Axum or Aksum (Tigrinya: ኣኽሱም^?/'aq͡χʼsum/, Amharic: አክሱም^?/'aksum/) is a city in the northern part of Ethiopia, its first former royal capital, a former bishopric and present Latin Catholic titular see. The town has a population of 56,500 residents (2010), and is governed as an urban wäräda.

The original capital of the Kingdom of Aksum, it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in Africa. Axum was a naval and trading power that ruled the region from about 400 BCE into the 10th century. In 1980 UNESCO added Aksum's archaeological sites to its list of World Heritage Sites due to their historic value.

Located in the Mehakelegnaw Zone of the Tigray Region near the base of the Adwa mountains, Axum has an elevation of 2,131 metres (6,991 ft). Axum is surrounded by La'ilay Maychew wäräda.

History

Axum was the center of the marine trading power known as the Aksumite Kingdom, which predated the earliest mentions in Roman era writings. Around 356 CE, its ruler was converted to Christianity by Frumentius. Later, under the reign of Kaleb, Axum was a quasi-ally of Byzantium against the Persian Empire. The historical record is unclear, with ancient church records the primary contemporary sources.

Axum (previously codenamed Maestro) is a domain specific concurrent programming language, based on the Actor model, that was under active development by Microsoft between 2009 and 2011. It is an object-oriented language based on the .NET Common Language Runtime using a C-like syntax which, being a domain-specific language, is intended for development of portions of a software application that is well-suited to concurrency. But it contains enough general-purpose constructs that one need not switch to a general-purpose programming language (like C#) for the sequential parts of the concurrent components.

The main idiom of programming in Axum is an Agent (or an Actor), which is an isolated entity that executes in parallel with other Agents. In Axum parlance, this is referred to as the agents executing in separate isolation domains; objects instantiated within a domain cannot be directly accessed from another. Agents are loosely coupled (i.e., the number of dependencies between agents is minimal) and do not share resources like memory (unlike the shared memory model of C# and similar languages); instead a message passing model is used. To co-ordinate agents or having an agent request the resources of another, an explicit message must be sent to the agent. Axum provides Channels to facilitate this.

Axum is a solo album by American jazz flautist and composer James Newton recorded in 1981 and released on the ECM label.

Reception

The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow awarded the album 3 stars stating "James Newton's set of unaccompanied flute solos is generally more intriguing and diverse than one might expect. An expert at multiphonics (often humming through his flute in order to get more than one note at a time), Newton is also very strong at constructing logical yet utterly unpredictable improvisations. His playing on nine of his originals covers a fair amount of ground, and he alternates between three different types of flutes (his regular horn, alto flute and bass flute). Still, the results are more for specialized tastes".

Track listing