Historical setting is one of the key elements for understanding the socially rooted, popular, perpetually emergent individual warriors that the chewa were. This is because of their proverbial sensitivity to history, their loyalty to the local and national structures, and their practice of coalescing into cohesive forces across linguistic groups when faced with hostility. Pride in monarchs and regiments featured in their historical narratives, though most Ethiopians never strived to be literate in order to read about those histories. Nonetheless achieving titles and political positions in the hierarchically organized state was part of the chewa historical consciousness that remained a critical tenet for warriors’ activities in the nineteenth century.

THE CHEWA AND THE NEGUS IN ANTIQUITY

The history of warfare in antiquity depicts a hierarchically organized Ethiopian state and society that used troops. Stone inscriptions and other ancient written sources indicate traditions in using terms such as negus, neguse negest and named military contingents. Sabaean inscriptions, probably from about the end of the sixth century BC, found in Axum, Yeha, Enda Ceros, Malazo, Matara and Kaskase, mention DMT and WRN dynasties (DMT and WRN are names found on stone inscriptions dating from a time when vowels were not used. Linguists continue to debate how they were meant to sound. I like to think of the first one as Damot, the name of a southwest region in medieval Ethiopia, and later also of a northwest region in current Ethiopia; but as a non-linguist, I have no supportive etymological evidence.) Military exploits of titled kings are mentioned in a Sabaean inscription dating from the fifth century BC in Yeha, in Greek, and later in Ge'ez inscriptions.

Titles designating monarchs and the names of regiments are two major features that should be noted with regard to subsequent history. A stone inscription from Adulis referred to a king who identified himself as a son of Ares, the war god, and described, among other things, his exaction of tribute from the people. He took half of their possessions for himself and allowed them to keep their lands as ‘tributaries’. His troops subjugated the pastoralist, commercial and warrior people along the Red Sea coast, and others in the region of Lake Tana and Gambella, as well as across the sea in parts of Arabia.