A major African encounter that preoccupied Dynastic Egypt over some two-and-a-half millennia was that with the successive civilisations of Nubia, from Kerma on the Third Cataract to Meroë between the Fifth and Sixth. Chapter 8 considers the identity, image, cultural status and legacy of these ‘First Ethiopians’ in the Egyptian and then the early classical symbolic world. Here I argue that by the late pre-Christian centuries, the ruling elites of both Egypt and Meroitic Nubia had adopted a highly discriminatory repertoire of images of ‘other Ethiopians’ (non-Egyptian and non-Nubian Africans, in other words) that would result in stereotypically derogatory depictions of Africans in the Mediterranean world.
Chapters 9 and 10 examine the evidence for such claims in Greek, Ptolemaic and Roman literature and art, from Herodotus to Heliodorus, developing Homer’s conceit that there were two kinds of ‘Ethiopian’, an eastern and a western. Chapter 11 pursues these investigations into the early Christian era, exploring how the contestational development of the early church along the northern littoral of the Sahara from Alexandria to Carthage generated, both doctrinally and socio-politically, a Mediterranean Christian conception of sublittoral Africa as primarily savage and diabolical.
Yet throughout these later centuries there survived some conception of a ‘worthy’ or near-paradisal Ethiopia somewhere deep in Africa and near the headwaters of the Nile, identified variously with Meroitic Nubia, and later, with Christian Aksum in what would become Abyssinia. Strong rumours and some contact maintained the requisite power and enigmatic symbolism to challenge repeatedly the growing derogatory image of Africa and Africans that a Mediterranean-orientated discourse increasingly encouraged. Chapter 12 briefly reviews the early history, and the iconic status in Mediterranean minds, of Aksumite or Abyssinian Ethiopa. Throughout these chapters, I try to show that images of Africa and Africans have not always been cultural absolutes, prejudices without foundation, but were dialectically established, negotiated and interrogated along lines suggested by the trope of ‘two Ethiopias’: ‘worthy’ and ‘noble’ or ‘other’ and ‘savage’, with many surprises in between.
1
ETHIOPIA, EGYPT AND THE MATTER OF AFRICA
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: 275
Ethiopia 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, 519
In 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 Meroë (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:
Meroë 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).
Every statement here is not merely mythic but, even as myth, thoroughly garbled. Yet Pierre d’Avity, writing half a century later, managed to assemble a riot of fantastic claims about Ethiopia that made Cuningham’s look tame:
In our time, [Prester John of Ethiopia] took the king of Mozambique in battle. He put to rout the Queen of Bersaga at the Cape of Good Hope; defeated Termides, prince of the Negroes, towards the West; and vanquished the king of Manicongo, which is right against the Island of St. Thomas, under the Equinoctial line; and afterwards one of his captains put Azamur, Basha to the Great Turk at Suaquem, thrice to rout (1615, 1086).
This Prester John is a veritable Tamburlain. Even if one accepts that as late as the seventeenth century, the whereabouts and nature of many parts of the world were for Western observers still dim and speculative, these extracts suggest that Ethiopia (or the concept ‘Ethiopia’) was at the time not only startlingly mythotropic, but had been so for a very long time. It would seem that in the notion of ‘Ethiopia’ we have to deal with a place or a space that for complex geo-historical reasons had, over many centuries, acquired rich and densely emblematic associations in European (or, initially, Mediterranean) worldviews – associations that were only very loosely connected with the actual sites or realities of the various cultures known as ‘Ethiopian’ in ancient and early modern history. My first chapters will attempt to give to some of these earliest iconic ‘Ethiopias’ a local habitation and a name.
Some confusions about the ancient identity of ‘Ethiopia’ are readily clarified; others are more elusive and will be constantly returned to in this study. In the broadest classical sense, ‘Ethiopia’ was simply a term for all of sub-Egyptian and sub-northern-littoral Africa. Greek authors from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus increasingly confined the term to Meroitic Nubia, but would also speak vaguely of ‘other Ethiopians’ from elsewhere in Africa. By late-classical and early-Christian times, the term ‘Ethiopia’ had become more specifically attached to Aksumite and then Abyssinian Ethiopia. But mythographically, ‘Ethiopia’ alternately expanded and shrank amoeba-like in the Mediterranean and European imagination, from the time of Herodotus up to the seventeenth century, construed as anything from a small and mysterious polity at the undiscovered headwaters of the Nile to a vast landmass including almost all of sub-Saharan eastern and central Africa.
The tendency to elide distinctions among different ‘Ethiopian’ cultures of ancient north-eastern Africa that would eventually be known as Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia and/ or Abyssinia has lasted till relatively recently. Thus Wallis Budge’s seminal work of 1928, A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia, while explicitly setting out to unpick the confusions surrounding the identity of ‘Ethiopia’, promptly resurrects all the ancient elisions by treating the history of Kushite Nubia on the Upper Nile and that of Aksumite and Solomonic Abyssinia as a seamless narrative. On the other hand, Budge rightly recognised another ambivalence about the ancient identity of ‘Ethiopia’ that lies at the heart of the present study; namely that where the ‘Ethiopians’ of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny