The Axum Brass Soldiers were a strange collection composed of thirty-five thousand statues of soldiers. These statues, made of solid brass, portrayed the soldiers with expressions reflecting agony and fear. The name "Brass Soldiers of Axum" was shared with Axum, a planet in the Core Worlds and former capital of the Azure Imperium, a state that existed before the Galactic Republic's formation.
Legends say the statues began as a real army from before the Republic, transformed into brass through the use of magic. The Axum Brass Soldiers eventually earned a place among the Twenty Wonders of the Galaxy, a list of remarkable, ancient artificial objects compiled by the historian Vicendi in 10,000 BBY for his work Arturum Galactinum. Sometime between 1 ABY and 3 ABY, two life-sized copies of the brass statues stood at the entrance to "Wonders of the Galaxy," an exhibition held at the Figg & Associates Art Museum located in the Cloud City settlement on the Outer Rim Territories planet Bespin.
The 2009 reference book The Essential Atlas, authored by Daniel Wallace and Jason Fry, introduced the Axum Brass Soldiers. Wallace mentioned on his blog that he particularly enjoyed creating names for the Twenty Wonders of the Galaxy that were original to the book, including the brass soldiers.
The author revealed that the Brass Soldiers of Axum were inspired by the famous real-world Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang. Additionally, Wallace expressed his fondness for the idea that the Brass Soldiers were once living beings magically turned into statues, but he chose to keep their origins ambiguous by presenting it as an in-universe legend. Replicas of the Brass Soldiers of Axum first appeared in The Jewel of Yavin, a 2014 adventure supplement for Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Edge of the Empire roleplaying game system.