By Dimitris Almyrantis
What decline are you talking about? Looking at the big picture, Ethiopia has gone from strength to strength. If you have some mental impression of imperial identity in her past, that is more the product of successful image-making on their part than their being the rump state of some yet-mightier civilization now gone.
For reference,Ethiopia aka Abyssinia (Greek and Arabic-derived names, respectively, meaning “land of coal-faced people” and “land of the Habasha people” – “Habasha” being the name of the main Ethiopic ethnic group in the middle ages) was, historically, more associated with the Middle East than Africa proper – meaning, it was a prestigious place with a state tradition preceding the middle ages, associated with Prester John, Solomon, the Queen of Sheba and the Holy Land, not part of the Dark/Unknown Continent – and so her experience more closely aligned with that of Iran, Egypt or Turkey than of the Sudan (the pre-modern term for most of sub-Saharan Africa). This meant that, like Egypt – which built the first large colonial empire in the 1800s, preceding the European scramble for Africa – Ethiopia was an active player in the colonial game.
Compare the red piece of land – the domains of several feuding Christian kings considered “Abyssinia” in the 18th century – with the green (modern Ethiopia) region, the 19th century conquests of a unified imperial state adopting an increasingly Westernized apparatus (1900 Ethiopia still “looked” medieval, but was in relative terms a leap ahead). Much like the Saudis on the other side of the Red Sea, the ‘Solomonic dynasty’ benefited from the colonial period with an unprecedented, in regional terms, state-building effort:
As for a brief history of peaks and declines of Ethiopia, look no further:
- 1st millenium – the kingdom of Axum: The “ancient Ethiopia” people have in mind was very different from the later country, and more like modern Eritrea – a lowland, maritime civilization benefiting from the Red Sea trade between India and Rome. They spoke Ge’ez, a Semitic relative of Hebrew and Arabic that, after becoming a dead language, would be the official and religious language (like Latin was to Europe) of divergent Ethiopic groups.
Axum, as a maritime power, had more territorial ambitions in the Arabian coast than in Africa, conquering the (then Jewish religiously, with a Christian and ‘Sabaean’ minority) fertile lands of Yemen and trying to take the pagan trade centre of Mecca in the 6th-7th centuries. They were removed by the Persians, who made Yemen into their own province, shortly before the Arab conquests.
With the passage of the Red Sea and its trade into Arab hands, Axum declined. The Christian kingdoms of Nubia along the Nile would eclipse it, and until the 12th c. maintain much friendlier (i.e. wealth-producing) relations with Moslem Egypt. The approximate region of Axum resurfaces in later Ethiopic history as the Medri Bahri, the “sea-country” under its own kings, now tributary to the “main” Ethiopic negusa negast (king-of-kings) based in the more defensible highlands.
Axum and the neighbouring kingdoms in Yemen; it is likely that the original Semitic people of Axum either migrated, or were heavily influenced by, Yemeni colonies.
- 10th-11th century – Jewish ascendancy: It is this period that formed the historical first memories of later Ethiopic tradition. The Ethiopian Kebra Negast, or the Book of Kings, is unique in beginning with a description of the cession of sovereignty from the Jews, represented by king Solomon, to the clever Christians who steal the Ark of the Covenant and hide it in Ethiopia. The “Solomonic dynasty” of Ethiopia represented a historical memory of the original Jewish kingship in the Abyssinian highlands, represented chiefly by the Queen Gudit or Judith (10th century) who established the kingship of the Falashas (compare with the Christian Habashas) over the Christians.
This period is rather obscure; I recall one author attributing the subjugation of the Jewish kingdom to a confederation of the Christian kings of Nubia, set to oust the ‘uppity’ highland Jews and install a Christian king. True or not, this is hardly out of character for the mores of the period (or our period, come to think of it). These Jews are the ancestors of the modern Beta Israel, since relocated to Israel, and the historically friendly attitude of Ethiopia to Israel, which is seen as a cousin nation. - 12th-13th century – Zagwe dynasty of Lalibela: The first “historical” dynasty, mostly remembered for the spectacular rock-hewn churches in their former capital, the Zagwe kings still ruled one of many divided kingdoms.
Below: Somewhat-speculative 12th century map, credit to Jake Mapping. “Makuria” is the Christian kingdom of Nubia, “Ethiopia” are the Zagwe lands, and Adal was one of the early Somali Moslem trading city-states of the Horn of Africa. At the time, most lands south of the Ethiopian/Falasha kingdoms were pagan, and would remain so for most of the middle ages.
- late 13th – mid-16th centuries – Solomonic empire and religious wars: In this period, the Horn of Africa begins to look increasingly like the middle ages proper. Two large competing kingdoms – Ethiopia and a Somali realm in Adal and Ifat – form and absorb or make tributary the former gaggle of petty realms, and by the 15th century assert a measure of control into the formerly (and often still) pagan interior. Wars range deep into each other’s territory, more than once resulting in near-conquests that are rendered null by lack of human or material infrastructure to effectively occupy territory.
- 16th- c. – Oromo migrations & socio-political collapse: In this period, large populations of pagan cattle-herders move out of the African interior and into the Sudan and Horn of Africa. They provide a third option to the religious dilemma of the old kingdoms by trampling them underfoot and grazing their herds on the ruins: in Nubia/Sudan, the nomadic Fundj conquer the Christians and later accept Islam; in the Horn of Africa, the nomadic Oromos (or Gallas, their historic exonym), who now compose Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, destroy the sultanate of Ifat/Adal and reduce the Christian kings of Ethiopia into irrelevance, hiding in their mountain fortresses while most of their provinces are overrun.
The upshot of the process is that now survival and security, rather than conquest and plunder, become the main goals of social organisation. Over centuries, most Oromo populations convert to Islam. They also settle down, at least nominally acknowledging the existence of the Ethiopian emperor, though at this time his authority has been lost to mighty feudal lords or kinglets of his provinces.
Oromo settlement;
- 17th – mid-19th century – Zemene Mesafint & crypto-Moslem rule: The Zemene Mesafint, or ‘Time of Judges’, is the long warlord period of Ethiopic history, named for a Biblical allusion to every man becoming his own judge (i.e. perpetual rebellion). The Solomonic king-of-kings remains in place in the royal stone fortress at Gondar, receiving the submission of the many independent, ethnically distinct, kingships that pop over his provinces and return to the old habits of tribal war.
The main power of the period were the Yejju dynasty of ‘Shahs’ (1784–1850s) who were nominal converts to Christianity from a Moslem Oromo clan. While observing the outward formulas of submission to a Christian king – in fact relying on the relict institutions of the Abyssinian empire to assert their control and restore a semblance of peace to feudal Ethiopia – they promoted their own still-Moslem Oromo relatives to positions of power.
Map of main feudal kingdoms at the close of the Zemene Mesafint, after the fading of Yejju rule; generally, the coastal kingdoms had the advantage of regulating the European rifle trade. The Red Sea coast was under nominal Turkish rule with hereditary janissary garrisons, with the Ottomans appointing (nominal) “governors of Abyssinia” at these coastal forts since the 16th century:
1850s-1920s – Reunification & Empire: It was the son of an impoverished lord from Showa, one of the autonomous provincial kingdoms, who over two decades of war reunified Ethiopia and placed himself on the throne as king-of-kings Tewodros II, citing his own blood ties to Solomon. Ironically, his life ended in suicide as the British (on whom he ordinarily relied for the trade of Western arms and cannon) invaded Ethiopia in 1868 over his imprisonment of Protestant missionaries, a war that has been called “the most expensive affair of honour in history.”
Still, despite pressure from all sides – the Turkish-Albanian Egyptian empire and later Mahdist Imamate to the north, the Italians on the Red Sea Coast, etc. – the reunified Ethiopia remained and, with continued tacit European permission, conquered most of the Horn of Africa, often under the same pretences as the British (“let the Ethiopians build railways for the Somalis”, etc.). Like the later deal with the Saudis, the Ethiopians assumed control of the vast, hard to control interior which they controlled with the old school techniques of warfare, while the Europeans took over the coasts and Somali trading centres.
Maps showing the campaigns of Menelik II (r. 1889–1913, pictured above) – the first shows his status as negus (king) of Showa under the king-of-kings, although by the end of his reign the old feudal nobility had been de-fanged, and Ethiopia unified under a relatively modern administration, with the title negus confined to the Emperor alone.
Religious map of Ethiopia with its main holy sites; of these, the monastery of Debre Libanos gained a reputation in the 20th century for the wholesale massacre of 30,000 monks and laypeople by the Italians in 1937.
Every Ethiopian king since Tewodros II understood that their military capacity against the Western empires was nil, hence Ethiopia’s quick adaption to the international system and championing of the League of Nations as a means to promote norms protecting small states. Despite the brief Italian occupation (an occupation only possible by British permission and infrastructure at Suez, not by Italian strength alone), Ethiopia succeeded in never becoming seen as Terra Nullius, gaining the Italian colonies after WWII.
Source: Quora