During the first half of first millennium A.D., the Roman, Persian, and Aksumite Empires were in a struggle for power in the regions of the Nile valley, the Red Sea, and the Middle East. And in the end the rise of Islam among the Arabs in the Middle East in the 7th century A.D. adversely affected the three Empire states.
Certainly, before the end of the century, the former territories of the Persian and the Roman Empires in the Middle East, and Egypt came under the Arabs.
The emergence of the Arabs as the new international power in the Middle East and Egypt interrupted the commercial and cultural ties of the Aksumite with the Middle east and the former Graeco-Roman world of the Mediterranean Sea.
As a direct and indirect outcome of these new international conditions and events, the Aksumite state turned the course and directions of its territorial and cultural expansion from the Red Sea and the Nile Valley towards the western, southern, and eastern regions of the Horn of Africa. During this period, sometime before the end of the 1st millennium A.D., the new dynasty of the Agews emerged in the northern highlands of Lasta.
It became the successor of the former Aksumite state and ruled Ethiopia for the next 3 centuries until 1270 in the general region approximately between the Red Sea and the Abay River in which the lands and peoples of Kunama, Felasha, Amhara, Gojam, and Angot were included.
The Agew dynasty, as rulers of Ethiopia, contributed to the continuation and the southern expansion of the former Aksumite state and to the introduction of Christianity in the subcontinent of North-East Africa.
One cultural and historical evidence remains today in the famous rock hewn churches in Lasta constructed by the Agew rulers at the beginning of the second millennium A.D.
Keywords: Agew state, Aksumite state, Islam, Lasta, rock hewn churches, Christianity, Abay River,