Dil Na'od
Dil Na'od is remembered as the last king of Aksum, and almost everything about him is a claim made later by people who needed an ancestor. The Aksumite kingdom had dominated the Red Sea trade for centuries, minted its own coinage, and adopted Christianity in the fourth century. It declined as that trade moved and as the Islamic conquests changed who controlled the sea lanes, and the record of its final rulers is thin to the point of silence. Ethiopian tradition holds that Dil Na'od was the last of the line, and that he was displaced by the Zagwe, a dynasty from the Agaw people of Lasta who ruled for roughly a century and a half and who built the rock churches at Lalibela. What the tradition is for becomes clear in 1270. Yekuno Amlak overthrew the last Zagwe king and founded the dynasty that ruled Ethiopia until Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974, and his claim to legitimacy was descent from the Aksumite kings through Dil Na'od - which made the Zagwe a usurping interruption and himself a restoration. The Zagwe were not simply usurpers in their own account. They claimed descent from Moses through an Aksumite marriage, built the churches at Lalibela as a new Jerusalem, and produced kings the Ethiopian church later canonised. Two dynasties were arguing about which biblical descent outranked the other, and Dil Na'od is the hinge the later side needed. That claim was then written into the Kebra Nagast, which traced the line back to Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and it remained the formal basis of Ethiopian monarchy for seven hundred years. Whether Dil Na'od existed, when he reigned, and whether any descent from him is real are all unresolved, and the dates here are approximate to the point of convention. What is certain is the use made of him: a dynasty that needed to be old chose a king at the end of an older one and attached itself to him.
- Lived: 900 CE – 960 CE
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: ruler
