I had a little bit of a hard time focusing on these documents because they don't seem as interesting to me as the previous documents have been. They seem to be a bit different than the other documents we looked at but this could be because it is harder for me to relate to them in anyway. Apparently these documents are more based off of Axum, which I know idea what or where that is, and it seems to be one of the only places in Africa that seem to have valid documents that we can learn from.
The first documents seems to be a descriptions of different locations that a caption may have journeyed through. He seems to give descriptions of locations and land marks and different places he may have visited, I guess this may come off as boring to be because it is more like someone's personal journal of places they have been, but really has nothing too interesting to say, which can only be interesting to those who can relate to it or want to read it, or even know the person personally. However, these documents do contain a great amount of importance, which can be very intriguing to historians because it talks about cultural topics such as clothing, animals that are killed, governors, literature, all sorts of information that may be useful.
The next set of documents talks about the achievements of Axum and all that it had taken over. It sounds like it was a pretty powerful empire. It had even taken some of Egypt's territory, if I understand properly. It is puzzling to me that I have never heard of such a successful empire, but this could be one of the regions that you don't learn much about in grade school because of the lack of documents that exists about them.
The third documents was a bit more interesting for me. It was about a story of two children who studied together and when their ship attacked before it left port, they were the only two who were spared. They were taken to the king and worked for him until his death. They later were set free and one returned to his parents while the other preached the word of God. It was a nice little story and something a bit different compared to earlier documents. I am not too such how much relevance this story has on the chapter but I suppose it explains the spread of Christianity in this particular culture, and that it was so widespread that stories like this began to spawn because of it.
This written last document shows proof of the value of gold and how people used it to trade. When I give it thought, it seems that gold has always been valuable and may always will. Even today gold is still pretty valuable and worth a lot of money, but what is it that makes it worth so much? Is it because of it's beauty or is it because we made it valuable with no true reason? It isn't much of a resource (who ever would make a house completely out of gold? maybe decorate it but I don't it would be stable enough to completely make it out of gold from the ground up). It maybe that gold is always worth something because there are people in the world who are willing to pay a lot for it. It is now used for jewelry and for glamor and that may be why is it so valuable.
by Andrew Murillo
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