Ethiopia: a Panacea for Tyrants, a Stiletto in Colonial Hands
Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
April 28, 2007
Warning: getimagesize(/articlePics/article25568.jpg) [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/html/americanchronicle.com/views/articles/print.php on line 47
In fact, colonial schemes for the wider area of Easter Africa, from Egypt to Kenya and from Libya to Yemen, Oman and Arabia have not come to surface but partly; the ferocious colonial powers, France and England, assisted by de-personified Germany, traumatized Russia, and dehumanized China, wait America’s withdrawal from Iraq in order to unleash abominable developments planned long ago that belong to a new vicious circle of their criminal and antihuman project of world control.
They will attempt to draw great political and geo-strategic benefits out of the expected severe deterioration of climatologic and socio-economic conditions, and the ensuing results will bring absolute disaster and despair to a great number of peoples who are viewed by the colonial elites as animals to sacrifice in the altar of their preponderance. The name ‘Ethiopia’ will play then at a completely different dimension; this dimension we intend to reveal here.
The Colonial Academia Dreams
In the same way we study History better if starting from Oriental Antiquity we go down through Roman and Late Antiquity, Christian Medieval and Islamic Times, to finally reach Modern Era, when dealing with colonial establishments, academia, military, merchants and diplomats, one better realizes the plans they have mounted, if searching first for the knowledge that they first got, before conceiving their plans, and prior to these plans’ execution.
To put it in a simple way, the colonial establishments are made of different people; the political class take the benefit only at the last stage. The economic elites start making profits only after the military and the diplomats prepare a possible situation for them. The military and the diplomats get their detailed field information from the academia, scholars and explorers who are far more intrepid than the colonels and the lieutenants. They collect first, they study first, the analyze first, and – consequently – compose first.
No one can understand the nature of the colonial phenomenon without a prior study of the colonial academia at its earliest stage: that of its formation. Before going for ‘in situ’ work, before composing interpretations, before elaborating falsehood and before delineating ‘what material’ goes for their national students (who may rise in the future to next generation academia and diplomacy) and ‘what material’ goes for foreign students (who will go back home to perpetuate the dependence links, without imagining what existed in their professors’ minds as regards themselves and their Oriental, Asiatic or African compatriots and co-religionists), they learn, they study the subject of their choice, Assyria, Anatolia, Phoenicia, Greece, Egypt, Persia, Ethiopia, etc.
These years of formation, before the first trip to focus area, matter a lot today, and mattered even more before 200 years when original sources had not been accessed, read: deciphered. This stage of formation of the academia that will later ‘export’ their system to their military, diplomats, merchants and political elite is very critical indeed. Imaginary perception, sentimental attachment to misperceived realities, and imaginative composition of data create an explosive amalgamation in which local realities almost do not exist at all. It is not by accident that it all started at the times of Romanticism. That current, artistic, literary and philosophical, left an unretrenchable and irreplaceable stamp on the entire World History, Its repercussions and ramifications have never been properly studied.
Romanticist perception’ sounds nice but its real face lies at the Bottom of Hell. It consists in a really inhuman juxtaposition of one’s dream about an unknown ‘other’ and the real life of the ‘other’; romanticist perception means that for the sake of one’s dream about the ‘other’, the ‘other’ will have to be culturally and nationally dispossessed and alienated.
What were the tools of the execrable ‘dreams’ of the romanticist times’ colonial academia? The first hand information they all got was Classical Greek and Latin. The French who wished to study Persia in the 1780s, the English who desired to delve into the past of Egypt in the 1810s, the Germans who decided to understand the Assyro-Babylonian past in the 1870s, the Italians who engaged themselves in learning the ‘Sabaean’ (not Yemenite!) and Abyssinian antiquities in the 1910s, the Polish who were committed to learn the secrets of the Ethiopian past in the 1940s, they all studied first Latin and Ancient Greek before embarking on learning (and eventually deciphering) Oriental Languages. In doing so, they never rejected the ‘earlier’ acquired, unreal image they had made of the subject they studied, and in the knowledge of which they had meanwhile advanced.
Their romanticist view remained integral and unadulterated; and this created a terrible shock, first to them, and second to the Asiatic and African peoples they visited in order to ‘rediscover’ the unreal images they had first got through their Greco-Roman readings.
The terrible shock was due to their romanticist reading of the Ancient Greek and Roman sources; if one reads Dio Cassius, Strabo, Flavius Josephus, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Plutarch, Arrian, Pliny, Herodotus, Xenophon, Aeschylus, and Homer and thinks that he is going to encounter – in his forthcoming travel to the Orient – situations and images he thinks he saw through the pages of the aforementioned classics, one makes a double mistake.
First, he will not meet the situations, landscapes, environments, behavioural systems, buildings and daily proceedings described by the ancient authors. These Western Europeans scholars failed to simply think that their world, late 18th and 19th century Western Europe was very different than Roman Europe. They did not understand for a single moment that in the same way as nobody could ‘see’ Julius Caesar’s Gaul in 19th century France, it would be an oxymoron to search for ancient Greek and Roman authors’ images of the ancient world in the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire, Qadjar Iran, Gondar Abyssinia.
Second, they never questioned their own understanding of the literature they read. Because you read, you do not necessarily understand, and more importantly, you do not understand correctly and accurately. Ancient Athens was not an ideal city, as more recent bibliography unveiled; the city did not have a proper sewerage system, and the streets were awfully malodorous.
Herodotus could not truly ‘know’ ancient Egypt, despite his descriptions, because he was treated as a foreigner and could not possibly be initiated into the Isis mysteries as an Egyptian. If he had been, he would have kept everything sealed, due to the oath he would have given.
Delacroix’s readings did not help him, while painting the Death of Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus, as he was able to call the Assyrian Emperor through his posterior Greek name alteration), but up to the point of finalizing an image that could have possibly taken place in an Ottoman palace, harim or castle, but certainly his painting has no place in Assyria – in the real Assyrian Antiquity that he did not know through his irrelevant, historically indirect and posterior, sources.
Before Delacroix, the way for misconception errors had been opened by the Classicists; Nicolas Poussin painted a great number of Ancient Greek mythological scenes in landscapes that were never Greek, as authentically French and Northern European! The ‘northern sky’ of Nicolas Poussin never covered Greece!
The two lethal errors were never dealt with, and they were perpetuated, because of a dreadful lack of self-criticism, self-questioning and self-reserve. Even worse, they helped produce a third error far worse than the first two as it hinges on others. If you want to misperceive something, it is your right, and as long as you keep the misperception for yourself, the ‘other’ is not disturbed. If you want to impose your misreading and misconception on others, and more particularly on the people who live in the area you have shown an interest in, then you turn to an invader, a racist, a dictator – first at the cultural and educational levels, then you will bring your military and diplomats to extend the tyranny to socio-economic, political and military levels.
Ancient Ethiopia: A Wonderful Past transfigured to Colonial Nightmare
What were the images the Orientalists got through their Classical readings about Ancient Ethiopia? This would need a Ph. D. dissertation to analyze, but certainly here we can present the basic axes. Before that, we re-publish here a modern English translation of Herodotus’ excerpts from his third book (entitled Thalia) written around 440 BCE (translation by George Rawlinson: http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.3.iii.html). It refers to the Table of the Sun, which is an important topos of the Ancient Greek literature about Ethiopia, a point of great imaginative attraction and endeavour. For the average readership’s easier understanding, we note that Cambyses (Kamboudjiya) was the Persian Achaemenidian Emperor who at the end of the 6th century BCE (around 525) invaded Egypt and attempted to extend his control until Ethiopia (Sudan). Icthyophagi (lit. Fish Easters) are most probably to be identified with the Blemmyes / Bejas or a related, Kushitic, tribe dwelling in Egypt’s and Sudan’s Eastern desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea coast. Elephantine is a Nile river island at Aswan (southern or Upper Egypt).
After this Cambyses took counsel with himself, and planned three expeditions. One was against the Carthaginians, another against the Ammonians, and a third against the long-lived Ethiopians, who dwelt in that part of Libya which borders upon the southern sea. He judged it best to dispatch his fleet against Carthage and to send some portion of his land army to act against the Ammonians, while his spies went into Ethiopia, under the pretence of carrying presents to the king, but in reality to take note of all they saw, and especially to observe whether there was really what is called "the table of the Sun" in Ethiopia.
Now the table of the Sun according to the accounts given of it may be thus described:- It is a meadow in the skirts of their city full of the boiled flesh of all manner of beasts, which the magistrates are careful to store with meat every night, and where whoever likes may come and eat during the day. The people of the land say that the earth itself brings forth the food. Such is the description which is given of this table.
When Cambyses had made up his mind that the spies should go, he forthwith sent to Elephantine for certain of the Icthyophagi who were acquainted with the Ethiopian tongue; and, while they were being fetched, issued orders to his fleet to sail against Carthage. But the Phoenicians said they would not go, since they were bound to the Carthaginians by solemn oaths, and since besides it would be wicked in them to make war on their own children. Now when the Phoenicians refused, the rest of the fleet was unequal to the undertaking; and so it was that the Carthaginians escaped, and were not enslaved by the Persians. Cambyses thought it not right to force the war upon the Phoenicians, because they had yielded themselves to the Persians, and because upon the Phoenicians all his sea-service depended. The Cyprians had also joined the Persians of their own accord, and took part with them in the expedition against Egypt.
As soon as the Icthyophagi arrived from Elephantine, Cambyses, having told them what they were to say, forthwith dispatched them into Ethiopia with these following gifts: to wit, a purple robe, a gold chain for the neck, armlets, an alabaster box of myrrh, and a cask of palm wine. The Ethiopians to whom this embassy was sent are said to be the tallest and handsomest men in the whole world. In their customs they differ greatly from the rest of mankind, and particularly in the way they choose their kings; for they find out the man who is the tallest of all the citizens, and of strength equal to his height, and appoint him to rule over them.
The Icthyophagi on reaching this people, delivered the gifts to the king of the country, and spoke as follows:- "Cambyses, king of the Persians, anxious to become thy ally and sworn friend, has sent us to hold converse with thee, and to bear thee the gifts thou seest, which are the things wherein he himself delights the most." Hereon the Ethiopian, who knew they came as spies, made answer:- "The king of the Persians sent you not with these gifts because he much desired to become my sworn friend- nor is the account which ye give of yourselves true, for ye are come to search out my kingdom. Also your king is not a just man- for were he so, he had not coveted a land which is not his own, nor brought slavery on a people who never did him any wrong. Bear him this bow, and say- 'The king of the Ethiops thus advises the king of the Persians when the Persians can pull a bow of this strength thus easily, then let him come with an army of superior strength against the long-lived Ethiopians- till then, let him thank the gods that they have not put it into the heart of the sons of the Ethiops to covet countries which do not belong to them.'
So speaking, he unstrung the bow, and gave it into the hands of the messengers. Then, taking the purple robe, he asked them what it was, and how it had been made. They answered truly, telling him concerning the purple, and the art of the dyer- whereat he observed "that the men were deceitful, and their garments also." Next he took the neck-chain and the armlets, and asked about them. So the Icthyophagi explained their use as ornaments. Then the king laughed, and fancying they were fetters, said, "the Ethiopians had much stronger ones." Thirdly, he inquired about the myrrh, and when they told him how it was made and rubbed upon the limbs, he said the same as he had said about the robe. Last of all he came to the wine, and having learnt their way of making it, he drank a draught, which greatly delighted him; whereupon he asked what the Persian king was wont to eat, and to what age the longest-lived of the Persians had been known to attain. They told him that the king ate bread, and described the nature of wheat- adding that eighty years was the longest term of man's life among the Persians. Hereat he remarked, "It did not surprise him, if they fed on dirt, that they died so soon; indeed he was sure they never would have lived so long as eighty years, except for the refreshment they got from that drink (meaning the wine), wherein he confessed the Persians surpassed the Ethiopians."
The Icthyophagi then in their turn questioned the king concerning the term of life, and diet of his people, and were told that most of them lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, while some even went beyond that age- they ate boiled flesh, and had for their drink nothing but milk. When the Icthyophagi showed wonder at the number of the years, he led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil- and a scent came from the spring like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived. When they quitted the fountain the king led them to a prison, where the prisoners were all of them bound with fetters of gold. Among these Ethiopians copper is of all metals the most scarce and valuable. After they had seen the prison, they were likewise shown what is called "the table of the Sun."
Also, last of all, they were allowed to behold the coffins of the Ethiopians, which are made (according to report) of crystal, after the following fashion:- When the dead body has been dried, either in the Egyptian, or in some other manner, they cover the whole with gypsum, and adorn it with painting until it is as like the living man as possible. Then they place the body in a crystal pillar which has been hollowed out to receive it, crystal being dug up in great abundance in their country, and of a kind very easy to work. You may see the corpse through the pillar within which it lies; and it neither gives out any unpleasant odour, nor is it in any respect unseemly; yet there is no part that is not as plainly visible as if the body were bare. The next of kin keep the crystal pillar in their houses for a full year from the time of the death, and give it the first fruits continually, and honour it with sacrifice. After the year is out they bear the pillar forth, and set it up near the town”.
Herodotus’s excerpts presents Ancient Ethiopians in an admirable and lovely way, but this is due to the politics Herodotus was involved in! Writing almost 85 years after the events he narrated, siding with the anti-Macedonian, anti-Persian alliance made up by Athens, Sparta, and some Egyptians, Herodotus wished to depict the Ethiopian friends of his Egyptian allies in the best possible way! Excerpts like this, if interpreted out of their historical context, can lead to severe misunderstandings. The Table of the Sun was a table of offerings, and we have excavated many of them in Northern Sudan. In a way, the same practice survived Christianity and Islam, and anyone visiting Sudan today (or in the 19th century) can see Sudanese in Ramadhan opening the gates of their houses, and placing on tables various assortments of foods and fruits for any passenger to pick up and eat. Myopic Western Christian Orientalists could never bother to search for historicity in the modern behavioural system of the Sudanese. They did not find the exotic image they created out of the above Herodotus’ excerpt, and they felt alien in that country when they went to visit monuments and explore antiquities.
Driven by their dreams, the Orientalists kept the unreal picture of Ethiopia they had made in their dark libraries unchanged. The modern Sudanese, as they did not reflect anything from the aforementioned passage, were a useless element for the Western colonial academia. They kept them far from their researches and endeavours, and as they were Muslim, they kept them far from their dreams, As these dreams were not based only on Herodotus but on Late Antiquity and Middle Ages literature about Christened Ethiopia, the dream of a Christian country at the southern confines of Mediterranean Egypt would not come true unless they devised a certain plan to ‘save’ Ethiopia from its own population that was supposedly lost in Islam.
In the same way Western colonial powers viewed the secession of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire as the beginning of the end of the main political rival to Europe, they envisage the re-christianization of Sudan as the beginning of the end of Islam.
In the same way no one can find French and British literature about their anti-Ottoman, late 18th, 19th, and early 20th century plans, one cannot identify a single document stipulating the Western Dream of Christian Sudan. However, we do not need to find a text to solidly identify policies. Through various attempts, different policies and parallels developments, the Colonial Academia offers a convincing documentation fro any political analyst, who would try to retrace hidden intentions and secret dreams. Of course, these dreams are not secret for Western students of Orientalist seminars, simply they are covered by silence when African and Oriental students are present. They would immediately understand that the colonial academia dreams are pending nightmares for the indigenous populations of many countries stretching from the Nile’s estuary to the Horn of Africa.
Axes of historical sources about Ethiopia used by Orientalist colonial academia
The Colonial Academia dream of ‘Ethiopia’ was made after readings evolving around the following axes:
1. Herodotus’ narrations about a superb, exotic and most attractive country at the southern confines of Upper Egypt. The alliance between some anti-Persian Ancient Greeks, some Egyptians, and Sudan’s Kushitic Ethiopians against the Achaemenidian Persian Emperor Cambyses was a wonderful dream for the colonial academia that wished to reproduce it in the 19th century – as a farce – mounting a scheme against the Sultan, and getting many rulers involved: Greeks premiers, Egyptian Khedives, and Menelik of Abyssinia. In the same insane way Herodotus attempted to depict Cambyses as hyperbolic, out of proportion, and demented, 19th century French and British newspapers depicted the Sultan as paranoid, ludicrously believing that they were at the same wavelength with Herodotus.
2. Te corpus of Ptolemaic Egypt’s historical records testifying to mostly good neighborhood and alliance of the Ptolemaic rulers of Alexandria with their counterparts of Ethiopian Meroe.
3. The references of Manetho to the Ethiopian dynasty of Egypt. The Ptolemaic historiographer wrote in Greek and his enumeration of Egypt’s 30 dynasties was always an attractive reading for Europeans. The Ethiopian dynasty consists in a series of Kushites rulers of Ancient Sudan, who at an earlier stage than the Kings of Meroe, ruled from Napata (today’s Karima, 750 km in the south of the Egyptian – Sudanese border), and with the help of the Theban clergy of Ammon, extended their authority far in the North, merging today’s Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt, only to be expelled by Assarhaddon and Assurbanipal, the Assyrian invaders of Egypt (671, 669 and 666 BCE). For a brief period of a year, Taharqa had merged all the area between today’s Khartoum and the Nile Delta.
4. The references of Manetho to the Libyan dynasty of Egypt, which was put in place by the Assyrians first as tributary administrators of Egypt as province of Assyria, and later became independent. The alliance made between Psammetichus I and some Greek states, the need for and cooperation with the Greek and Carian mercenaries at Naucratis, the expedition to Napata (capital of the Ethiopian dynasty that had ruled Egypt) by Psammetichus II, whereby Carian and Greek mercenaries participated, all this historical stuff excited the romanticist imagination of the Orientalist colonial academia that viewed themselves in the 19th century as historical ‘replay’ of the Greek mercenaries, mythically and fallaciously identifying Psammetichus I and Psammetichus II with Mehmet Ali, the apostate Albanian soldier of the Sultan whom Napoleon initiated to French Freemasonry and appointed as local ruler – Khedive of secessionist Egypt – nominally subservient to the Sultan but essentially enslaved to Colonial Freemasons.
5. Historical sources of the Roman Times, involving Strabo and his narration of the Roman explorations of the Nile river sources whereby he had personally participated, Plutarch, Pausanias, Flavius Josephus, and Pliny to mention the most extensive ones. To this should be added epigraphic sources in Greek and Latin, bearing evidence to the good Roman – Ethiopian relations, which have been corroborated through common architectural works (Talmis / Kalabsha temple) and joint control of border areas (Dodekaschoenus).
6. Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Times Greek and Roman literature. Heliodorus Aithiopika recreates a fabulous, idyllic atmosphere that fascinated wide readerships. The extensive commerce between Rome and India had contributed to some geographical confusions; the entire area in the south of Thebes of Egypt (Luqsor) until India was at times called either Ethiopia or India. This hyperbolic use of the two terms involved lands like today’s Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Abyssinia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, Arabia, and Oman! Cosmas Indicopleustes (‘navigator to India” as his name means) in his ‘Christian Topography’ referred extensively to Adulis (near today’s Massawa in Eritrea) and other parts of this huge, real by hyperbolic ‘India’ or ‘Ethiopia’.
7. Last but not least, the relatively scarce mentions of the Old Testament and the New Testament to Kush and Ethiopia. For the Ancient Hebrew authors of the Biblical texts, and for the Septuaginta (72 Jewish Elders who traveled to Alexandria invited by Ptolemy II) who translated the Hebrew text to Greek, the Hebrew term Kush had to be translated to Aithiopia in Greek, and this meant exclusively the area of today’s northern Sudan. The Ethiopian prince who traveled to Palestine and believed in the stories of Jesus’ disciples was a corroboration for these Colonial scholars of the fact that was prophesied in the Old Testament that ‘Ethiopia will stretch out her hand to the Lord”. As they were Christian, they thought that the ‘Lord’ was Jesus. For the 19th century Colonial academia, it was ‘awkward’ how Sudan was not Christian! Then, they thought how not only Sudan but the entire hyperbolic Ethiopia would become Christian and Western ‘again’!!!! When they later excavated monuments bearing evidence to Christian Ethiopia, and the formation of the three Christian Sudanese states, Nobatia, Makkuria and Alodia, they could not accept the reality; they could not take it in! Narrations about Frumentius’ trip to Adulis and Axum, Abyssinia’s Christianization, and Ezana’s attack and destruction of Meroe enriched the Colonial Orientalists’ minds about ways Eastern Africa would become a huge Christian state from Alexandria to the Horn region, and all this under one name: Ethiopia.
The colonial plan implementation will be the subject of a forthcoming article.
The picture represents a (saved during the Nubia Salvation UNESCO project) wall painting from (Christian Sudanese state) Nobatia’s cathedral at Faras (near today’s border between Sudan and Egypt); the subject reflects the Biblical narrations about Three Young Men in the Furnace.