court as a young man who later became the first bishop of the kingdom. Whether the king acted on the bishop's teaching or on political calculation is debated.

In the sixth century the kingdom projected its power across the Red Sea. The king Kaleb sent an army into southern Arabia, where the local ruler had been persecuting Christians, and a Christian kingdom was established there for a time. The campaign is recorded in Byzantine and Syriac sources as well as in Ethiopian tradition, which shows that Aksum was still a force to be reckoned with. Tradition adds that Kaleb later became a monk.

From the seventh century onwards, however, the kingdom's fortunes changed. The rise of Islam and the establishment of a caliphate that controlled the shores of the Red Sea altered the routes by which goods moved, and Aksum seems to have lost much of its commercial importance. Its kings stopped issuing coins, and the city itself shrank. Some archaeologists have argued that intensive cultivation had already damaged the soil on the plateau around the capital, and that a run of dry years made recovery impossible; others point to the loss of access to the coast, and the evidence does not allow a firm conclusion.

One monument left the country altogether. In 1937, during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, an obelisk was removed to Rome, where it stood for decades while Ethiopian governments demanded its return; it was eventually flown back and re-erected at Aksum in 2008. The written language of the kingdom, a script that developed at Aksum and is known as Ge'ez, survives in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and later Ethiopian kings traced their legitimacy to Aksumite rulers.

The monuments stand in a town that is a place of pilgrimage as well as a destination for tourists, and the site is protected by law. The kingdom that produced them remains far less familiar than Egypt or Rome, yet for several centuries it was one of the most powerful states on earth.

Bronze, the alloy that gives the Bronze Age its name, is made by melting copper together with tin, usually in a proportion of about nine or ten parts copper to one of tin. The addition transforms the metal: the alloy is harder than copper, flows more readily when molten and can be cast into complicated shapes. Copper ores are found in many parts of Europe and the Near East, and Bronze Age smiths clearly had no difficulty in obtaining them. Tin is another matter. Workable deposits are rare, and in the eastern Mediterranean they are almost entirely absent.

The nearest sizeable sources lay far inland. Tin ore has been worked in the Ore Mountains on the border between what is now Germany and the Czech Republic, in the Iberian peninsula, and in Cornwall and Devon in south-western Britain. Further east, deposits were exploited in Anatolia, in Central Asia and in Afghanistan. Geologists have since mapped these deposits, but a deposit is not the same thing as a working mine. The question that has occupied archaeologists for more than a century is how metal from such distant places reached the palaces and workshops of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Aegean, where finished bronze objects are abundant but the raw materials were not.

Written records offer the first clues. Clay tablets from Mesopotamian cities, some of them four thousand years old, list quantities of tin arriving from the east, sometimes with the names of the merchants and officials involved. Some of these tablets come from palace archives, which suggests that the metal was of interest to kings as well as to traders. The amounts are small by modern standards, a few kilograms at a time, but they show that tin was weighed and recorded as carefully as silver. These documents prove that long-distance transport existed; they say much less about where the metal actually came from.

For a more direct picture, archaeologists rely on ships. In 1982 a sponge diver working off the southern coast of Turkey, near a cape called Uluburun, came across what proved to be a Late Bronze Age wreck. It was excavated over more than a decade by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, and its cargo was extraordinary: about ten tonnes of copper in the form of standardised oxhide ingots, roughly a tonne of tin, jars of oil and resin, glass and ivory. The tin alone would have kept a workshop supplied for years.

An earlier discovery had already shown that such trade was not exceptional. In 1960 the American archaeologist George Bass excavated a wreck at Cape Gelidonya, also on the Turkish coast, which had sunk around 1200 BC. Its cargo of copper ingots, bronze tools and scrap metal belonged, he argued, to a merchant who travelled along the coast buying and selling metal. At the time, the idea that a ship of that period could be excavated scientifically was itself new, and the work helped to establish underwater archaeology as a discipline.

Mines provide a third line of evidence. At Kestel, in the Taurus mountains of southern Turkey, archaeologists have found a Bronze Age mine with galleries cut into the hillside, together with stone tools and a nearby settlement where ore appears to have been processed. The miners left no written record, and the shafts themselves are hard to date. The identification was disputed for years, partly because some scholars doubted that the deposits could have produced enough tin, but it remains one of the very few places where ancient tin extraction has been documented.

To link metal to a source, scientists measure the ratios of different isotopes of tin in ore and in finished objects. Because tin ore contains no lead, the methods developed for copper and silver cannot be used, and tin isotope work has proved difficult: the ratios can change during smelting, and the reference collections of ores are still small. Several studies have nevertheless argued that some of the tin carried by the Uluburun ship is consistent with ore from Central Asia, more than two thousand kilometres away. Others are unconvinced, and the debate is far from settled.

Ancient writers, finally, describe a trade that the archaeology has barely touched. In the fifth century BC Herodotus had heard of islands called the Cassiterides somewhere in the far west, from which tin was said to come, though he admitted that he could not confirm their existence. Four centuries later Diodorus Siculus gave a fuller account of south-western Britain, describing tin carried to an island at low tide, loaded onto carts and shipped onwards towards Gaul. Neither writer ever visited; both were repeating what merchants told them.

The picture that emerges is of a trade that was long, fragmented and almost invisible in the archaeological record. Tin moved in small consignments, exchanged many times along the way, and the people who dug it out of the ground were seldom the people who wrote it down. That is why a single shipwreck, or a handful of tablets, can change the argument, and why historians still disagree so sharply about how much tin came from Britain, how much from central Europe and how much from Asia.

Every October, on the ground where King Harold died in 1066, several hundred people dressed as Norman knights and English infantry fight the Battle of Hastings once more. The event is held beside the ruins of the abbey that William the Conqueror founded on the site, and it attracts a large paying audience. Similar scenes take place at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and at Waterloo in Belgium, where anniversaries bring thousands of performers and far greater numbers of spectators. Battle re-enactment has become a substantial industry, and it raises a question that the organisations which own these sites rarely answer directly: should the killing of thousands of people be staged for visitors?

The case in favour starts with the landscape itself. For most visitors, a battlefield is an empty field with a car park and a few information boards; the monuments tell them where the lines stood, not what it was like to stand in them. A well-organised re-enactment, its defenders say, supplies what the ground cannot: noise, smoke, the sense of numbers, the sight of men on horseback moving at speed. The argument is a strong one, and it is difficult to watch a well-drilled body of infantry advance without feeling that something has been added to the field.

Money is the second argument. In towns whose main attraction is a field, hotels, restaurants and shops depend on a short season, and a large event can fill them for a weekend in a quiet month. The income is not confined to the day itself, since contractors build stands, hire fencing and supply food. Local authorities that might otherwise see the battlefield as an obstacle to development have a reason to keep it open. Whether the sums involved are as large as organisers claim is another matter, and few figures are published.

Critics reply that the spectacle is bought at the cost of understanding. A battle lasts a few hours; its causes take years to explain, and its consequences last for generations. In most scripts the fighting fills almost the whole performance, and the wounded, the prisoners, the plunder and the civilian population of the surrounding countryside make no appearance at all. The result is a story with a clear winner and a clear ending, which is precisely what the fighting was not.

Accuracy is a battlefield of its own. Many re-enactment groups are intensely serious about materials: hand-woven cloth, correct stitching, period cooking, carefully researched drill. Their expertise is genuine, and television producers borrow it when they need convincing equipment for a documentary. Yet the pursuit of authenticity can become an end in itself, and the pressure to entertain an audience pulls in the opposite direction, towards explosions, dramatic deaths and a tidy victory.

There is also the question of respect. A battlefield is a grave, and at Hastings the high altar of the abbey is said to have been placed where Harold fell. For some people whose ancestors fought and died in such places, the sight of laughing performers pretending to be killed is offensive, and others object to the noise of mock artillery on ground that holds human remains. Defenders answer that the dead are long gone, and that remembrance and enjoyment have coexisted at these sites for centuries.

Then there is the physical damage. Heavy footfall, vehicles, temporary buildings and cooking fires all leave marks, and a wet weekend can churn a field into mud that takes years to recover. In Britain, the most important battlefields are listed on a register maintained by the heritage authorities, and it is a criminal offence to use a metal detector on a scheduled monument without permission. Conservation bodies therefore tend to favour small events, or none at all. Their opponents reply that these bodies are short of money, and that an event which fills a car park builds a public that will object when a road is proposed across the site.

Smaller alternatives exist. Guided walks, lectures, drill displays by a dozen performers, exhibitions of finds and well-made films can all explain a battle without a cast of hundreds. They are cheaper, they disturb the ground far less, and they can present the aftermath as easily as the fighting. The objection is that they are dull, and that a family with young children will choose the event with the cannons every time.

My own view is that re-staging is defensible, but only when it is treated as public history rather than as a show. That means a commentary that explains why the armies were there, what the battle actually decided and what it cost the people who lived nearby. It means limits on numbers, protection for the ground and no digging for entertainment. It also means that a share of the ticket income goes to the conservation of the site. An event that meets these conditions is not a fairground; it holds a large crowd's attention long enough to teach it something.

The real objection, then, is not to the spectacle itself but to the spectacle treated as an end. A crowd that goes home knowing only who won has been entertained but not informed. And so the question is not whether famous battles should be re-staged for visitors, but what those visitors should be told while the smoke is still in the air.