The Kingdom of Aksum, or the Aksumite Empire, was a kingdom in North East Africa and South Arabia from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, based in what is now Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia, and spanning present-day Djibouti, Sudan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Emerging from the earlier Dʿmt civilization, the kingdom was founded in the 1st century. The city of Axum served as the kingdom's capital.