Ethiopia: Homeland of Humanity (II)In two previous articles on EgyptWe speak of this country as the cradle of one of the oldest civilizations in history, as well as of Coptic Christianity, which we describe below. However, there is another country of which little is said, although it has an even older history and is just as important, culturally and also religiously: Ethiopia.
Ancient History
Ethiopia is a huge country in sub-Saharan Africa, located in the Horn of Africa, with an area of 1,127,127 km² and a population of over 121 million inhabitants, 62% of whom are Christians, mostly belonging to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church called Tawahedo, which became autonomous from the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt in 1959 (in Christological terms, it is also defined as Myophysite, therefore non-Chalcedonian).
The current name of the country and its inhabitants derives from the Greek Αἰθιοπία, Aithiopia, a term composed of αἴθω, aítho ("burn") and ὤψ, ops ("face"), thus literally "burnt face", in reference to the dark skin of the inhabitants of these places. It was Herodotus who first used the term, also mentioned in the Iliad, to refer to the lands corresponding to present-day Nubia, the Horn of Africa and Sudan. Ethiopia was also the Roman name for that region, adopted over time by the local population itself, especially the inhabitants of the kingdom of Axum.
Another name by which the whole of Ethiopia is known - although this name applies more precisely to the Ethiopian plateau populated by peoples of Semitic descent - is Abyssinia, from the Habeshat (Abyssinians), one of the first Semitic-speaking peoples of Ethiopia, of South Arab (Sabaean) origin, which had already colonized the Ethiopian plateau in pre-Christian times and for which there is evidence in Sabaean inscriptions, to the extent that the Arabs themselves, both before and after the arrival of Islam, continued to call the area Al-Habashah.
We have called Ethiopia the home of mankind because the oldest hominid remains have been found here, dating back 4 million years, as well as those of the famous Lucy, a female African australopithecine that died at the age of 3 some 3.2 million years ago.
Ethiopian prehistory, therefore, begins 4 million years ago and extends to 800 BC, with the advent of the D'mt kingdom. C, with the advent of the D'mt kingdom, of which few details are known, except that it was linked in some way to the Sabaeans, a South Arabian Semitic-speaking people who lived in the area of present-day Yemen and from whom the famous Queen of Sheba, narrated both in the Bible and in Ethiopian (the Kebra Nagast, an Ethiopian epic book, calls her Machedà) and Islamic (in the Koran she is called Bilqis) sources, is said to have come.
Due to the historical connection with the Sabeans, both from the kingdom of D'mt and the later Axumites, the Ethiopians claim to have Jewish origins and to be of divine lineage, since the Queen of Sheba, according to the biblical account, traveled to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon and had a son with him, Menelik, who would become emperor of Ethiopia. This story is also told in the aforementioned Kebra Nagast, which also narrates that Menelik, once grown up, would return to Jerusalem to join his father and there he would steal the Ark of the Covenant to take it to Ethiopia.
However, it is historically attested that the traditional Ethiopian peoples - i.e. the Amhara, Tigrinya and Tigrinya - are the result of the union between the first South African colonizers, coming from the Yemen area and arriving in Abyssinia after crossing the Red Sea, and the indigenous peoples. The languages of these same traditional peoples are also Semitic (the oldest of them, the one used in Ethiopian liturgy, is Ge'ez, strongly related to South Arabian languages such as Sabaean).
Judaism (according to tradition, introduced in Ethiopia by Menelik) became the religion of the kingdom of Aksum, which arose around the 4th century B.C., probably from the unification of several kingdoms in the area. Aksum was one of the largest empires of antiquity, along with the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire and China.
In 330 AD, Frumentius (a saint for both the Ethiopian Orthodox and Catholic Church as well as the Eastern Orthodox Church) convinced the young Axumite king Ezana to convert to Christianity, making Ethiopia the first country, along with Armenia, to adopt Christianity as a state religion. Frumentius, after leaving Ethiopia for Alexandria, was appointed bishop in 328 by Patriarch Athanasius and sent back to Axum to exercise this mandate (hence the direct link between the Church of Ethiopia and the Church of Egypt, which we will discuss in more detail in a second article on Ethiopia).
More than 600 years later, around the year 1000, the kingdom of Aksum fell into the hands of Queen Judith (it is said that this queen was Jewish or pagan, depending on the sources), who tried to restore Judaism as the state religion, but failed, and destroyed all the Christian places of worship. After her death, however, with the Zaguè dynasty, Christianity could be professed again and from this period dates the construction of the most important and famous Christian monuments of the country, such as the incredible monolithic churches of Lalibela.
The Empire
In 1207, Yekuno Amlak proclaimed himself emperor of Ethiopia, giving birth to a dynasty that remained on the throne for eight centuries and claimed direct descent from King Solomon. The Ethiopian emperors adopted the title Negus Negesti, literally king of kings, and, in time, established good relations with the European powers, especially the Portuguese, who supported them, especially Emperor David II, in his wars against the Muslims. However, David II himself refused to submit to the Catholic Church, while the Jesuits entered the country and began their missionary work, provoking, as a reaction, the division of the territory into several fiefdoms commanded by local chiefs. Among them was Gondar, dominated by the Oromo ethnic group (speaking Cushitic, another branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages in addition to Semitic and Camitic).
Emperor Theodore II, who came to the throne in 1885, later succeeded in reunifying the country under a strong central authority, but had to face the colonialist aims of the European powers, in particular Italy, which conquered Eritrea in 1888 and moved inland towards Abyssinia.
Even more important was the government of Menelik II. In an even more centralist manner, and emphasizing the Solomonic origin of his dynasty, he founded the city of Addis Ababa in 1896, making it the new capital of the Empire. However, in 1895 the Ethiopian war against the Kingdom of Italy had broken out and Menelik II himself had proved to be a great leader, firmly opposing the Italians and even defeating them in 1896 in the infamous battle of Adua, the only battle in history in which an African people defeated a European colonial power.
At the death of Menelik II, the country was again divided into fiefdoms, before the ascension to the throne of Ras Tafarì (Amharic: fearful leader) Maconnèn, who adopted the name of Haile Selassie I. Under his rule, Ethiopia was the first African country to join the League of Nations in 1923.
Haile Selassie and the end of the empire
Haile Selassie's more enlightened policies were not enough to repel the Italian attacks (in the meantime, Mussolini's fascist regime had established itself in Rome) and in 1936 Italian troops entered Addis Ababa: Ethiopia was absorbed into Italian East Africa (which also included Eritrea and much of present-day Somalia), although for a few years, until 1941, when Emperor Selassie returned from exile and resumed all power, he initiated a policy of reform and became the symbol of Rastafarianism. This was because Selassie had called for the return to Africa of all dispersed Africans and had even provided land, in the Shashamane area, to those who intended to return. His intention, in fact, according to a doctrine known as "Ethiopianism", was to unite all the black populations of the world under the Ethiopian monarchy.
That is why he became a true anti-colonialist symbol (and for the Rastafarians in Jesus in his second coming or at least in a divine manifestation) even after his death in 1975, the year in which the country fell into the hands of the socialist dictatorship DERG, which put an end to the centenary Ethiopian empire. The dictatorship ended in 1985 with a terrible famine.
Thus was born the current Republic of Ethiopia, which today has a federal constitution with a strong autonomist stamp on the ethnic, linguistic and political basis of the various states that make up the country.
Despite the war with Eritrea (a neighboring and strongly related country, but with which differences have always existed - among other things because of the terrorist methods used against the Eritrean population by Haile Selassie himself and other Ethiopian rulers - and continue to exist), which ended in 1993 with the independence of the latter country, and inter-ethnic conflicts (the last of which, in 2020, between the central government and the Tigray Liberation Army, an eastern region of the country inhabited by the Tigray and Tigrinya peoples, which resulted in dozens of deaths and thousands of refugees), Ethiopia is today experiencing strong growth, being the African country with the highest economic and social development. Since 2018 it has had a female president, the diplomat Sahle-Uork Zeudé.
Writer, historian and expert on Middle Eastern history, politics and culture.
