Let's Look Across
the Red Sea, I
Ethiopias
Historic Ties with Yemen
By Richard
Pankhurst
Ethiopia
and Yemen, two historic countries on either side of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, have
been in contact since almost the dawn of time. This is scarcely surprising. The
intervening strip of sea between South Arabia and the Ethiopian Horn of Africa is at its
closest little more than fifty miles wide, and is believed ten thousand years ago to have
been only eleven miles wide. This narrow stretch of water could be crossed, throughout the
historic period, by the simplest of vessels, including rafts, within little more than a
day.
The
highlands of the Yemeni and Ethiopian regions, as the archaeologist David Phillipson
notes, have much in common physically and environmentally". They form part of a
wide region which, Walter Raunig observes, has not only very close geographical,
climatic, zoological and botanical connections,
but also cultural links [which] have always been equally, at times
exceptionally strong.
The
Queen of Sheba
The
antiquity of Ethiopian and Yemeni history is apparent from the fact that traditions in
both countries go back twelve centuries to the time of the renowned Queen of Sheba. It is
not the object of this article to examine her life, or to enter into the debate as to
whether she was the ruler of Ethiopia or Yemen, or whether her government, as is often
suggested, extended over both lands. It is sufficient to note that traditions associated
with her are common to both, and point to the existence of an at least partially shared
culture, dating back to early antiquity.
The
Habashat, and the Origins of Ethiopian Civilisation
An
intimate relationship between Ethiopia and Yemen in ancient times has also been postulated
from the fact that several place and clan names, as well as inscriptions in the South
Arabian language Sabaean, are found in both countries.
The
existence of shared names on either side of the Red Sea caused the Italian scholar Carlo
Conti Rossini to postulate, however somewhat simplistically, that the very name of
Abyssinia was of Yemeni origin. The word is generally believed to be derived from the name
Habashat, used to designate a people which lived in the north of historic Ethiopia, in
what are now the highlands of part of Eritrea and Tigray.
Land on both sides of the Red Sea, according to the ancient geographer Ptolemy (AD 150)
Conti
Rossini assumed that the Habashat actually originated in Yemen, and later established
themselves, as colonists, on the Ethiopian side of the Red Sea, where, he believed, they
introduced their name. It was his belief, furthermore, that the South Arabian language,
and writing, represented the origin and basis of the Ethiopian tongue and script
Geez.
These
suppositions were once widely accepted. The British Arabist Spencer Trimingham for example
wrote, in 1952, that the Habashat, or agriculturalist mountaineers of Yemen,
faced with population pressure, and the failure of their irrigation system, crossed the
intervening sea, and, after leaving the inhospitable coastal zone of Ethiopia,
found a country [in the Ethiopian interior] which possessed the same climate and
vegetation as their own land. The Habashat, he claims, thereupon assumed a
predominance over all the other tribes, and its chief took the title of negus nagasti
(chief of chiefs). As a result, the kingdom of Habashat consolidated itself
about the third century B.C., when its rule extended over the plateau region of Eritrea
and northern Tigrai.
"Settlers
and Colonizers"
Elaborating
on this supposed migration, Trimingham claimed that the Yemeni migrants came as
settlers and colonizers, brought their regional names with them, settled
in the plateau regions most suitable for agriculture, and brought the
fully developed civilization of the Sabaeans. The Yemenis, he claims, introduced the use of metals, certain
domestic animals, new plants, advanced systems of irrigation and agriculture, new forms of
communal organization, and the art of writing.
Conti
Rossinis thesis, which was based largely on conjecture, was, however, subsequently
undermined by the work of a number of other scholars approaching the question from
different disciplines and interests. One of the first of these scholars was Joseph
Greenberg, whose Studies in African Linguistic Classification, appeared in 1955. In it he
argued that the Semitic languages, found on both sides of the Red Sea, were in no way
unique to the region, but formed part of a very much wider Afroasiatic language family
scattered over much of Africa, as far as Chad in the west.
Jacqueline
Pirenne
In
the following year, 1956, Jacqueline Pirenne, a scholar of early Arabian history,
drastically revised South Arabian chronology. Her new dating was significant to the
question of Ethiopian origins, for it indicated that Sabaean immigrants to Ethiopia did
not live in Ethiopia for centuries, as Conti Rossini had postulated, but only for no more
than a few decades.
Six
years later, in 1962, the Dutch linguist A.J. Drewes, published his important Inscriptions
ie lEthiopie antique. It revealed the existence in Ethiopia of Geez graffiti,
and other inscriptions, which were quite as old as the South Arabian inscriptions in
Ethiopia. This discovery showed that Conti Rossini had been mistaken in assuming that
Sabaean inscriptions in the country represented the prototype from which Geez had
later developed.
In
the following decade the Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Fattovich, working in Nubia,
unearthed ancient pottery virtually identical to that which had been produced in Ethiopia
prior to the founding of Aksum. This evidence suggested that the early material culture of
Aksum was of essentially African origin, and had thus developed entirely independently of
South Arabian immigration.
Roger
Schneider
This
thesis was further spelt out, in the following year, by the epigraphist Roger Schneider.
Emphasising the entirely unproven character of Conti Rossinis suppositions, he
pointed out for example that the people of northern Ethiopia, living as they did in a
rocky environment, did not have to wait for the arrival of the Sabaeans to erect houses
built of stone. He argued further that Sabaeans who came to Ethiopia did not arrive
in a cultural vacuum, but that, on the contrary, a significant Ethiopian state,
people, and language had existed well before their advent. He contended further that
Sabaean settlement was restricted to a few localities, and did not impinge greatly on
Northern Ethiopia as a whole.
Schneiders
final conclusion was that similarities between South Arabian and Ethiopian civilization
had in fact existed long before the coming to Ethiopia of the Sabaeans.
These
and other arguments in support of Ethiopian origins independent of South Arabia were
subsequently supported by other scholars, among them three linguists, the Ethiopian
Abraham Demoz, the American Grover Hudson, and the Englishman David Appleyard, at a
Conference on Ethiopian Origins, organised by the present writer at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, in June 1978.
Standing
Conti Rossini on his Head
The
result of such convergent investigations by scholars working in different fields was that
Jacqueline Pirenne, basing herself on the areas material culture, as well as on
linguistic and paleographic data, stood Conti Rossinis thesis on its head. She
argued that migration was not from Yemen to Ethiopia, but rather in the opposite
direction: from Ethiopia to Yemen".
Whatever
the direction, dating, and details of such migration, there can be no denying that
northern Ethiopia and Yemen, in the half millennium or so prior to the Christian era,
shared a related civilisation, or civilisations. This is evident from the at least limited
use in Ethiopia of the Sabaean language and script, as found on ancient Aksumite
inscriptions and coins, and an apparently identical religion. The latter centred on the
worship of the sun and moon, and the local god Almaqah. The logo of the sun and moon, used
at that time in Yemen, appears for example on an ancient Aksumite obelisk at Matara, as
well as on virtually all pre-Christian Aksum coins, which began to be struck in the first
century A.D. Reference to Almaqah is likewise to be seen on many Sabaean inscriptions on
both sides of the Red Sea.