Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Map
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 Ethiopia, Egypt and the Matter of Africa
- 2 Who were the Egyptians?
- 3 The Egypt of Africa African Resonances in Predynastic Egypt
- 4 The Egypt of the Rock Artists
- 5 Africa in Egypt Proto- and Early-Dynastic Manifestations
- 6 Africa in Egypt Dynastic Responses
- 7 Africa in Egypt Later Dynastic Encounters
- 8 The First Ethiopians
- 9 Ethiopians in the Greek and Ptolemaic World
- 10 Ethiopians in the Roman World
- 11 The ‘Ethiopia’ of the Early Christian World
- 12 The ‘Real’ Ethiopians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plat Section
1 - Ethiopia, Egypt and the Matter of Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Map
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 Ethiopia, Egypt and the Matter of Africa
- 2 Who were the Egyptians?
- 3 The Egypt of Africa African Resonances in Predynastic Egypt
- 4 The Egypt of the Rock Artists
- 5 Africa in Egypt Proto- and Early-Dynastic Manifestations
- 6 Africa in Egypt Dynastic Responses
- 7 Africa in Egypt Later Dynastic Encounters
- 8 The First Ethiopians
- 9 Ethiopians in the Greek and Ptolemaic World
- 10 Ethiopians in the Roman World
- 11 The ‘Ethiopia’ of the Early Christian World
- 12 The ‘Real’ Ethiopians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plat Section
Summary
We judge of the ancients improperly when we make our own opinions and customs a standard of comparison.
—Comte de Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt, 1787, 1: 275Ethiopia fits few categories, prejudices or preconceptions. It maintains an ill-defined separateness from the rest of Africa, yet has links with Arabia and the Middle East of which it is not a part.
—David W. Phillipson, ‘Ethiopia’, 2008, 519In 1681, Hiob Ludolf (or Job Ludolphus, as his title page called him), probably the first European scholar to make a thorough study of the history and culture of the country that came to be known as Abyssinia or Ethiopia, pointed out the pitfalls of his enterprise: ‘Concerning [the Ethiopians] there have been many large, but few true relations…. Besides that the name of “Ethiopians”… is common to so many nations, that it has rendered their history very ambiguous’ (1681, 1). And to make matters worse, complained Ludolf, this protean uncertainty surrounding Ethiopia had over the centuries attracted myth-making on a large scale:
Others there are who, to waste idle hours, and designing some fabulous inventions, or to present the platform of some imaginary commonwealth, have chosen Ethiopia as the subject of their discourse, believing they could not more pleasantly romance, or more safely license themselves to fasten improbabilities upon any other country (1–2).
The following two instances attest to just how bizarrely fanciful late-Renaissance European conceptions of the whereabouts and status of Ethiopia had become. William Cuningham, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, managed to patch together in his description of Meroe (on the Sudanese Nile and, as we shall see, one of the ancient locations of ‘Ethiopia’) a rag-bag of classical, biblical, Aksumite, patristic, Arab and crusader myths:
Meroe is an island of Nilus, sometimes called Saba, and now Elsaba, where St. Matthew did preach the Gospel. From hence came the Queen of Sheba, to hear Solomon's wisdom. From hence also came Candaces, the queen's eunuch, which was baptized of Philip the Apostle. But at present it is the seat of the mighty prince that we call Preter [sic] John (1559, fol. 185).
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- The First EthiopiansThe image of Africa and Africans in the early Mediterranean world, pp. 63 - 96Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2009