What is in a Name? Ethiopia vs. Abyssinia
By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Totalitarian practices in Eastern Africa rely heavily on falsification of History, promotion of Colonial Schemes, and educational – cultural – historical confusion and ignorance. In the case of Abyssinia, the totalitarian state dogma hinges on a shameful act of Usurpation of the name ‘Ethiopia’ that was attributed to Kush and Meroe, the black-faced people of the Ancient Sudan, who are the ancestors of Modern Oromos. All is in a Name!
The Usurpation of Name ‘Ethiopia’ by the Christianized Axumite Kingdom of Abyssinia
It is historically erroneous and politically misleading for the Amhara – Tigray ruled country to change its real name, Abyssinia, and pretend to be called by a name like Ethiopia that is totally irrelevant to these two peoples, who descend from the ancient Axumite Abyssinians, who in turn were the offspring of one Ancient Yemenite (so please, do not confuse, they are non-Arabic) tribe that we first attested on Ancient Yemenite epigraphic documentation. The event has traces in the past of course, but was intensified and generalized over the past 50 years, under colonial academic and diplomatic guidance of the Abyssinian ruling class.
We know of course that for the needs of his royal propaganda the invader of Ethiopia, which is present day Sudan, king Ezana of Axumite Abyssinia called himself ‘King of Ethiopia’, and he truly ruled the southern part of Ethiopia, all that area of the Butana desert of Sudan that the Ancient Greeks and Romans were calling Insula Meroe, island Meroe, since it is surrounded by Atbara, the United Nile, the Blue Nile and lake Tana. The Abyssinian control did not reach Ptolemais Theron, present day Suakin, the Ptolemaic and later Roman colony at the Sudanese Red Sea coast; it did not reach either the flow of the Blue Nile or even lake Tana itself, although the lake was not far from the Axumite borders.
Last but not least, Ezana’s control did not reach further in the north, the old Kushitic capital of Napata (present day Karima), let alone Meroitic territories further in the north, Dongola, Kerma and the 3rd and 2nd cataracts’ area. A few successors to Ezana may have kept their control on that part of Ethiopia, but after the end of the 5th century and the rise of the three Christian states in Sudan, Nobatia, Makkuria, and Alodia, the Axumite kingdom of Abyssinia did not control any area on the present day soil of Sudan, or to put it otherwise any area belonging to the ancient Meroitic kingdom of Ethiopia.
Consequently, they had – already by that time – lost any legitimacy to the name of ‘Ethiopia’; we know of course that the kings of Axum kept using it among their royal titles but this propaganda was related to the Christianization of their state. The use of the name ‘Ethiopia’ they were making was of Biblical dimensions, since according to their erroneous and falsified interpretations the christening of Abyssinia was prophesized long ago by means of the Biblical verse stating that Kush (and in the Septuaginta Greek translation of the Alexandrian 70 Elders ‘Ethiopia’) will extend its hand to the Lord.
Of course, all this is just medieval non-sense! You cannot make ‘use’ of a verse stating that another country will accept a faith, and pretend that this verse refers to you because you accepted that faith, whereas the other country did not! Either you invade the other country or not, you prove nothing! Whereas it is evident that there were political reasons, an ideological – theological dimension cannot be denied to that attack of Ezana. In any case, it is a childish attempt to vindicate the Biblical prophecy for Axum. For both the Old Testament and the New Testament, Axumite Abyssinia simply does not exist! The Biblical verse refers to Ethiopia, that is Sudan, and can refer to the formation of the three Christian states of Sudan, or to the later acceptance of Islam by the Kushite Ethiopians, or to something that has not yet happened; all these possible interpretations are of course for those who do not accept that the verse refers to its own historical environment, and to developments much earlier than the Christianization or the Islamization of Ethiopia.
As we know, the term ‘Ethiopia’ implied continuously – throughout the Abyssinian Dark Ages – a shadowy reference to the deeds of Ezana and to the Abyssinian interpretation of the Biblical verse.
Examples of pre-Christian Meroitic Ethiopian – Axumite Abyssinian divide
Studying the socio-historical divide between the Semitic Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians and the various African Kushitic peoples, modern scholarship is bound to focus on very different backgrounds, each encompassing various qualitatively different old civilizations. According to a certain approach, the Oromo culture, generally community- and Logos-based, is in confrontational clash with the Amhara - Tigray culture, generally dictatorial and Mythos-based. The approach proved to be correct, and in this regard the term ‘qualitatively different civilizations’ applies even to earlier stages of the two cultures, antedating the introduction of Islam and Christianity. Meroe and Axum were truly very different.
We do not know much about Amanikhatashan the Meroitic counterpart of Negus (king) Zoskales of Axum for whom we have some details within the text of the Periplus of the Red Sea. And we do not know much, even not the name of the Abyssinian Axumite counterpart of the great Qore Shorkaror of Meroe, who lived earlier, at the last years of Jesus’ historical presence. We know that Zoskales had learnt Greek, and we are sure that there were Greek artists at the Ethiopian court of Meroe, probably disembarking at Prolemais Theron/Suakin. We attest the presence of Iranian artists at Meroe thanks to a relief at Djebel Qeili (about 150 km east of Khartoum), a kind of a drawing on a granite outcrop in the middle of the desert, that attributes strong solar insignia to the Supreme Meroitic god, a Mithraic version of Amun congratulating and supporting the Qore in the aftermath of a victory that is depicted in a typically Iranian way. We find Indian influences and this is also normal due to the development of maritime and commercial contacts.
However, all these elements show similarities that lie on a substrate of significant differences. In the aforementioned relief, Shokraror is depicted as wearing a quiver and carrying a bow, arrows, a spear and sword. He is shown, at the aftermath of a battle, victorious over his enemies. He stands on a row of four bound prisoners. He holds seven more by a leash that he is handing to the god. Other enemy figures are shown in rows like they are lying dead on a field of battle or being thrown off a cliff. The god hands the king a clump of dhurra (millet, a grain). The millet probably symbolizes good crop harvests. This is something you would never find in pre-Christian or Christian Abyssinia. It shows a deep involvement in a pastoral and peaceful style of life that was not interrupted by the fight that had taken place!
The differences between Semites and Khammites/Kushites are very striking, yet the subject has not been thoroughly studied. Khammitic rule never took the absolute monarchical aspect the concept of kingdom had among the Semites. One cannot compare Khefren to Naram Sin, Senwosre II to Shamshi Adad I, Ramses III to Tiglathpileser I, Taharqa and Nechao to Assurbanipal and Nabukadnezzar. There have been great Khammitic military leaders in Egypt and in Ethiopia, but their power was never as compact as it happened among Semitic kings and emperors. Semitic discipline reminds us German order at times! More specifically among the Meroitic Ethiopians the role of the Queen, the ‘Kandake’ was highly stressed! From Accadians to Yemenites and from Aramaeans to Hebrews, we have only some exceptions within the context of 2700 years of pre-Christian Semitic History. We are about to reach a level of understanding of the Ancient Egyptian History, according to which the ancient temples were not only holy places, universities and research centers, but they also represented a kind of social and ideological – political institutions parallel to Modern History’s political parties and associations. This was reflected in Ancient Ethiopia as well. Among Semites it was not like this.
The false name ‘Ethiopia’ as the Colonial Choice in Modern Abyssinia
In the Modern Colonial times, the tiny kingdom of Abyssinia (that had been limited in its small Amhara territory because of the Islamic Ottoman control of the Red Sea coasts) became the object of Western academic Orientalist research and, in parallel, the stake of the colonial involvement and manipulation. Abyssinia could be useful – if properly manipulated – to two visions of colonial Africa that were fighting against one another, and at the same time they were cooperating in kicking the Ottoman Empire out of its vast possessions in the continent (no less than 7 million square kilometer of African soil belonged to the Ottoman Empire at the eve of Napoleon’s disembarking at Abukir – Alexandria), and in preventing other powers, mostly Germany and Italy, from getting sizable portions of the African cake!
The two visions were the horizontal and the vertical ones, or if you want the alignment with the parallels or the placement on the meridian’s way. The former expressed the French approach that Africa (or most of it) can be unified under Colonial rule through an expansion from the West to the East, from Mauritania and Senegal to Sudan, and from Congo to Somalia. The opposite, British, way insisted in proving that the easiest colonial control of Africa can be assured by means of a South to North axis. Finally, the British were successful in controlling an uninterrupted territory from South Africa to Alexandria. And the French, who failed to reach uninterruptedly from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast or to the Eastern African coast (Djibouti and Madagascar have no land connection with the other French African dominions in Africa), were successful in controlling the major part of Africa.
But the two colonial axes’ conflict was terrible. The British had to do all they could to stop French short of reaching the Eastern African coast. It was a very long project and fight; it lasted an entire century. The French were slowly advancing from the West, and they had the upper hand in Egypt. Facing an 1870-defeated France (by the Prussian army), England had still difficulties to prevail over the French in Egypt before 1882. What one attest in today’s Darfur is the continuation of problems ensuing from the serious Fashoda event (19/9/1898) between the French Major J.B. Marchand and the British Lord Kitchener that brought France and England to the brink of war, just six years before they managed to set up the Entente Cordiale.
Envisioning expansion and anticipating developments, the British contacted the Abyssinian kingdom in the middle of the 19th century and attempted to convince the powerless, underdeveloped, uneducated, and isolated ruling class of Abyssinia about the importance of expansion, exploits and neighboring lands’ annexation that would permit – supposedly – the refractory court of the obscurantist kingdom to obtain power. At that moment everything was at stake, and one could not know what would come next. For the British it would be far better that the small kingdom expanded towards the south of present day Abyssinia at a moment they had not yet achieved the establishment of their ‘meridian’ axis, and they were worried because of French successes. The French could have reached – from Congo and Central Africa – the South of Sudan and from there to the south of present day Abyssinia. At a later stage they would be able to vanquish the inexperienced soldiers of the old fashioned African monarchy, reducing the British vertical vision to ashes. Abyssinian expansion to the Oromo and the Somali lands was the work of subtle British diplomacy.
There was another colonial trap prepared for the 19th and the 20th century Abyssinian kings, and they fell even more easily therein. French and other European scholars were visiting all these parts of Africa either as missionaries and political agents or as pioneers and decipherers. Not much time had passed until they were able to read Gueze manuscripts and to understand them better than the ignorant and uneducated monks of Abyssinia whose readings in Gueze literature were limited, derisory and contemptible. Even today the situation did not turn better!
The authoritative Catholic Encyclopedia states the following about them (entry Abyssinia): ‘The oldest translation of the Bible into Ethiopian dates from the fourth century, having been made in Gheez. Pell, Platt, and Dillman have edited some of the manuscripts in London and Leipzig, but the majority remain untouched, in convents of Abyssinian monks. The present clergy are buried in a state of deplorable ignorance. Little is required of secular priests beyond the ability to read and to recite the Nicene creed, and a knowledge of the most necessary liturgical rites. The monks in their numerous convents receive an education somewhat more complete, and occasionally there are found among them men versed in sacred hermeneutics, who can recite by heart the entire Bible’.
The second trap concerns precisely the introduction by the Abyssinian authorities of the name of ‘Ethiopia’, and this has to do a lot with the French ideological and cultural plans for the entire Middle East. French, Italian, and other scholars convinced the various successive ‘Negus’ and political rulers to obliterate the name of Abyssinia and to introduce the name of Ethiopia. This would serve a multifold colonial purpose that the ignorant and naïve political class of Abyssinia could never imagine.
First of all, it would engulf Abyssinia deep into the marshes of stagnation and underdevelopment on permanent basis because lack of authenticity and cultural – national confusion is a very negative situation. Never a country with confused identity can access important understanding, historical – political knowledge, real emancipation. This trickery would keep Abyssinia permanently as a devoted member of the Third World. It ensured that never Abyssinian intellectuals would attempt to reassess their Axum and Gondar past through modern viewpoints in order to setup a new, genuinely modern and humanist, but also authentically Axumite Abyssinian vision of the World. This would in turn generate a more democratic political environment, releasing oppressed forces and peoples, and empowering them with stimuli for genuine development and progress.
Abyssinian pretensions to the name of Ethiopia would in addition have an impact on part of the Middle East that concerned France – and consequently England, Germany, Russia, and later the USA – much more than marginal and peripheral Gondar! This was the area of the Arabic-speaking peoples, from Morocco to Iraq, a vast area that was met with the very negative developments the French and British colonialism provoked. To extirpate illegally all these lands from their legitimate and wholeheartedly accepted ruler, the Sultan and Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, France diffused gradually a nationalist idea that was completely rejected by the local people initially: the Pan-Arabism. This falsehood was a fabricated bogus version of History that would make of the Arabic-speaking peoples a nation, and would bestow upon them unbelievably exaggerated promises for wealth, development and power. By forming the elite, the French created a dynamics that was stimulated by agents, who diffused unprecedented hatred and confusion about the non-Arabic identity of the Arabic speaking Muslims. To drive the Arabic-speaking populations to advanced levels of ignorance, and be therefore able to manipulate them at will against their own interests, and their own countries, which were under the Ottoman Empire, France needed to keep them far from any serious consideration, study, and research, let alone reassessment and comprehensive use of their pre-Islamic and pre-Christian past.
A good example of the various ways pursued by the French in their colonial interference is the following; whereas in Greece, all the intellectuals, academia, politicians and even average men were encouraged to learn Ancient Greek, and to delve into what was said to be their own past, in Egypt the first Egyptian to study, learn and be able to read Egyptian Hieroglyphics appeared no less than 100 years after the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Champollion! Ever since, the situation turned even worse with the Greek secondary schools offering – obligatory to all – courses of Ancient Greek, whereas the Egyptian miserable intellectual and academic bogus-elite does not even think of introducing - even for one year - the study of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the Egyptian Secondary education, although there are people who studied Egyptology in the University of Cairo, and they could teach.
Similar ignorance about the pre-Islamic and the pre-Christian past reigns elsewhere: in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, etc. Why this is necessary for the colonial plans of France and England one may understand relatively easily. Greece was to become part of Europe, whereas Egypt should be kept at a low-level third world country from where colonial powers would only extract materials. Development is necessary in Europe, not in the colonized periphery.
Quite obviously, the promoting power of the Islamic radicalism, fanaticism, and extremism has been France, and Europe in general. By doing their best to keep the populations of the Arabic speaking countries far from their own past (Phoenician, Aramaic, Babylonian, Egyptian, Meroitic-Ethiopian, Carthaginian and Berberic) at a moment Islam was already misinterpreted, misunderstood and ultimately lost, France and England pushed these countries gradually to Islamic terrorism.
Certainly, the colonial scheme should be viewed as a very big plan, not something to be carried out in a year or a decade. The French even intended to use Islamic terrorism against America; they already did so three years ago. In a way it is colonial France that prepared the minds and the hands of these suicide pilots of September 11th. The Anti-Americanism that Europe still generates, when intermingling with the dark ignorance and the hysteric hatred that have been well prepared for 200 years, can create an uncontainable explosive material that the Mankind will need many decades to overcome.
Within this context of colonial interests, it can be understood that Sudan as a new country, with a past of just 48 years of independence, should not be left with any chance to be attracted by its Antiquities that were partly stolen by the bogus-academia of France, Prussia, England and other countries. The robbery of Lepsius, who transported in the 1840s colossal statues from Karima to Berlin, must be denounced, and the majestic Kushitic monuments must return back to Napata, the capital of Taharqa.
With regard to Egypt the colonial powers applied their scheme early. For the rest (from Morocco to Iraq), they had the time to advance the bogus-theory of Pan-Arabism, terribly oppressing and tyrannizing the non Arabic-speaking minorities, Berbers (in Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania), Copts and Nubians (in Egypt) and Aramaeans (in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the Emirates), who are the absolute ethnic (but not linguistic) majority of all these countries.
On the other hand, Sudan was so clearly unrelated to anything Arabic that the colonial powers would have extreme difficulty to divert the natural local interest towards the glorious Ethiopian Past of Sudan. That is why they kept Egyptians there to diffuse confusion and ignorance, along with the vulgar amalgam of Arabic nationalism and Islamic religious fanaticism, and that is why they did not wish to have the name ‘Ethiopia’ accessible for the Sudanese! It would create a dangerous challenge to the disastrous colonial plan of pulling Sudan to the backward and disastrous falsehood of Pan-Arabism.
At the end, the use of the name ‘Ethiopia’ by Abyssinia would create the oxymoron of the Abyssinians imposing their minority culture in the country they tyrannize, and at the same time imposing as theirs the name of a large part of the oppressed people, the Oromo, the Afar, the ******is, and the Sidama. This can create only a national disaster.
Political Exit of a Millennia long Semitic – Kushitic Divide
Before stating explicitly that one state simply cannot exist within the borders of present day Abyssinia (that is falsely called Ethiopia), we have to denounce as an aberration the fact that Amhara and Tigray Abyssinian politicians and bogus-intellectuals call other peoples living in Abyssinia 'Abyssinians' or 'Habasha'. The only modern Habasha, as continuation of the Semitic Yemenite tribe Habashat (the name of which we find in Ancient Yemenite epigraphic documentation of the second half of the first millennium BCE) are the Amharinya and Tigrinya speaking people of Abyssinia and Eritrea. The event is quite indicative of the confusion spread by the totalitarian rulers of Addis Abeba, who attempt to remove their national name from their peoples (Amhara and Tigray) and then to project it to other peoples, whom they have oppressed for more than 100 years under various forms of state, royal, communist and republican.
Bearing in mind that only pertinent perception of genuine cultural – historical identities can help states create a strong, viable and productive educational system, two possible solutions for Ethiopia can be envisaged by all the parts concerned.
• Either there will be a peaceful secession, and the two states will co-exist, namely a Kushitic state (turning around the Oromo majority, and encompassing other Kushitic peoples, namely Somalis, Sidama and Afar) named Ethiopia and a Semitic Amhara –Tigray state named Abyssinia.
• Or otherwise the falsely named Ethiopian state will adopt the name Abyssinia, openly showing its totalitarian nature, and then it will be up to the oppressed peoples to reject the Amhara – Tigray rule in a rather explosive way that could destabilize even further the entire Eastern Africa.
