Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2011
In 1868, during the British military expedition to Magdala in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), an archaeological excavation was undertaken, under the auspices of R. Holmes, a representative of the British Museum, at the ancient port-city of Adulis a few kilometres from the Red Sea coast. The excavation, of which some details were reported in a War Office Publication of 1870, was one of the earliest undertaken in Africa south of the Sahara. As a result an ancient church was discovered and cleared. Among the finds were a number of items of ecclesiastical furniture, some apparently imported in a prefabricated state from the Roman eastern Mediterranean. Some of these pieces, now lodged in the British Museum, are here published for the first time.