Greater Ethiopia

The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society

Donald N. Levine

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226475615
• eBook ISBN: 9780226229676
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

Greater Ethiopia combines history, anthropology, and sociology to answer two major questions. Why did Ethiopia remain independent under the onslaught of European expansionism while other African political entities were colonized? And why must Ethiopia be considered a single cultural region despite its political, religious, and linguistic diversity?

Donald Levine's interdisciplinary study makes a substantial contribution both to Ethiopian interpretive history and to sociological analysis. In his new preface, Levine examines Ethiopia since the overthrow of the monarchy in the 1970s.

"Ethiopian scholarship is in Professor Levine's debt. . . . He has performed an important task with panache, urbanity, and learning."—Edward Ullendorff, Times Literary Supplement

"Upon rereading this book, it strikes the reader how broad in scope, how innovative in approach, and how stimulating in arguments this book was when it came out. . . . In the past twenty years it has inspired anthropological and historical research, stimulated theoretical debate about Ethiopia's cultural and historical development, and given the impetus to modern political thinking about the complexities and challenges of Ethiopia as a country. The text thus easily remains an absolute must for any Ethiopianist scholar to read and digest."-J. Abbink, Journal of Modern African Studies

1

Conventional Images of Ethiopia

After the Italian invasion of 1935-36 Ethiopia came to be viewed in many parts of the world as a hapless victim of fascist aggression and a symbol of the need for collective security and international order. This was not the first time, however, that an image of Ethiopia had stirred strong sentiments in distant countries. Long before that it had aroused foreign interest for other reasons. Five types of response have been particularly prominent over the centuries. Typically Ethiopia has been looked upon as a terribly remote land; a home of pristine piety; a magnificent kingdom; an outpost of savagery; or a bastion of African independence.

A FAR-OFF PLACE

For disenchanted moderns and for romantics of many times, the name Ethiopia has evoked the alluring image of a faraway land. This image has a notable ancestry. In the opening lines of the Odyssey Homer characterized the Ethiopians as eschatoi andron, the most remote of men, a phrase remembered by his readers throughout classical antiquity. Homer’s Ethiopians dwelt by the streams of Ocean, “at earth’s two verges, in sunset lands and lands of the rising sun.”¹ Later, Herodotus chided Cambyses for ordering a march against Ethiopia without providing supplies and “without for a moment considering the fact that he was to take his men to the ends of the earth.”² And Aeschylus had Io, the wandering woman of Prometheus Bound, sweep down to “a land far off, a nation of black men ... men who live hard by the fountain of the sun where is the river Aethiops.”³

For the early Greek writers Ethiopia was less a geographical location than a state of mind. For Greeks and Romans generally, Ethiopians meant dark-skinned peoples who lived south of Egypt. At times the reference was so vague as to include peoples from West Africa, Arabia, and India. At times it was more localized, referring to the Nubian kingdom of Kush, with its capital first at Napata and later at Meroe. What was constant was that the name Ethiopian denoted a person of dark color—literally, of burnt face—and that it connoted, above all else, remoteness.

As Frank M. Snowden, Jr., has observed in his study Blacks in Antiquity, the classical attribution of remoteness to Ethiopians had two main rhetorical purposes. As an example of extreme variations of geographical conditions and racial features, it appeared to provide evidence for hypotheses about the effects of environment on the color, features, and life-styles of peoples living in widely separated regions. Thus Aristotle attributed the woolly hair of the Ethiopians to their dry environment and the straight hair of the Scythians (a people of the far north often cited in contrast to the Ethiopians of the far south) to the effects of a moist environment.

The other rhetorical function of classical allusions to the remote Ethiopians was to illustrate the unity of mankind, the all-inclusiveness of the human community, popular prejudices to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus did the Athenian dramatist Menander argue that a person’s lineage is not relevant for determining his human worth:

Whoever by inherent nature have no worth

These all in this take refuge—in their monuments

And pedigrees. … The man whose natural bent is good,

He, mother, he, though Aethiop, is nobly born.⁴

Early Christian writers drew on biblical references as well as Hellenic conventions in constructing their image of faraway Ethiopia. Saint Augustine, like many other Christian authors, considered the Queen of Sheba referred to in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles to have been Ethiopian and associated that with New Testament statements that “she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon.” Christian apologists often alluded to the remote Ethiopians to illustrate their own form of universalism. Psalm 68 proclaimed that kings would bring presents to God in Jerusalem: “Nobles shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall hasten to stretch out her hands unto God.” Commenting on this and a similar verse in the Psalms, Augustine argued that the name Ethiopia was used here in a figurative sense. By Ethiopia was meant all nations, for the psalmist here “chose for special mention that people which is at the ends of the earth.”⁵

It was probably in the fourth or fifth century that Hebraic and Hellenic allusions to Ethiopia began to be associated with the region now called Ethiopia, whose chief political center was then at Aksum. When Christian writers like Athanasius (295-373) and Venantius Fortunatus (530-600) celebrated the success of apostolic efforts by noting that Christian missions had been effective as far away as Scythia and Ethiopia, they may well have had Aksumite Ethiopia in mind. The royal court at Aksum was converted to Christianity by the middle of the fourth century, and Athanasius himself dispatched the first bishop of Aksum from Alexandria. Stephanus of Byzantium, a contemporary of Venantius, showed a similar inclination to associate classical images of faraway Ethiopia with the kingdom of Aksum. In his geographical encyclopedia the Ethnikon he uses the Homeric phrase, eschatoi andron, to describe the Ethiopians, but he also records that Aksum was the capital city of Ethiopia.

The image of remote Ethiopia persisted long after the world had been mapped and the source of the Nile discovered. From the nineteenth century on, Ethiopia was considered remote in two new ways. As Western institutions changed at an accelerating rate and distances were compressed, Ethiopia came to seem removed in time as she became closer in space. Many visistors described themselves as being transported into a biblical era. Others called Ethiopia a gate into the medieval world. The current accessibility of Ethiopia by jet is advertised as an opportunity to “travel to a distant time.”

Still another convention developed, that of viewing Ethiopia as remote from understanding. She was frequently portrayed as basically unknown, if not in some fundamental sense unknowable. More than one book about Ethiopia featured the word “unknown” in its title. As early as 1844 a correspondent from Cairo had written that “if Abyssinia does not become one of the most well-known countries of the world, it won’t be due to the lack of interest of Europeans in this country, as for years there has been a continuous flow of travelers to this land.”⁶ Even so, a quarter of a century later John Hotten asserted that “about no part of the habitable world has there been such prolonged misconception and ignorance as about … Abyssinia.”⁷ A kindred point was made a century later in the preface to Dame Marjery Perham’s The Government of Ethiopia: “‘It is a country’ it was said to me by one who knows it very well, ‘of which it is impossible to speak the truth.’”

ETHIOPIA THE PIOUS

Three passages in the Homeric epics depict the Olympian gods as going off to feast with the Ethiopians. In book 1 of the Iliad, Zeus, followed by all the gods, departs for twelve days to visit the “blameless Ethiopians.” Later, the goddess Iris goes by herself to the land of the Ethiopians to participate in their sacrificial rites to the immortal gods. And in the Odyssey, the god Poseidon “lingered delighted at the banquet side” of the far-off Ethiopians.

The Homeric pattern of portraying Ethiopians as close to the gods or of an especially pious nature is found in many later writings—pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. This image too persists despite the vague geographical identity of the subject, whether Ethiopia is taken to mean all of Black Africa, the Nubia of Napata and Meroe, the Abyssinia of Aksum, or the later Christian kingdom of Nubia. It appears in generalized descriptions and in accounts of individuals.

Diodorus Siculus, the first-century B.C. Greek historian, writes at length in this vein. Hercules and Bacchus, he notes, were “awed by the piety of the [Ethiopian] people.” With no apparent incredulity Diodorus reports the Ethiopian belief that they were the first to institute religious worship, solemn assemblies, sacrifices, and other customs used to honor the gods; and that their own sacrifices were the most acceptable of all to the gods.⁸ Six centuries later Stephanus of Byzantium, for whom Aksum was the capital of Ethiopia, reiterates the belief that Ethiopians were the first to introduce the worship of the gods. And one of Stephanus’s contemporaries, Lactantius Placidus, elaborates:

Certainly [the Ethiopians] are loved by the gods because of justice. This even Homer indicates in the first book by the fact that Jupiter frequently leaves heaven and feasts with them because of their justice and the equity of their customs. For the Ethiopians are said to be the justest men and for that reason the gods leave their abode frequently to visit them.⁹

An image of just and pious Ethiopians is also conveyed by the way individual Ethiopians are usually depicted in ancient literature. Both Herodotus and Diodorus mention that Sabacos, the first Nubian ruler over Egypt—in the Twenty-fifth, or “Ethiopian,” Dynasty—replaced the death penalty with an order to have Egyptian offenders serve time in communal work projects. Diodorus describes Sabacos the Ethiopian as one who exceeded all his predecessors in showing homage to the gods and kindness to his subjects. Herodotus presents a vignette of another upright Ethiopian ruler. Confronting spies sent by Cambyses before his ill-fated invasion attempt, the Ethiopian king rebukes them with a small sermon: “You are liars, and that king of yours is a bad man. Had he any respect for what is right, he would not have coveted any other kingdom than his own, nor made slaves of a people who have done him no wrong.”¹⁰

The only Ethiopian represented in any detail in the Old Testament is likewise portrayed as a man of high moral character. Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian officer at the court of King Zedekiah, responds with compassion upon hearing that Jeremiah had been cast into a pit and takes all steps necessary to liberate the prophet.¹¹ Noble character types also appear in later secular literature about Ethiopians. The protagonists of Aethiopika, the third century romance by Heliodorus—a book which had a great vogue during the Renaissance—are portrayed as particularly pious and just. Perhaps influenced by associations with Aethiopika Samuel Johnson depicted Prince Rasselas as an ingenuously upright and just young man, and had one of his countrymen observe that “oppression is, in the Abissinian dominion, neither frequent nor tolerated.”¹²

Many Muslim references to Ethiopians are in a similar vein. A work of the highest standing in Islamic tradition, the Sira or biography of Muhammad by Ibn Hisham, reports that Muhammad advised his followers who were being persecuted by the Quraish in Mecca that “if you go to Abyssinia you will find a king under whom none are persecuted. It is a land of righteousness where God will give you relief from what you are suffering.”¹³ Muslim legends further impute piety to the Ethiopian king by saying that he declared his belief in the Prophet’s mission, and several Muslim writers have eulogized the character of the Abyssinians.

Whereas these Muslim references are clearly to Aksumite Ethiopia, Christian references tended to confuse Ethiopia or Abyssinia with both Nubia and India for nearly a thousand years. Such ambiguity was reinforced by the conversion of three new Nubian kingdoms to Christianity in the latter half of the sixth century and by contemporary European ignorance about northeast Africa after the Muslim conquests of the seventh century. Late fourth-century references to Ethiopian monks may well pertain to men from the Aksumite kingdom, however, since at that time Aksum alone had been converted and monastic culture spread quickly in the Ethiopian highlands. Rufinus and Palladius reported seeing Ethiopians among the monks in the desert of Scetis in Northern Egypt and noted that many of them “excelled in virtue.” One of the most celebrated Fathers of the Desert whom they describe, a tall Ethiopian named Moses, became widely known as a model of Christian virtue. One text which extols him, an anonymous Byzantine Menologion, states that the Kingdom of Heaven is not closed “to Scythian or Ethiopian. This can be seen in the case of very many others but especially in the case of Moses the Ethiopian. . . . This man whose body was black had a soul more radiantly bright than the splendor of the sun.”¹⁴

It is likely that monks from Aksumite Ethiopia had traveled to Jerusalem from the fifth century onward. About the year 400 Saint Jerome mentioned Ethiopia as one of the countries from which monks were being welcomed daily in the Holy Land. From the thirteenth century, the continuing presence of communities of Ethiopian monks in Palestine is securely established. A number of medieval European travelers to the Holy Land reported that the Ethiopians possessed important Christian sanctuaries, including the chapel of Saint Mary of Golgotha adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and an altar in the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre itself. Because of the rigor of their ascetic practices and the enthusiasm with which they performed the rites, Ethiopians were viewed by a number of such visitors as “the most pious of all the monks” in Jerusalem.¹⁵ Such notices contributed to a more general image of Ethiopia as an isolated African country devoted to upholding the Christian faith. It was with this image in mind that King Henry IV of England wrote to the king of Abyssinia in 1400:

Therefore, great Prince, we do most truly rejoice in the Lord, and give thanks to Jesus Christ, in that He has thought fit to enlarge His Church, as we hope, through the devout faith of so great a Prince and his subjects.¹⁶

A MAGNIFICENT KINGDOM

A few passages from the classical writers suggest a contrasting image of Ethiopia—that of a significant worldly power. Pliny the Elder considered that Ethiopia had been a major power in archaic times, that it was “famous and powerful” until the Trojan wars and had formerly dominated Syria and the Mediterranean coasts. Speaking of his own times, Diodorus described Nubian Ethiopia as a wealthy and well-run polity, full of rich gold mines and ruled by powerful kings who governed by principles upheld by their devoted and deferential subjects.

Aksumite Ethiopia clearly had a reputation for being a particularly impressive state. In the latter ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface 2000
• Preface
• 1. Conventional Images of Ethiopia
• 2. Scholarly Images and Assumptions
• 3. The Differentiation of Peoples and Cultures
• 4. Foundations of Unity
• 5. Patterns of Expansion and Unification
• 6. Four Questions
• 7. Tigrean Legacy: A National Script
• 8. The Amhara System
• 9. The Oromo System
• 10. Comparisons and Explanations
• 11. Social Evolution in Ethiopia
• Appendix: Roster of the Peoples of Ethiopia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Addendum to the Bibliography
• Index