Abyssinia, Ethiopia, Axum, Meroe, Yemen - History and Modern Politics
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Monday, November 19, 2007
Abyssinia, Ethiopia, Axum, Meroe, Yemen, History and Modern Politics
Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Orientalist, Historian, Political Scientist, Dr. Megalommatis, 50, is the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages. He refuted Greek nationalism, supported Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, and rejected the Greco-Romano-centric version of History. He pleaded for the European History by J. B. Duroselle, and defended the rights of the Turkish, Pomak, Macedonian, Vlachian, Arvanitic, Latin Catholic, and Jewish minorities of Greece. Born Christian Orthodox, he adhered to Islam when 36, devoted to ideas of Muhyieldin Ibn al Arabi.
Greek citizen of Turkish origin, Prof. Megalommatis studied and/or worked in Turkey, Greece, France, England, Belgium, Germany, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Russia, and carried out research trips throughout the Middle East, Northeastern Africa and Central Asia. His career extended from Research & Education, Journalism, Publications, Photography, and Translation to Website Development, Human Rights Advocacy, Marketing, Sales & Brokerage. He traveled in more than 80 countries in 5 continents. He defends the Right of Aramaeans, Oromos, Ogadenis, Sidamas, Berbers, Darfuris, and Bejas to National Independence, demands international recognition for Kosovo, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and Transnistria, calls for National Unity in Somalia, and denounces Islamic Terrorism.
Several misconceptions diffused by colonial historians and totalitarian governments need immediate refutation.
Ancient Ethiopia and its borders
Part of the Abyssinian state propaganda advances the idea that in the Antiquity “the Kushites populated the whole of Eastern Africa” and that “the majority lived in present day Abyssinia”. Even worse, these falsifiers diffuse the idea that at those day “Sudan and Ethiopia were one country” to add that “Abyssinians were just a few Sabaean (Yemenite) refugees who intermingled with the Kushite population”.
This is absolutely wrong, although there are some correct elements in it. In addition, it is said in a very misleading way! Even more, it is self-contradictory.
The Kushites, as part of the Khammitic family, were living for millennia in the South of Egypt. We now know that the famous non-Egyptian Hyksos dynasties ruled Egypt to some extent thanks to their alliance with the people who developed the Kerma civilization in Sudan during the 2nd millennium BCE. These were the ancestors of the Kushites, who formed later (in the 1st millennium) their capital at Napata, the area of present day Karima.
We know that the term Kas was used by the Egyptians to describe the area, the people and the kingdom at the area of modern Sudan, long before the term is disfigured into ‘Mat Kusi’ in Assyrian - Babylonian, ‘Kush’ in Hebrew, and ‘Hus’ in the Greek Biblical text. Then, comes the introduction of the Greek term ‘Aithiopia’ for the same land, people and state. In most of the cases, the Greek Biblical text renders ‘Aithiopia’ what stands in the Hebrew text as Kush.
But it is a state, namely the Kushite state of Napata, whose rulers reigned in Egypt for some time (Piankhi, Shabaka, Shabataka, Taharqa and Tanut Amon, the ‘Ethiopian’ dynasty according the term employed by Manetho for the 25th dynasty), before being expelled by the Assyrians emperors Assarhaddon and Assurbanipal, who annexed Egypt.
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The same term is used in Greek for later phases of Sudan's (Ethiopia’s} pre-Christian history. When twice in the sixth century Psammetichus II (595 BCE) and Cambyses, the Iranian invader of Egypt, (525 BCE), go so far in the south as Napata (Karima lies at 1050 km in the south of Aswan, so 1900 km in the south of Cairo – alongside the Nile) and destroy that city, the Kushites – Ethiopians transfer their capital further in the south, to the area of today’s Bagrawiyah (1550 km in the south of Aswan), as if they wanted to ensure that nobody would undertake an attack against them from the north anymore! Then, rises Meroe (with its numerous pyramids built between 400 BCE and 350 CE and preserved today in Bagrawiyah), about which we have the valuable narrations of Heliodorus (in his ‘Aithiopica’, a description of the Sudanese Meroitic kingdom). Meroe was the capital of Aithiopia.
To respond therefore to the assumption that the Kushites “lived throughout Eastern Africa”, we must first answer the question of the southern limits of the Meroitic state of Aithiopia. All specialists would agree that the kingdom was extended until areas between Khartoum and Wad Madani. According to all the indications we have, the African jungle was reaching these points, preventing anyone from advancing further to the south.
So, never did Meroitic Ethiopia encompass the slightest portion of present day Abyssinian territory. Continental as it was, that state did not control either the mountains confines of the north of Eritrea and Abyssinia nor the present day Sudanese coast, if we refer to authentic sources such as the Periplus of the Red Sea (written around 70 CE).
Certainly there may have been Kushitic populations not included in the Meroitic kingdom of Ethiopia, but we cannot identify them, since they did not leave any written monuments so that we possibly decipher, read, evaluate, crosscheck, understand and judge. What was the ethnic origin of populations leaving in the 1st millennium BCE in the area of today’s Abyssinia, Eritrea, Somalia is anyone’s guess. We know nothing precise in this regard.
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Certainly there may have been Kushitic populations not included in the Meroitic kingdom of Ethiopia, but we cannot identify them, since they did not leave any written monuments so that we possibly decipher, read, evaluate, crosscheck, understand and judge. What was the ethnic origin of populations leaving in the 1st millennium BCE in the area of today’s Abyssinia, Eritrea, Somalia is anyone’s guess. We know nothing precise in this regard.
Another serious point is that already in the area of the Khammitic Egypt, as well as in the Meroitic realm of Ethiopia, and certainly in other locations, Nilo-Saharic peoples (some of them were the ancestors of the modern Nubians) were living among the Khammitic Kushites. So, it is also wrong to assume that in the area of Eastern Africa only Kushitic populations were living.
These forgers of historical truth seem to forget that the term Aithiopia in Ancient Greek sources is not an ethnic name only (so that they possibly generalize its use, and include populations inhabiting the surface of present day Ethiopia); it is mainly and mostly the name of a state! And that state had capital Meroe and – surely – did not extend its borders as far as modern Abyssinia in the south.
So, there is no point in insisting on historical forgery, and keep employing the name ‘Ethiopia’ for present day Abyssinia.
Habashat were Yemenites but not Sabaeans
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There are other wrong points in the aforementioned official Abyssinian approaches – forgery of Historical Truth. First of all, the people of Sheba, the ‘Sabaeans’, must not be confused with the Aramaic ‘Sabians’, who were the inhabitants of the area of Harran (at Eski Sumatar, near present day Urfa in Turkey) and were a Gnosticist religious denomination with strong astro-symbolic characteristics.
The assumption that the Abyssinians are Sabaean Yemenites, and originate from the area of the state Sabaa is definitely wrong. Ancient Yemenite (deciphered) epigraphic documentation testifies to the existence in the area of today’s Yemen of one tribe / ethnic group named Habashat. Probably in several waves during the 1st millennium BCE different parts of that group moved to Africa crossing the straits Bab al Mandeb. The entire story is solemnly reflected in the Abyssinian Christian epics Kebra Negast.
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Even weaker point in this aberrational argumentation is the effort to undermine Abyssinians in their intermingling with earlier settled in the African plateau Kushites. We do not actually know whether the archeological evidence we have from Abyssinia before the introduction of Gueze (which means before the arrival of the Yemenite Habasht) belongs to Kushites, Nilo-Saharic or even Bantu people. What is sure is that this intermingling was not extensive, and did not influence the Ancient Axumite Abyssinian civilization. Gueze as scripture is entirely derived from Ancient Yemenite, consisting in a more elaborate system. As linguistic evidence, Gueze is absolutely Semitic, with almost totally insignificant traces of Khammitic or Kushitic. So, even if a certain mixture took place, it was not of important scale and did not influence the formation of the Semitic Axumite (pre-Christian and Christian) culture that was practically speaking an alien element, an Asiatic culture on African soil.
Even limiting the subject at the pre-Christian periods, Meroe and Axum had nothing in common, no similarities and no affinities. Axumite Abyssinia is culturally and religiously totally irrelevant of and unrelated to Meroitic Ethiopia. Axum and Adulis present – quite contrarily – many affinities with Safar and Mouza, the capital and the Red Sea harbour of the kingdom of Sabaean and Himyarite Yemenites. When Meroitic Ethiopia and Axumite Abyssinia co-existed one next to the other for some hundreds of years, they were more different than Greece from Persia.
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