Steven Kaplan, *The Ethiopians: Lost Civilizations*. London: Reaktion Books, 2025.

Ethiopia has captivated observers since ancient times. This book provides a novel perspective on Ethiopian history up to the year 1500, beginning with the Aksumite civilization at the dawn of the Common Era. It revisits well-known stories such as the narrative of the Queen of Sheba, scrutinizes the ascent and decline of Aksum, investigates the role of Muslims and Islam in Ethiopian society, and underscores the architectural wonders of Lalibela’s rock-hewn churches. By concentrating on the Golden Age of the early Solomonic rulers, the book integrates the latest research to deliver a clearer and more nuanced understanding of this rich history than ever before.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello, welcome to the Dialogues and International History Podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat. Today it's my honor to engage in a dialogue with Stephen Kaplan. We will discuss his newly published book, The Ethiopians, Lost Civilization, published in London by Reaction Books 2025. Stephen Kaplan is Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. For over 35 years, he taught African studies and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Ethiopia, History, Culture, and Challenges. Ethiopia has fascinated observers since ancient times. This book offers a new perspective on Ethiopian history up to the year 1500, starting with the Aksumite civilization at the beginning of the common era. It revisits well-known narratives such as the tale of the Queen of Sheba, analyzes the rise and decline of Aksum, investigates the uh influence of Muslims and Islam in Ethiopian society, emphasizes the architectural marvels of Alibella's Rocking churches. By concentrating on the golden age of the early Solomonic rulers, the book integrates related scholarship to prove a clearer and more nuanced understanding of this rich history than ever before. Stephen, it's an honor to be in dialogue with you today.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

Oh, thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourself? How did you become interested in this field of study? What is your personal relationship to the broader field of Ethiopian history, Ethiopian studies? How did you become interested in this field of study in the first place?

SPEAKER_03 2:16

Sure. Um I became interested in Ethiopia really by accident. I I did my BA at Brandeis University. And I realized fairly early on that while I was doing work in Jewish studies, what really interested me was what could be called history of religions or comparative religion. And when I would tell people this, they would say, that's fine, but you have to choose a particular area. You can't just do everything. And during my senior year of college, I went with a friend to visit some childhood friends of my family. And they had been in Ethiopia for three months on a program which was, I almost say, was like a Peace Corps for senior people to help Ethiopians start businesses, where you would go to Ethiopia and you would advise Ethiopians who were starting small businesses. And they started taking out, you know, their slides and their the things they had brought back with them. And I thought, what a fascinating place. It's got so many different things interacting. And I went back and I started talking to people, and I said, well, what if what if I did Ethiopia? And they said, well, sure, that's that's possible. I was in the Boston area. Um at Harvard, they had somebody who taught Gez, ancient Ethiopic, the historical language of the Christians and Jews of Ethiopia. Um, go ahead. And so uh I got into it, as I say, largely by largely by accident. Um, and then uh I you know I realized how interesting it was. I went to Israel to do my doctorate. And just, you know, and and people would laugh because I did my doctorate on the role of monks in medieval Ethiopian society. And people would laugh that it was the most obscure topic that anyone had. And just about the time that I was finishing up my doctorate, they started bringing Ethiopian Jews into the country. And suddenly I was one of the people who could find Ethiopia on a map of the world. And even though I was a historian and not an anthropologist or sociologist, people became even more interested. And so since then, and that's you know, now what, over 40 years, I've sort of gone back and forth. I would say I do the religious and social history of Ethiopia and the experiences of Ethiopians who have migrated outside the country.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Can you say something about the Kebra Negast and its significance in Ethiopian history?

SPEAKER_03 5:43

The Kebra Nagast is the Ethiopian version of the story of Solomon and Sheba. In the Bible, in two different versions, it says that the Queen of Sheba came to visit King Solomon. We don't know who the Queen of Sheba was. We don't know where Sheba was. The story is very, very brief. As usually happens when you have a brief story in the Bible, you have lots of legends. And there are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim legends. There's so much that's been done about this meeting between Solomon and Sheba. There are operas about it. Rudy Kipling Lura's story about it. Um there are movies about it. And everyone recreates the Queen of Sheba in their own image. So in the 1950s, the Queen of Sheba was Gina Lola Brigida, who only the oldest of the oldest of your listeners will know who she was, but she was an Italian actress, to more recent actresses like um Haley Berry, and most recently a Ugandan actress. So she's gone from being depicted as a Southern European to being depicted as a sub-Saharan African. The Ethiopian version says that Queen of Sheba traveled to Aksum to meet King Solomon and to study his kingdom. And when she was getting ready to leave, he wanted um to sleep with her. And she said that it was important that the ruler of her country be a virgin. And he said, Okay, I won't take you by force, but you can take nothing of mine. And then he fed her very spicy food and hid all the water in the palace. We can just imagine the Me Too, you know, uh, what's his name? Uh, you know, um Roan Ronan Pharaoh version of this, and King Solomon has the you know, sexual, you know, harasser. The Queen of Sheba wakes up thirsty, grabs the water. King Solomon says, You said you wouldn't take anything of mine. She says, This is just water. And he says, There's nothing more important in my country than water. Um he sleeps with her, he gives her his ring, and he says, if a child is born, I will recognize him by the ring. The child is born, he's called Ibn Hakim or Anmenelik. Ibn Hakim means the son of the wise man. As children do, he asks where he came from, and the queen of Sheba tells him about Solomon. He travels with an entourage to Jerusalem to meet his father. He meets his father, and his father wants him to stay in Jerusalem, but Menelik says he has promised to return to Ethiopia to Aksum. And so King Solomon assigned him, the firstborn sons of the nobles and priests of Jerusalem to accompany him. The firstborn sons of the priests steal the Ark of the Covenant from the temple and take it with them. Solomon has a dream in which he sees the sun rising over Jerusalem and then going to the south. And when he asks for an interpretation of his dream, he's told that this that the ark has been stolen. The priests go to the temple, they see the ark has been stolen, but of course they don't tell anybody. The ark is brought by Menelik and his retinue to Aksum. And thus the people of Aksum become the new, literally the true Israelites, the new Israelites, and Aksum becomes Sion, Zion, the new Jerusalem. And the Ethiopians believe to this day that the Ark of the Covenant is, the original Ark of the Covenant is in Aksum. Stephen Spielberg got it wrong. Okay. Well, that story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, of course, as we've discussed, is also makes the Ethiopian people Israelites and makes the Ethiopian rulers descendants of Solomon and Sheba, the Solomonic dynasty. All of this is well and good. But the argument of scholars was until recently: was the Kebra Nagas written in the sixth century, 1500 years after King Solomon lived, or was it written in the 13th century, 2300 years after Solomon lived? So it's an incredibly important document for understanding Ethiopian culture, understanding the political theory and ideology of the ruling Christians for centuries. But it's a very good example of what I try to do in the book, in that we also have to understand that it might be that this document, which tells a story about events from 3,000 years ago, and it is from the Ethiopian point of view crucial to their history over a 3,000-year period, was only written down in its present form 700 years ago. Now, only written down 700 years ago is nothing to sneeze at. But of course, it makes it a very different challenge of interpretation if you accept that view. It's not a very good translation, but fortunately, uh Wendy Belcher of Princeton University and Michael Kleiner, a German scholar, are preparing a new English translation, which I hope will be finished in the coming years.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Can you comment on the text Mota Aaron, the death of Aaron? Der Sana Senbat, the homily on the Sabbath, and Der Sana Ibrahim Waserah Begats. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Abraham and Sarah and Egypt. Yes. All three of those are okay. I talked about the we talked about the translation from Arabic into Gez. We talked about Abuna Salama and how important the second and how important he was. And we probably talked about how the translation into Gez was not necessarily the end of the project. That these texts like the Sencasar or the Miracles of Mary could continue to expand. I think someone uses were perpetually renewed. Well, it also wasn't the end of the process, in that it wasn't the end of the process that these texts came to the church. The three works that you just mentioned, the death of Aaron, what was the second one?

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Homily on the Sabbath.

SPEAKER_03 14:38

Oh, um, yes, the homily on the Sabbath and the homily of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt also reached the Bet Israel, what were called in the past, the Philasha, the Ethiopian Jews. And we have edited versions of these texts which form part of the literature of Ethiopian Jews. So you have this process where text may it, a text may have originally been a Jewish text, written in in Greek or even in Hebrew. And maybe it was, and for example, let's take the homily of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt. Because I actually, coincidentally, I'm actually working on that right now. The homily of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt was originally written in Syriac, in the Christian language of the Christians in Syria. Okay, it was translated from Syriac into Arabic. Now there's a tradition that says it was translated by Abuna Salama II. Again, maybe under his auspices, maybe by him, but it was translated from Syriac into Arabic. And we have at least five manuscripts of that work in the possession of the Beit Israel Ethiopian Jews. So not only are these works important for understanding the process of literary transmission within Ethiopia, not only are they important for the understanding of the interface between Arabic literature and Gez literature, but they're also crucial to the understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in Ethiopia. And those three books that you mentioned, and I could mention, you know, there's the there's the testament of Abraham, the testament of Isaac, the testament of Jacob, you know, those are three separate uh books. Um and and, you know, so so there's they're just you know crucial for for three different areas of study.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Can you elaborate on the relationship between Ethiopian Christianity and Coptic Christianity? Can you comment on the historical vicissitudes of this relationship?

SPEAKER_03 17:25

Well, okay. From the time that Christianity came to Ethiopia, the head of the Ethiopian church was um a Coptic monk appointed by the patriarch in Egypt. This has to do with something called apostolic secession. In the Catholic Church and in the ancient Eastern churches, um clergy are legitimate only if they can trace their consecration back to the disciples of Jesus in an unbroken line. Unlike the situation with Protestant churches, you can't suddenly establish a church and say that somebody is a priest or a minister or you know, or a reverend. So obviously the Ethiopians had to be able to say that their clergy were valid clergy. And the reason they were able to say this is because they had this link with the Coptic Church. But of course, historically, you start out with a situation where you have a church in Egypt. And remember, in the early centuries, it's not the Coptic Church, it's simply the church, the universal church in Egypt. But when Egypt comes under Muslim conquest, you have a situation in which the Coptic Church is a minority church in a predominantly Muslim country. And the Ethiopian church, miles away, has Muslims in a predominantly Christian country. And if the Ethiopian church wants to get a head of the church, when the existing head of the church dies, they have to write to Egypt, not to the head of the Coptic Church, but to the ruler of Egypt, asking him to give permission for the head of the Coptic Church to appoint somebody to come to Ethiopia. And obviously, all of that takes an enormous amount of time and is a perilous journey. And so you end up with situations in Ethiopia where the head of the church dies, and it's years, maybe even decades, before a new head is appointed. And one of the problems is that if the church is headless in this way, new clergy can't be consecrated. So the clergy begin to die out, and it's impossible to perform the sacraments. So what the Ethiopians do is when they have a patriarch, uh metropolitan, they have them do massive consecrations, sometimes of people who are minimally qualified, so that they have, in the sense, a what's the word, a backup storage, you know, uh reserve. That's, you know, I'm thinking everyone talks about the oil reserves that different countries have. They have clergy reserves, young clergy who are comparatively uneducated, who are there, so that if there's a long period where clergy can't be consecrated, they the Egypt the Ethiopians will still have clergy. So you've got this, in a sense, a domino effect. Because the Ethiopians are dependent on the Egyptians, it affects the quality of the clergy in Ethiopia. The second aspect of this is that because the head of the church is appointed from Egypt, he comes to Ethiopia, he is a stranger, he doesn't know the language, and he is dependent on the on the emperor for his protection and resources. So the so while the the the uh metropolitan um the metropolitan is the de jure head of the church the emperor is the de facto head of the church. You know, uh and if he's if he's not satisfied, the emperor can largely ignore or or or or or or send the the metropolitan into exile. The third problem is, and I mentioned this before, not only are these not people of the highest quality, but the practice that they have in Egypt is not the same as the practice in Ethiopia. So the Metropolitan who comes from Egypt doesn't want to observe Saturday as a holy day, and the Ethiopian clergy, who have always observed Saturday as a holy day, don't want to accept his rule, and so you almost end up with a schism in the Ethiopian church over the issue of whether to observe the Sabbath, Saturday as a Sabbath. And I would joke when I would teach about this stuff in Israel. I mean, he said, oh, they would say only Israelis can appreciate the idea that a major institution in the country could be split in two over the observance of the Saturday Sabbath. Because the only countries that that could happen in are modern Israel and medieval Ethiopia with its biblical Christianity. So all of those are side effects of this dependence on the Coptic Church. What happens in the 20th century under the Emperor Haile Selassie is he finally achieves what he wants, which is that first he gets it, that an Ethiopian is appointed head of the of the Ethiopian church, and then that Ethiopian head of the church appoints enough bishops so that Ethiopians can choose their own head of the church. And so the historical tie with the Coptic Church is broken. The irony of it is that after that there's a Marxist revolution followed by a counter-revolution, and what we now understand is the metropolitan who was appointed outside Ethiopia had a lot more independence than a metropolitan who lived than a than a patriarch who lives in Ethiopia, who is subject completely to the Ethiopian government.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Can you say something about Abuna Salama the First and Abuna Salama the Second? Okay.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Um Abuna Salama the the the first. Um Abuna Salama means literally our father of peace. He is also known by the name Frumentius, and this is connected to how Christianity comes to Ethiopia, or at least how tradition says it comes to Ethiopia. Two Syrian brothers are shipwrecked in Ethiopia. They come to the court of the king, they're Christians, they begin to convert people to Christianity, and at a certain point they're able to return home. But one of them doesn't return home. He goes instead to Egypt, to the Egyptian church, where the patriarch of the Egyptian church is the very famous figure of Athanasius, who was one of the great theologians of the early Egyptian church. And he says to Athanasius, there are Christians in Ethiopia, but there's no church. There are no clergy, there's no hierarchy, there's no one who can administer the sacraments. And Athanasius says, you know, sort of, again, I'm paraphrasing the story. I know just the right person to be the first leader of the Ethiopian church. And he consecrates Fermentius as the leader of the church, and he's known as Abuna Salama. And he goes back to Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian king converts to Christianity, and Ethiopia in that way becomes an official solidified church. And as the Abuna, as the as the metropolitan, as the bishop of the church, he can then consecrate clergy and perform sacraments and those things. So the first Abuna Salama is in the fourth century, and he's crucial to the foundation of the Ethiopian church. The second Abuna Salama lived in the 14th century. And he is an Egyptian monk who is sent to Ethiopia to be the Metropolitan as part of this arrangement in which the head of the Ethiopian church is a Coptic monk. Unlike many of the people who come, you know, sending sending a Coptic monk to Ethiopia was a good way for the Coptic patriarch in Egypt to get rid of him. You know. You know, sort of thing, you know, you know, promoted out of power in a sense, you know, promoted away. Abuna Salama II was, among other things, tremendously skilled when it came to languages. And he's the person under whose auspices a massive project of translating documents, sacred texts, uh, not historical documents, from Arabic to Gez was undertaken. There may have been texts translated earlier in the 13th century, in the beginning of the 14th century, but really this takes off under his auspices in the 14th century. And you have hundreds of documents which are translated from Arabic to Guess. It's difficult to think of any church. Think about this. This is more than a thousand years after the foundation of Ethiopian Christianity, and yet thousands of new texts are coming into the church through this translation. I'm not aware of any other church in the world in which that late in its existence it suddenly introduces so many new holy texts. And so the second Abunna Salama is to distinguish him from the first, besides that, he's Abunna Salama the second, but he's also he's always called as Abuna Salama the translator. The first is Abuna Salama who brought the light or who revealed the light, brought Christianity. The second is Abuna Salama the translator, who officiated over this massive translation of documents, of holy texts. Like that. Okay, yes. Lalibella is a site in Ethiopia. I would encourage anybody to Google it, and if you can, to certainly go there. The tradition is that it was built by the Zagwa dynasty, and it is named for their most important king who was named Lalibella. It's had other names over the course of history. And what marks the city is that it has a series of rock-hewn churches. Churches, some of which are literally carved out of the rock. Some of them are monolithic. In other words, it's one piece of rock carved out. Some of them, that's not the way it was done. And it's, you know, visually, it's a magnificent thing. But there's another element here which is also very much part of our story and part of this, you know, the story that I try and tell in the book. Although the tradition is that these churches were built during the reign of one king named Lalibella, who was assisted in building it by angels who carved the churches. Most scholars agree that these churches were built over an extended period. Moreover, it's generally agreed that not all of them were built as churches originally. They don't have the architecture necessary to conduct services in them. But what happens visually when a person comes and sees them, and even more so in modern times, where you can do like an aerial photograph of them, you see them as a single unit at one time, and so you interpret them as a single unit at one time. And so it becomes the city of Lalibella, in which these churches were built to be a new Jerusalem in the Ethiopian highlands, rather than a complex story about buildings being built over different times and being repurposed and reinterpreted over the course of that time. So it's a very good illustration, in this case, in a visual way, of the way of the fact that you can have a tradition that tells one story and you can have scholarship, in this case archaeology, which tells a slightly different story.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Can you comment on the evolution of modern historiography on Ethiopia?

SPEAKER_03 33:44

Sure. Um Okay, the the first, you know, obviously, you know, people in Ethiopia were writing their history. You know, again, Ethiopia is unusual in Africa in that it has had since the beginning of the Common Era a written language. And so while we don't always have sources, certainly from around the 14th or 15th century on, Ethiopians were writing their own history in this language called Old Ethiopic or Gez, which is a Semitic language. And so you had those sort of sources. But it's really around the 17th century that for the first time you have Europeans. Joe Budolf, who was a scholar in Hamburg, Germany, is usually viewed as the founder of Ethiopian studies in Europe. And you really see in the, you know, explorers go to Ethiopia when Afri when, you know, in the in the period where people are quote unquote discovering Africa. People travel to Ethiopia, like James Bruce travels to Ethiopia in the 18th century to discover the sources of the Nile. And in the 19th century, we begin to see, especially the latter part of the 19th century, serious archaeological work being done in Ethiopia. What has to be kept in mind is when this historian, when this work begins in the late 19th century, not only does it have a very European bias to it, which is obvious, but Ethiopia was, for centuries, a monarchy. And so when explorers or researchers would come, one way or another, they would have to get approval of officials, and in some cases of the emperor himself. And so from the beginning, the study was focused on the Ethiopian state, and because Ethiopia was predominantly a Christian country, and certainly the state was a Christian state, on churches and monasteries, and they sort of went hand in hand, church and state, monarchy and and uh and clergy. Um you had, you know, doing work. Of course, there's the there's the colonial or semi-colonial background, because Italy was very interested in Ethiopia from a colonial point of view. Many of the early researchers were um Italians. And only in the 1960s, early 1970s, do you get Ethiopians who are trained as modern scholars writing Ethiopian history. But again, it's still this church and state perspective. What's important is the central government, what's important are the Christians, all the other peoples of Ethiopia. All the other peoples, and Ethiopia has dozens of different peoples in it, are just a sideshow. And so that's the way the history of Ethiopia developed until really the 1970s, when people have, or I would say even later, the 1980s, when when people have begun to try and do a more holistic history of Ethiopia.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Can you comment on the history of the Sagwe dynasty?

SPEAKER_03 38:01

This is one of those cases where I started out to write a book, and I thought I knew what the book would be. And I thought this will be easy to do. All I need to do, and I need to stress this this book is not based on original research of doing archaeology or reading manuscripts or collecting oral traditions, it's a synthesis. So when I said all I need to do is catch up on what's been published in the last 10 or 15 years, and I'm ready to go. And I realized that the conventional narrative about the history of Ethiopia had to be revised. That a narrative which said in the early common era, there was an empire in northern Ethiopia called Aksum. Aksum survived until the sixth or seventh century. It was there was there was sort of chaos to some extent. And then a new dynasty seized power, who were unlike the people of Aksum. And in the let's say, 11th, 12th, 13th century, this new dynasty called the Zagwe took power in Ethiopia. And the Zagwe were always depicted as an illegitimate dynasty which seized power from the rightful rulers of Ethiopia. And you had this tremendous paradox, because on the one hand, the Zagwe rulers were viewed as illegitimate usurpers, and on the other hand, in the history, in the stories of the Ethiopian church, the Zagwe kings are remembered as saints. So how can you be at the same time rebels who overthrew the legitimate government and saints who are commemorated and prayed to within the church? When I discuss the Zagwe in my book, first of all, I'm very much inspired by uh Marie Lau Dura, a French historian, who published uh a number of years ago an incredibly important book on the Zagwe. And and what we know now, or what we think we know now, what we say now, the Zagwe were in fact much more heirs to the legacy of the previous rulers than we thought they were. That they had family ties and regional ties to their predecessors in Aksum. That they were not rebel usurpers, they were a branch, and perhaps you would say a very a very peripheral branch that continued the legacy of the first kings of Ethiopia. Now, let me say something, that creates a major pivot for reconstructing the history of Ethiopia. If in the past it was the kingdom of Aksum, the Zagwe rebels, and then a restoration of legitimate rule around 1270. Now we understand that what happened happened when the Zagwe fell, when they were overthrown around the year 1270, was not a restoration of the legitimate rulers, but something far more dramatic. I hope that that's it's complicated, but I hope that's that's clear.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

What were the distinctive features of the period from 1380 to 1478 in Ethiopian history?

SPEAKER_03 42:39

Okay, again, let me give a little bit of background. Um as I indicated, Ethiopia is you know an ancient country from the beginning of the common era. You have a state, you have an empire. Ethiopia accepts Christianity, or at least some Ethiopians, the Ethiopian emperor, accepts Christianity in the fourth century. So it's the third country in the world to have a Christian ruler. Christianity, Ethiopians often, you know, Europeans who aren't aware of it will say, well, when did you become Christians? And they'll laugh because they say, we became Christians in the fourth century, a lot earlier than England or France or Germany became Christians. And certainly them become the country becoming a Christian country meant that you were churches and you had a Christian calendar, and you had holy books, which were translated into Gez, the holy, the Semitic language, which was the language of the church. Now, one of the things that scholars have tended to do. And there are reasons for this, which maybe I'll discuss later, is assume the antiquity of certain elements in Ethiopian history and culture. And I know I'm doing a big detour here to get to your question, but let me give you an example. Okay? The Bible was translated from Greek into Gez sometime between the fourth and seventh century. And scholars would argue: was it only from Greek, was it from other languages? And they were always working off of manuscripts which were from a thousand years later. Well, now we know that the period of the fourteenth and fifteenth century was a tremendously creative period in Ethiopian history. And while it probably sounds paradoxical to say this, much of quote-unquote ancient Ethiopia dates to that period. And by this I mean you had a number of remarkable rulers. I'll mention, though, two of them. One was named Dawit David, and his son, who was probably the greatest ruler of medieval Ethiopia, who lived, who ruled from 1434 to 1468, Zara Yaakob, the seed of Jacob. And what they did under their auspices, you have a revolution in the literature, the calendar, and the visual arts of Christian Ethiopia. And so that period is a golden age in the creation of Ethiopian Christian culture. It's also a pinnacle in terms of imperial power. But one of the things that means is many things that we look at in Ethiopia and we think, oh, this is part of the ancient heritage of Ethiopia. In fact, we discover that they date to that period in the 14th and 15th century. And I could give numerous examples if you want. Peace. Okay, so let me let me take something like the cult of the cult or the veneration of the Virgin Mary in the church. Obviously, Ethiopian Christians, from the beginning of the acceptance of Christianity, venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was a central figure in Ethiopian Christianity, as she is in Christianity in so many places in the world. But it's in the 14th century that the Emperor Dawid, who I mentioned, has the clergy begin to translate from Arabic to Gez, The Miracles of Mary, a book which exists in Egypt and in other places, which collects stories about Mary's intervention in people's lives. So Daoid has them to begin to translate this book. And they also, of course, in the course of time, add miracles that Mary performed in Ethiopia to localize it. There are holidays in honor of Mary in Ethiopia. But we know that Daweed's son Zara Yaqob instituted many of these holidays. In other words, he's the one who decreed that there wasn't going to be one day a year where you celebrated the birth of Mary or the assumption of Mary into heaven. But there were going to be literally dozens of holidays which commemorated events in the life of Mary. So from a calendric point of view, you have this transformation in the 15th century. And the third element is that although we have Ethiopian art from early periods, and certainly the building of churches from early periods and illuminated manuscripts, the idea of Ethiopian Christians carrying icons is again a 14th, 15th century intervention. And very often these were icons of the Virgin Mary. So there's an example of something where if you came to Ethiopia in the 16th century, and you saw all these holidays of Mary, and you saw these books with all the miracles of Mary, and you saw people walking, wearing these icons or on the walls, images of Mary, you would say, Oh, this is the way it's been since the church began. And in fact, this quote-unquote ancient veneration of Mary largely has its seeds, or not its seeds, but its fruits in this golden period of the 14th and 15th century. So that's one example of how that period transformed Ethiopian Christianity. In many ways, and I'm not the first one to say this, I said there was this great emperor called Zari Yaqob. Gitachu Haile, who was probably the greatest scholar of, who was not probably, was the greatest scholar of Ethiopian literature in the 20th century, once said, in many ways, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the Zari Yaqob Church. It's the church that he created. Not that they weren't Christians for a thousand years before him, but he shaped it in a way that determined its path for the next centuries.

SPEAKER_00 51:08

In light of what you've just shared, if you don't let me ask you a follow-up question. In light of what you've shared, is that an exaggeration? Are there certain worldviews that tend to uh uh make more of this uh than it necessarily is?

SPEAKER_03 51:44

Okay, there this is a complicated question. Um, in some ways, that you know, and and you may uh ask about this later, or you know, the two things that almost always come up when you talk about Ethiopian Christianity. One is what you just asked, what's called this Hebraic biblical Jewish influence, and the other is its relationship with the Coptic church, and people often say, oh, you study Ethiopia, uh the Copts. We might be able to get to that. They're not the Copts. But let me talk about what you just asked. Okay, so you look at Ethiopian Christianity, and again, especially Ethiopian Christianity in the medieval period. Ethiopian Christians were circumcised, boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Ethiopian Christians didn't eat pork. Ethiopian Christians observed a Saturday Sabbath alongside the Sunday day of worship. Ethiopian churches were divided into three parts in a way similar to the biblical temple. In fact, the holiest part of an Ethiopian Orthodox Church was called the Kadusa Kadusan, the holy of holies. So you see these elements, and it's certainly, if you're a European and you're familiar with Judaism, it leaps, it leaps out at you. Um there's been a great debate among scholars of Ethiopia. Were these Jewish are these Jewish elements part of a level of culture within Ethiopia that existed before Christianity and survived within Christianity? Or are they something which entered Christianity at a later period? And I'll give you two examples. In the Bible in Gez, there are loanwords. And some of these loan words, words that weren't originally Gez, that came into the language, as you have in every language. If you look at the days of the week, the days of the week in Gez are numbered the first day, the second day, the third day, till you get to Friday. Friday isn't the sixth day. Friday is Urb, Eriv, like the Hebrew word Eriv, the eve of. And Saturday is Sunbat, the Sabbath. Well, that's something which is obviously very ancient. And you can find lots of words like that in Gez, which must which date to the period of the initial translation of the Bible between the fourth and seventh century, and indicate Jewish influences. And on the other hand, what I've just mentioned about the way churches were constructed, it's true, churches were constructed on a model that reminds us of the Temple in Jerusalem. But the earliest churches that were constructed that way are from the 16th century. So that may be a biblical Hebraic influence, but it isn't an early biblical Hebraic influence. So we have these competing, you know, some stuff might be early, something like that. And then, of course, the the ultimate, you know, element, which is until the overthrow of the emperor Haile Selassie in the 1970s, Ethiopian emperors claimed to be descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And what could be a more biblical Jewish claim than to claim that your elite rulers are in fact Israelites? So that's why that's such a big topic in the study of Ethiopia. I think it gets somewhat exaggerated, but you certainly can't understand Ethiopian Christianity without taking it into account.

SPEAKER_02 56:32

Who was Amdatseon?

SPEAKER_03 56:36

Okay, Amdatseon. Okay, in some ways this this will connect, it helps. I can I can connect to this off of the the previous question. Okay. Amdatsion. Amdatsion is a ruler in the 14th century, 1314 to 1344. Although he isn't the first ruler in his dynasty, in some ways you could say he's the person who really establishes the state. His name, his royal name means the pillar of Zion. Okay, so let's go back a minute or two to the question of Hebraic, biblical, Jewish influences. This ruler of 14th century Ethiopia called himself the Pillar of Zion. Okay, that sounds very, very biblical. Now, Amda Sion did a number of things. First of all, when he came to power, he set out his army to pacify all the areas that had been under previous Ethiopian rule, and to establish himself as the legitimate ruler of Ethiopia. It's probably during his period that the myth, the tradition, that Ethiopian rulers are descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba really gets embedded in Ethiopian culture. But he did more than that. He saw to it that he controlled the trade routes in the Ethiopian plateau, which meant he had to go to war with the local Muslims to get control of the trade routes. Now he didn't necessarily have to replace those Muslim rulers, but he wanted the ability to tax all the trade that went in and out of Ethiopia. And by succeeding in pacifying the previous areas and establishing the Christian Empire and its control of trade, he set the basis for the Ethiopian state, which would be at its highest point for the next two centuries. So he's a remarkable ruler. We're very fortunate we have a text which tells about his wars against the Muslim some of the Muslims. Again, we don't we don't know exactly when this text was written and how reliable it is, but it but it's a you know it's it's one of the most important historical texts for the reconstruction of the history of Ethiopia.

SPEAKER_00 59:48

What insights are presented in this book regarding the history of Islam in Ethiopia?

SPEAKER_03 59:56

Okay, thank you. That's a very important question. Um in going back to what I said previously, or when you asked about the historiography of Ethiopia, um one of the clear gaps in the in the traditional historiography of Ethiopia was writing about Islam. I mean, I am I am not exaggerating here when I say that in the 1950s, 60s, and I'll even say to the middle of the 1970s, there was one book in English called Islam in Ethiopia, which attempted to tell all there was to know about Islam in Ethiopia. Its history, its culture, its religious practices, its holy places, it's it's okay. One of the things that I tried to do in this book, and again, I'm depending on other scholars, is provide a corrective. Some of this corrective has to do with amazing work which is being done by archaeologists right as we speak in southern or you know, southern Ethiopia, who are uncovering Muslim cities in thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth century Ethiopia, cosmopolitan cities, where um goods were being imported and you know from around the Muslim world, in which there were Muslims who were not only local population, but also people who had traveled there from the Middle East and even further away. Um you know, so it's funny because people often say that Ethiopia historically didn't have a lot of cities. Well, the Muslims were we always thought, we always wrote that the Muslims were merchants, pastoralists, you know, and and and that was the extent of Muslim history in Ethiopia. In fact, now we know they also had a large urban population. The other thing about Islam that I deal with in the book is that Islam is crucial to the early history of Ethiopia. Because when Muhammad appears as a prophet and he is persecuted by the clans in Mecca, he receives refuge in Ethiopia from what's called the Najashi, the king of Aksum, who is said to be tolerant of people. And a group of Muslims travel to Aksum, and they are given um asylum until it is safe for them to return to Ethiopia, to um Arabia. Some of them return, some of them don't. They represent the nucleus of the first Ethiopian Muslims. And so Islam also has a long, long history in Ethiopia. I'm far from being an expert on that because I don't have the necessary source languages, but one of the things I try to do in the book is correct the perspective that Ethiopian history is Christian history.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:46

In light of what you've just shared, if you don't let me ask me a follow-up question, uh can you say something about the history of uh Byzantine, Ethiopian relations? Where does Byzantium uh come into play in the context of the history of Ethiopia's foreign relations during the medieval period?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:08

Okay, well, I would I would for for um practical purposes, let's say that Byzantium and Ethiopia at that time aren't really medieval, but you know, late antiquity, that wonderful term that the historian Peter Brown uh developed. Um so in the fourth, fifth century, um Aksum is one of the great powers. You know, it's often it's it's you know, every people are aware of it. It controls to a large extent the trade on the Red Sea through its port of Adulus and other ports. And so you know, Byzantine um traders and Byzantine Christians, you know, are very aware of this place, of this place. Um so much so that when Christians in the Arabian Peninsula are are massacred, um the Byzantian king looks to Aksum and its king and its king, Caleb, Caleb, to be the one to um, you know, to what's a restore the honor, you know, have seek revenge for Ethiop for Ethiopian Christ Christianity. Um so so you so you have this situation where although Aksum, you know, is obviously not part of Byzantium. It is very much influenced by the fact that it is on the periphery. And of course, in time, what will develop is Aksum, and afterwards, with its decline, Ethiopia, northern Ethiopia more generally, are at the meeting place of Eastern Christianity, the Persian Empire, the developing Islam, and Ethiopia is sort of squeezed between all of those in late antiquity. Does that sort of give us a picture? Very much so.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:52

Can you tell us about Queen Judith?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:56

Okay, so one of the big questions that we have in Ethiopian history is why does Aksum fall? Aksum is this powerful empire, and as I say, around the 6th century, certainly by the 7th century, it's declining by the 7th century. Um all the archaeological evidence is very clear is you know there are still churches, there are still is there is still an Aksumite culture, but there's not a strong state on the in the Ethiopian highlands. Now, scholars, what we do is we complicate things. We say the reason that Aksum fell was one, there were nomads on the periphery of Aksum who got stronger and disrupted the trade routes. Two, there was a plague at the time and many people died. Um three, there were ecological changes, and the um people in the Aksum area had so over farmed the area. Aksum was very dependent on irrigation uh to for growing crops, that it no longer was possible to um you know to support the city, and the port of Adulus on the Red Sea was destroyed by flooding. Ethiopian tradition says no, no, it was much easier. There was a queen, and her story was that she was part of the Aksumite ruling family, and because of a s and be because of a series of misfortunes, um she lived her life as a prostitute, but she managed to leave Ethiopia, marry an external king who was Jewish, and came back and with his army conquered Aksum. So the Ethiopian traditional explanation is why did Aksum fall? Aksum fell because Queen Judith or Yodit or Gudit, depending on what source you read, sought revenge on the Aksumites and conquered, and conquered them. One of the things that's interesting about the traditions about Judith, and because of this, we need to be a little bit skeptical about their historiosity, is that she really appears as the mirror image of the Queen of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba is credited for building up the glory of Aksum. Yudith is credited with destroying the glory of Aksum. The Queen of Sheba is said to have been a virgin until she met the King Solomon. Judith is said to have been a prostitute. The Queen of Sheba brought, you know, Israelite biblical influences to Ethiopia. Judith destroyed those influences. So you have to be skeptical about a historical narrative that is the mirror image of another historical narrative. But of course, um you can't discount the traditions of the Ethiopian peoples themselves. And you can certainly go to places in Ethiopia and they will point out to you sites and say this is the burial place of Queen Judith. Archaeologists can argue about that, about, but you know, as we all know, when when writing history, you know, you can't argue with myth. You can't argue with tradition.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:30

And I thought you just shared if you don't ask the follow-up question. We discussed Emperor Dawit and Queen Judith. To what degree were they aware of the biblical significance of their names? How did they relate to the biblical Judith or the biblical David? Was this in any way part of their diplomacy, cult of personality, ways of presenting themselves?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:01

Okay. I understand. Well, a couple of things. First of all, um in many of the, I mean, with again, Judith is is so much a legendary figure. It's it's much harder because we you know, but the Dawid is a wonderful example. In many sources, Dawood is referred to as um Dawid II. And it's like, wait a minute, there's no one in his dynasty called Dawit. But yes, of course, there is, because he presented himself as descendant of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and Solomon's father was Dawit, and therefore this 14th century Dawoit is Dawit II. Okay, so so you know that that's a very clear statement. But one of the other things that's interesting, and I can't off the top of my head simply you know throw you know give examples, but um the the British historian Richard Pankhurst, who did a tremendous amount of work throughout the second half of the 20th century to build up Ethiopian studies and was for years the director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, has written two wonderful articles, which are simply about the way that Ethiopian Christian kings employed Old Testament biblical quotes to refer to themselves, to describe what they were doing, and then say, as it says in the Old Testament, you know, in the you know, in the Bible, da-da-da-da-da. And they're quoting about the Israelite, the Israelite kings. You know, so they're very much depicting themselves, you know, as, you know, the heirs to these kings, you know, something that they that they take, you know, you know, very, very, you know, they take it very seriously. You have to understand something. There's a continuity here, and this goes beyond my book, okay? In 1270, a dynasty comes into power, which creates the mythology that not only are they the heirs to the kings of Aksum, but they are the heirs to Solomon and Sheba. Okay, and that dynasty remains in power. Well, people from that dynasty remain on the throne for 700 years. Now, sometimes those those kings, quote unquote, are just puppets for more powerful warlords. Sometimes those kings, you know, you know, are sitting in a room and they basically the influence they have is in that room in the room next to it. But the fact that for 700 years, the view is that the legitimate ruler of Ethiopia is someone from family X, because they are descendants of the Israelite kings, just shows how seriously they take it. In the case where people came into power who weren't or weren't clearly descendants of this ruling dynasty, they would manufacture genealogies. They would come out and say, ah, yes, but my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was so-and-so, who was a descendant of so-and-so, and in that way create the mythology that they were legitimate, because that's how seriously they they took they took that.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:27

What misconceptions about Ethiopian history does your research attempt to correct? Why do these misconceptions exist and persist?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:37

Okay, well, I'll start with the second question. Firstly, the most the most basic reason why these misperceptions persist is because um, you know, most people know very very little about or anything about Ethiopia. Um they probably know know more about Ethiopia through Bob Marley and the Rastafarians than they know through actual Ethiopian history. Um and and let me clarify, you know, it's something that you said in the introduction, and I've already had people comment on it. My my book is published in a series which is called Lost Civilizations. So it's not that I wrote the book and said the Ethiopians lost civilizations, but rather the publishers who have a series which probably has 20 or 30 books now, which have things like the Sumerians and the Goths and the Etruscans and all sorts of groups, said, We'd like you to do a volume about Ethiopians. My first reaction was Ethiopians still exist, they're not a lost civilization. They said, Really? Do you think you think that people know about Ethiopia? Know about ancient and medieval Ethiopia? So, so, you know, part of it is again, they don't people don't tend to know about it. There are there are, and so these misconceptions uh develop. Um, one of them, which I mentioned, is people will say, think that Ethiopians are are Copts. The Coptic Church was the Church of Egypt. For centuries, the head of the Ethiopian Church was appointed in Egypt by the head of the Coptic Church. But the practice and the holy language and the holidays of the Ethiopian Church were not identical with those of the Coptic Church. So the Ethiopian Christians weren't Copts. Um I'll give you another, another, okay? Um I say at the beginning of the book, the two things that most people know about Ethiopia are famines and the food because of Ethiopian restaurants. Okay? Let's take let's take coffee. Coffee doesn't become a drink anywhere in the world until the Middle Ages. Late, you know. Ethiopian Christians don't drink coffee until the 19th, late 19th or early 20th century, because in their eyes, coffee is connected to Muslims and connected to pagan cults of spirit possession. So when you go to an Ethiopian restaurant and they do a traditional coffee ceremony, that traditional coffee ceremony dates from the 19th century. And let's consider one other example, and again, because your podcast is sort of broadly about history, think about the importance and history of the Colombian exchange, all the products that go back and forth after the quote unquote discovery of the new world, you know, and and and and uh you know, and and how this opens up things, you know, so that you know that um that there aren't tomatoes and potatoes in Europe. Okay, and there isn't coffee, and there isn't coffee in Brazil. Well, the spicy red peppers that are used to make classic Ethiopian food that people enjoy so much come from South America. Ethiopian food was probably spicy before that. The Portuguese who come in the 15th and 16th century say the food is spicy. But it must have been spicy because of a different spice than the one they use today. So, in many ways, you know, when we when we look at Ethiopia, we can be captive of, I don't know what to call it, presentism, where we think that what we're seeing now, or even that we saw, you know, a hundred years ago, always existed. And in fact, it has a much deeper history.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:40

In light of what you've just shared, can you elaborate on the importance of Portuguese Ethiopian relations in the history of Ethiopian foreign policy and foreign relations?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:57

Sure. Um let me stress. I mean, I I end my book around 1500, 1550 for a number of reasons. Uh, that's when the Ottomans become a dominant force in the Red Sea. Um there are migrations within Ethiopia which change the population. And of course, one of the other reasons is that the Islam in Ethiopia becomes much more militant. And one of the things is that the Portuguese come. Now, again, we can easily forget it, but the Portuguese were a great maritime empire. You know, this tiny country at the ends of Europe. Um, and one of the places they came to was Ethiopia. Um, they came to Ethiopia because they were explorers, they came to Ethiopia because it was on the quote-unquote other side of the Muslim world. They came to Ethiopia because they were looking for the legendary ruler Prester John. And in Ethiopia, they had a Christian king who was also a major figure in his church. And they thought he was Prester John. They call him Prester John. Um, so there's an element that the that the that the Portuguese, again, I you know, I hate to use the word, but I put it in parentheses, scare quotes, discover Ethiopia. You know, they they they they are the first Europeans to really be there and and write about it. Um the downside of that is we can be captives of the Portuguese perspective on things in Ethiopia. One of the reasons why the Jewish elements that you asked about before get so much attention is remember, the Portuguese are in the middle of the Catholic Church trying to wipe out the Jews. And they're concerned with people who claim to be Christians but secretly observe Jewish customs. And they arrive in Ethiopia, and there's a church there in which people don't eat pork, people observe the Sabbath, the men are circumcised. I mean, that's like red lights going off, saying these are crypto Jews. And the Emperor of Ethiopia has to write a document. His name is Claudius Glaudius, and he writes a document called The Confession of Glaudius, in which he defends these practices and says to the Portuguese, these aren't Jewish practices, these are Ethiopian practices. This is our Christianity. So the so the Portuguese, you know, and again, I stress, you know, my book ends just with a few lines, but Portuguese are enormously important. We're very fortunate today in that in the last 20 years, there has been a tremendous amount of work done on the Portuguese period in Ethiopia. There are documents which have been published, which no one previously knew about. Um, archaeological work has been done, and you have scholars who combine, you know, the the the obscure language skills of Portuguese, Latin, and Ghez, ancient Ethiopic, to be able to write properly about the history of this period.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:46

Can you say something about Tekla Haimanot?

SPEAKER_04 1:25:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:52

Um so one of the things, and it's funny that uh that we haven't mentioned it up to now, uh, but it's certainly important. Um in the Ethiopian church, historically, um, the monastic clergy were tremendously important. The Ethiopian church had the structure which you find you know in many churches. You had you had married priests and you had celibate monks. Um, some of the celibate monks you know were people who chose to become monks at a young age, and some of them were widowers who joined. So monasticism was very important. There were monasteries scattered all throughout the country. And excuse me. Um again, the 13th and 14th century, we see a tremendous flowering of monasticism. And one of the first figures who is responsible for this flowering is a figure called Takla Haymanot, the spirit, uh I mean the plant of faith. Now, Taklahaimana not only was remembered as uh you know as a as a missionary, but he founded a monastery in what is now central Ethiopia, not far from Addisabala, but was then southern Ethiopia, called Dabra Asbo, later it was called Dabra Libanus. And it became the most important monastery in Ethiopia. So important that the head of that monastery was essentially part of the secretariat of the emperor. And he was the highest, most important Ethiopian cleric in the country. Again, remember the head of the church was an Egyptian monk, and Taklahaiman. Students spread out throughout Ethiopia or you know, central Ethiopia, southern Ethiopia, converting people and building churches. Now, they were one of only three monastics, or you could say even four monastic movements at this time. There was also a monastic movement which arose somewhat later, which was in the north of the country and focused around the issue of the Saturday Sabbath, which we've discussed. There was another monastic movement even later, which focused around its opposition to the expansion of the cult of Mary and the cult of the cross, which I know sounds bizarre, but believe it. And perhaps strangest of all, the Beit Israel, the what people called quote-unquote Falacia, the Ethiopian Jews, also had a monastic tradition. But Taklahaimenot is one of the only monastic figures in Ethiopia who is familiar and is venerated throughout the entire church, and not just in a particular monastery or among a particular group of clergy. So he's one of the most important monastic figures in Ethiopian history.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:32

What does your book's title mean? Can you explain it?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:35

Well, as I said, uh Reaction Press publishes a series called Lost Civilizations. Most of the people who appear in the series are people who, you know, are literally no longer lost. I mean, you know, I mean, no longer here. Um, the Etruscans, the Goths, um, the barbarians, although PP and I joke, you know, that lots of people would say we have lots of barbarians uh among us, but they're not a specific ethnic, you know, group of people. Uh the Assyrians, the Sumerians. Well, the Ethiopians aren't a lost people in the sense of, you know, people saying, well, there are no Ethiopians. But because of what we discussed, you know, over the past, you know, in our conversation, in many ways, the story of Ethiopian history has been lost under a series of layers of stories and myths and misunderstandings which have clouded it. To the extent that, you know, to the extent that if people think, if if the average person thinks they know Ethiopian history, they probably don't know Ethiopian history. And Ethiopian history has been lost in that sense. But I admit it's a little bit of a stretch compared to using it for a group like the Sumerians.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:34

What evidence do you rely on to advance the or theses uh presented in this study?

SPEAKER_03 1:31:46

Okay, this book the book is a synthesis. Okay. Um it's not that I, you know, read a whole series of new manuscripts or that I went out and I do did archaeological digs. I read to the the the amount to the extent that I could, all of the latest work that's been done on these topics. Um to try and understand the state of the art in the study of Ethiopia at the moment. And I can say, you know, one of the things that I so I suppose is frustrating to any author, but certainly I found this, um, is that, and I knew it would happen, is after I had finished the book, after the press was done, after we'd gone through all the proofs, after we'd done the index, after I sent it to them and said, that's it, and they said, okay, we'll let you know when the book appears, of course, research kept appearing that I could have quoted in the book. Um, but but what this is, okay, that you know, the there are, and I say this in the book, there are two other books called the Ethiopians. One of them was published in the 1960s by the British historian Edward Uhlendorff. It gives a general survey of Ethiopia, you know, history, culture, literature, and all that. It is tremendously focused on Christian Ethiopia. Um, says very little about non-Christian people and, you know, including Muslims. Thirty years later, Richard Pankurst, who I mentioned, did a book called The Ethiopians. In the paperback edition, he wrote called it The Ethiopians a History, and it's really a historical survey of Ethiopia from earliest times to the present. 30 years ago, his book was published in the 1990s. 30 more years go by, and I publish this book called The Ethiopians, which I hope has the state of the art of what we know about Ethiopia based on the best, on my summary of the best research that's been done. And my hope is that this book will be viewed as valuable, as an intervention in an ongoing conversation, and that 15 years from now, or 20 years from now, someone will come along and say Kaplan's book was fine for what we knew in 2025 when it was published, but now we know so much more, we need to do a new version of the book or a new survey of Ethiopian history. So, you know, that's that's what the book is, and that's how I view it. It's my contribution to an ongoing conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:17

As a follow-up question, if you don't mind me asking. In your scholarly opinion, why does Ethiopian history get comparatively less attention than the histories of other empires in medieval and modern history? Why does it receive less scholarly attention than the Ottoman Empire, for example?

SPEAKER_03 1:35:46

Okay, there are a couple of things. There are a couple of things going on here. Um let's position okay, Ethiopia, and we and this has come up several times in our conversation. Ethiopia is at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Um while you would think or hope that that would lead to people saying this is a key place to be studied, the reality of academic work is different. If you're setting up and running a Middle Eastern Studies department, and you know, some people consider Ethiopia part of the Middle East, well, there are a dozen topics and a dozen countries that you want to be sure you can teach before you get to Ethiopia. You know, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, um, you want to do the Ottoman Empire, and you want to do the early caliphates, and you want to do, you know, contemporary uh Sunni and Shiite Islam and all of those things. And the reality is that the chances that you're going to appoint somebody who does Ethiopia are comparatively slim. Okay. Let's say you do African studies, okay, and there are certainly places where Ethiopia is taught as part of an African studies department. Well, if you're in the United States, the first thing you're going to teach about is what's called the Black Atlantic. West Africa and its historical connection with the New World, the slave trade, the influences that flow into the New World and shape, you know, culture in the Americas, whether it's Brazil or Jamaica or the United States. And then the next area you're probably going to have somebody do is South Africa. Because there are troves of documents, and the country is relatively stable, and you can and has been, and you can get access to those documents. And then, of course, how can you do Africa and study Africa and not talk about colonialism? And Ethiopia wasn't colonized, except for a very brief period by the Italians. So it's if you appoint somebody who's a specialist in colonial history, it's not going to be someone who does Ethiopia. Maybe he does Kenya and Tanzania. You know, maybe he does uh Ghana and Nigeria, you know. And so what you end up with is a situation in which, for a very practical reason. Okay, let me cite, let me get cite one further example. Suppose you do Semitic languages. Okay. Well, I always told my students who did Semitic languages Arabic, spoken Arabic, classical Arab, classical Arabic, biblical Hebrew. Those are the three languages you better know because that's what they're going to want you to teach. There's something else, gonna be Syriac and maybe Akkadian. Once again, Ethiopian languages, way down on the list. So there's simply a phenomena here, you know, where, you know, I would say it has something to do, you know, with, you know, maybe with Ethiopia's history itself, but I think it has much more to do with the reality of how fields become important in the academic world. Look at think about the number of universities in the world whose reaction when the when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, or when the Americans invaded Afghanistan, said, why don't we have somebody who studies Afghanistan? You know, so Ethiopia gets neglected because of the academic realities of that.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:52

Can you say something about that, Senkasar?

SPEAKER_03 1:40:55

Okay, uh, this brings us back to the the question of translation from Arabic. Um, the Senkasar is a calendar of the saints. Every day throughout the year, different saints are commemorated. And of course, events in the life of Jesus and very much events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So, you know, you can go through, I mean, I can't cite specific examples, but you every day is connected to a certain saint. Usually his death, sometimes his birth, perhaps some event in his history, especially with Mary or with Jesus, some event in their lives. And the Senkasar is that, you know, literally, you know, that calendar. Uh, the Senkasar exists in many churches in one way or another. In medieval times, the Sencasar in Arabic was translated into Gez, when things were being translated from Gez into Arabic. I mean, from Arabic into Gez. But of course, from the Ethiopian point of view, it was a very interesting but hopelessly flawed document because as it initially existed, it didn't contain any of the Ethiopian saints. So, what happens is the manuscripts that are in Ethiopia, and remember, this is such a massive book that you need an incredibly rich patron like the emperor, or a very powerful monastery, to help you produce this book because it's so expensive to do it. The monastery, in a particular, they add, you know, the their local saints, or the saints they were. And so one of the things that results is every version of the syncasar in Ethiopia is slightly different. Around the 17th century, um there's a certain consolidation, and obviously now there's a more standard thing, but the the syncasar is this remarkable document, um, both because it's a symbol of the meeting between external Christian influences and local Ethiopian Christianity, um, but also by looking at the stories that appear in it and comparing these to other sources we have about these saints, we can begin to understand something about how the cult of different saints arose and how it changed over time.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:08

In light of what you've shared, we previously discussed the Ethiopian relationship with Byzantium and with the Portuguese Empire.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:20

Can you say something about them or the Ottoman relationship with Well well the Ottoman the Ottoman relationship is important because part of what happens is that um it changes the politics of the Red Sea. Again, you know, that that uh you know Ethiopia goes through these very there's the period when the Aksumite Empire largely controls Red Sea trade, or at least is is you know has has enough control of Red Sea trade. There's the period when you know various Muslim groups control Red Sea trade, um, but the Ethiopians control the interior trade within Ethiopia. Um when the Ottoman when the Ottomans control the Red Sea trade, one of the results of that is that you know they largely control access to Ethiopia. It has to be understood, you know, that although in theory it is possible to travel from the Mediterranean to Ethiopia via the Red Sea, I mean, via the Nile, you know, via the Nile, practically that's not something you're going to do. You're going to travel via the Red Sea, go into one of the coastal ports, whether in the north, you know, you know, of what is now Eritrea or in the south, what is now Somalia. Um, and so if someone controls the Red Sea trade, they control Ethiopia's access to the sea and Ethiopia's access to a whole host of other things. The other part of this is uh the the Ottoman Empire gives tremendous encouragement to the local Muslims in the Horn of Africa. And when, because of political disruption in the Horn of Africa, the Islam there in the 16th century becomes for the first time a militant Islam which seeks not cordial relations with the Ethiopian kingdom, but to conquer the Ethiopian kingdom, the Ottomans are very much willing to support those ambitions, both financially and practically with mission with mercenaries. So it's a it's it's an important turning point. Again, it's it's another, it's one of the reasons why my book ends around 1500, because it really transforms relations. Um you know, in in for you know, the history for Ethiopia.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:10

In light of what you've just mentioned, can you say something about the Red Sea in relation to Ethiopian history?

SPEAKER_03 1:47:20

Well, that someone has a wonderful phrase in a book, I can't remember who it is right now, where they say, you know, that the Red Sea has always been a sea on the way to somewhere else. Um whether it's to India, whether it's to the Far East. The point is you go through the Red Sea, you know, to then go onward, where the real, I mean, you know, all we need to think about, look at the um, think about modern history. The Suez Canal was not built to get access to the Red Sea. The Suez Canal was built to get access to India and points eastward. Um, and that's very much this place. However, I mean, one of the things, you know, for Ethiopia, you know, the Red Sea, um, first of all, there are there are people who would argue that what is, you know, what was once the coast of Ethiopia is now, you know, the independent country of Eritrea. And this is a tremendously complex political issue for Ethiopians. Um that this is there's a there's a culture that develops. People talk about a Red Sea culture that the different banks of the Red Sea share more in common than they share with the interior of either of their of their countries. Um but but the you know the again, the Red Sea is where Christian the path through which Christianity came to Ethiopia. The Red Sea is the path through which Islam came to Ethiopia. The Red Sea is the path in which various trade came to Ethiopia. And, you know, if I had to predict a, you know, what's going to be the next big trend in Ethiopian studies, it's going to be studies of Ethiopia's relations with India. And that's going to be, to a large extent, connected to people traveling through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and through the Indian Ocean to India and back and back and forth. Because we know, for example, I'll just give one example again, which isn't part of my book. But many, many, many Ethiopian manuscripts have woven cloth covers on them. Virtually, you know, virtually all of those covers were produced in India. And so we can learn a tremendous amount about the history of trade between India and Ethiopia by looking at those covers and trying to work back to where in India were they produced. But again, there's no what you can't reach Ethiopia from India without going through the Red Sea. And so it's just once again become, you know, and that, you know, again, that was true in antiquity, and it's also true to a large extent, obviously, not by air in uh in modern times.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:59

What is the Ethiopian manuscript microfilm project?

SPEAKER_04 1:51:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:05

Um when the Ethiopian Revolution took place in the 1970s, one of the fears that scholars had is that the new regime, which it very quickly became clear was a Marxist regime, would go after the church. And in some ways it did, but you know, not to the not in the way that the scholars feared. But because they feared that it would go after the church, they said they could decide to simply burn all these manuscripts. The church in Ethiopia had been a major um landlord in Ethiopia. And the revolution took away all of the church's property, other than the land that the church actually sat on. Churches no longer had fields, no longer had, you know, other. So what if they said those books aren't yours? You know, they were bought through the you know, money you expropriated from the peasantry. So it was decided to go out and microfilm as many Ethiopian manuscripts as possible to preserve them in case they'd be destroyed. And this was an and there were a number of people, the Ford Foundation, I think, got involved with this, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Professor Walter Harrelson of Vanderbilt University was a key figure. Um, Professor Sergu Habu Selassie in Ethiopia was a key figure. And they would literally send people out to monasteries with material with material with huge, you know, again, this is the 70s, with these huge cameras to take photographs to produce microfilms. And one copy of every microfilm was um deposited in Addis Ababa, and one copy was deposited in, of all places, Collegeville, Minnesota, where there was uh the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, which is a library which specializes in monastic manuscripts. Well, the manuscripts weren't destroyed, and this project became the pioneer for what then became dozens of projects. And obviously, on a technological basis, it kept getting easier and easier to photograph manuscripts. The same way it gets easier and easier to tape material. Think of what we would have had to do, you would have had to do to tape something, the equivalent of a podcast. Well, I don't know, you you know, I don't even know how you could have done something like this. So there are there started to be lots of projects to photograph manuscripts, not because there was a fear that they would be destroyed, but to create greater access. So you no longer had to travel into Ethiopia to a monastery to photo to see a manuscript, and even more important in an ethical way, you no longer had to steal manuscripts, which is of course what the Europeans had done. And suddenly, oh it's not suddenly, but over the next few decades we went for a situation of a few thousand Ethiopian manuscripts available in European libraries, like the British Library, like the Bibliothèque Nationale, like the Vatican Library, to literally thousands of manuscripts being available first on microfilm and then in other forms, to the situation today when I can sit at home on my computer and say, I wonder what word is used to translate this word in this verse in the Bible in this old manuscript, and click on a few things and be reading the manuscript. Because all of this material is now, or lots of this material has now been preserved. So the EMML, the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library, 50 years ago was the pioneering project which transformed our access to Ethiopian manuscripts. I'll give one, to give you just one example. You asked about the Zagwad dynasty. The most important king of the Zagwad dynasty was a king called Lalibella. And there's a great city of churches in Ethiopia named after him, called Lalibella. And in the 19th century, a French scholar published the Vita, the life story of Saint Lalibella, because Lalibella is remembered not just as a king, but as a saint. And he published it on the basis of one manuscript. Recently, a young scholar was able to do a new edition of this text. And she had over 30 different manuscripts that she could access to do that work. So not only do are we discovering works that we didn't know existed, but we're able to do much better editions and readings of manuscripts that we've had for years, but were based on a single version, which may not have been the best version of the text. What does the term guelt mean? Okay. In many things, again this can go back to our misunderstandings about Ethiopia or semi-understandings. Often you will read that Ethiopia under the kings until Haidley Selassie was a feudal system. And in fact, a lot of the rhetoric around the Marxist revolution was we're going to overthrow the feudal government. And of course, when Ethiopia as a Marxist country came under the sway of the Soviet Union, that became even a stronger sort of theme: feudalism, feudalism, land to the peasant. And there was this idea that if you just distributed the land, everything would be solved. But the system in Ethiopia wasn't really like a European system. Land was owned in Ethiopia by the peasants. And this was called Rist, which came from a root which means to inherit. And a peasant owned his land and could pass it on to his descendants. Now there's incredible complexity with that. That needn't concern us at the moment. What gult was, or guelt gult, was that the king or other officials could go to that same place where the peasant owned the land and say this noble or this church or this soldier has the right to place taxes on the peasant who owns the land. And the gold system was the way in which the emperors and other officials rewarded their followers. You were loyal to the emperor? He gave you land not as yours to own, but that you could apply taxes to. And unlike Rist that the peasant had, gult could be taken back, could be transferred. A new emperor could say, I'm taking this land from this monastery and I'm giving it to this peasant, to this noble. I've been taking land from this noble and I'm giving it to another noble. So it was a very unsteady situation. Over the course of time, of course, if you had a noble who had gult and had land that he had peasants on, inevitably members of the quote-unquote noble family, and what made this a noble family may have simply been the fact that they had been given gult and not any lineage that they had, would marry with the local peasantry, and so the difference between inheritable land and not inheritable land um could could really get blurred. There's one other crucial point about this. If you have a system in which the way you reward loyalty is by division of spoils, by taking a resource and rewarding their loyal followers by giving them some of that resource, you have to keep enlarging the amount of that resource. Because otherwise, the only way you can give to one person is to take away from another person, and then you're gonna have bitter people who you took away from. And if the resource that you're giving out is land, well, the way you're able to do that is to conquer more and more land, so that you can then take that land, tell the peasants who are on it they can stay there, but give that but give the taxes to a local official. And so gult and risk are crucial to the understanding of the economy of pre-modern Ethiopia. I would even say of Ethiopia. Yeah, let's say a pre-modern Ethiopia, but in some ways you would say of Ethiopia until the revolution in the 1970s. Um, I don't deal, I don't deal a tremendous amount with that in in the book, um, partly because of its complexity. Um, but you know, again, it's it's a key element to the understanding of the economics of Ethiopia, much in the way, you know, trade, you know, trade was you know was crucial to understand Islam and Ethiopia and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:30

In light of what you've just shared, if you don't mind me asking, just as a follow-up, um what new revelations have come to light through archaeology in Ethiopia and Ethiopian archaeology? How is that influencing the writing of history and what we know about Ethiopian history?

SPEAKER_04 2:03:50

Okay, good question, actually.

SPEAKER_03 2:03:52

Um for many years, when you talk about Ethiopian archaeology, you meant one of two things. In the far south of the country, prehistory. You know, the Leakey family, the discovery of Lucy, um, you know, basically the early hominids and that whole national geographic story of the emergence of people. And the other part was archaeology in and around the city of Aksum. And to some extent in and around the city of Lalibella. But certainly, you know, and and that was archaeology in the service of, I would say, like an elite political population. What's happened in recent years is that the archaeology has expanded to include a series of subjects that were grossly neglected in previous archaeology. This includes the archaeology of Islam and the uncovering of Muslim cities and mosques and the thriving Muslim culture in medieval Ethiopia that we weren't really aware of. It includes somewhat outside the scope of my book, archaeology of the Portuguese period in Ethiopia, and buildings that clearly show the Portuguese influence and activity. Moreover, in the latter case, we see through the archaeology the connections between India and Ethiopia, because often the skilled artisans who worked on some of these places were clearly Indians who were imported because of their skills. Along with this incredible expansion in access to manuscripts that we have in Ethiopia over the past fifty years, the other major transformation of Ethiopian, of the way we write Ethiopian history, is the expansion of the archaeological evidence that we have access to.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:43

As we bring today's dialogue to a close, can you kindly tell us where you've devoted your attention since completing this project?

SPEAKER_03 2:06:52

Uh sure. Um I started out working on, as I indicated in the very beginning, started out working on Ethiopia, on Ethiopian Christianity, and the medieval history of the church. And just around the time that I finished my doctorate, they started bringing Ethiopian immigrants into Israel as Jews to become part of the population. And I was one of the few people who knew a lot about Ethiopia already. And I began doing work on Ethiopia, uh on Ethiopian Jews and on Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Since um since I did this project, I've returned to that. Um with a colleague in Jerusalem, I we did an article about a pilgrimage site near Jerusalem where Ethiopian Jews come to worship. We did a synthesis article, which is one we've done every decade for a while now, which basically tries to summarize what has been going on with Ethiopian Jews in Israel. How many are there, what's their economic situation, who do they marry, you know, uh how's what's their education and things like that. And the the other thing that I'm that I've done is um I've mentioned, you know, we've mentioned this thing of translation and how uh Ethiopian texts went, you know, text went from Arabic to Gez and from the church to Ethiopian Jews. Um, I've been working on, on the one hand, a new source on the history of Ethiopian Jews, which exists in a Gez church source, and trying to understand it. And on the other hand, on uh the first ever translation into English of the homily of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, which exists in Syriac and Arabic versions, and the Christian version has been translated into French, but the Beita Israel Ethiopian Jewish version has never been translated. And so I'm working with a colleague on that.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:28

As we end our dialogue today, I'd like to emphasize how appreciative and humbled I feel for your magnanimity and generosity throughout the course of this conversation. I can hardly thank you enough.

SPEAKER_03 2:09:43

Well, thank you. It's been it's been a real it's a real pleasure. As I say, I I'm retired, and so it's been a while since I've been able to talk so much about the work that I love, and thank you for giving me the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:58

As we end today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbalat, your host on the Dialogues and International History Podcast. Today it's been my privilege to engage in a dialogue with Stephen Kaplan regarding his newly published book, The Ethiopians Lost Civilizations, published in London by React Young Books 2025. Stephen Kaplan is associate uh fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences for over 35 years. Uh uh taught African studies and comparative religion uh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Uh his books include Ethiopia, uh history, uh culture, and challenges. Uh Ethiopia has fascinated observers since ancient times. Uh this book offers a new perspective on Ethiopian history up to the year 1500, starting with the Aksumite civilization at the beginning of the common era. Uh uh revisits well-known narratives such as the tale of the Queen of Sheba, analyzes the rise and decline of Aksum, investigates the influence of Muslims and Islam in Ethiopian society, and emphasizes the architectural marvels of Lalibella's raccoon churches. By concentrating on the golden age of early Solomonic rulers, the book integrates the latest scholarship to provide a clearer and more nuanced understanding of this history than ever before.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:40

Thank you wholeheartedly.