Foundations of an African Civilization PDF Download

Author: D. W. Phillipson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1847010881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
"Focuses on the Aksumite state of the first millennium AD in northern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea, its development, florescence and eventual transformation into the so-called medieval civilisation of Christian Ethiopia. This book seeks to apply a common methodology, utilising archaeology, art-history, written documents and oral tradition from a wide variety of sources; the result is a far greater emphasis on continuity than previous studies have revealed. It is thus a major re-interpretation of a key development in Ethiopia's past, while raising and discussing methodological issues of the relationship between archaeology and other historical disciplines; these issues, which have theoretical significance extending far beyond Ethiopia, are discussed in full. The last millennium BC is seen as a time when northern Ethiopia and parts of Eritrea were inhabited by farming peoples whose ancestry may be traced far back into the local 'Late Stone Age'. Colonisation from southern Arabia, to which defining importance has been attached by earlier researchers, is now seen to have been brief in duration and small in scale, its effects largely restricted to ľite sections of the community. Re-consideration of inscriptions shows the need to abandon the established belief in a single 'Pre-Aksumite' state. New evidence for the rise of Aksum during the last centuries BC is critically evaluated. Finally, new chronological precision is provided for the decline of Aksum and the transfer of centralised political authority to more southerly regions. A new study of the ancient churches - both built and rock-hewn - which survive from this poorly-understood period emphasises once again a strong degree of continuity across periods that were previously regarded as distinct."--Publisher's website.

Author: Graham Connah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521596909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This edition of African Civilizations, first published in 2001, re-examines the physical evidence for developing social complexity in tropical Africa.

Author: Ronny Meyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198728549
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1425

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Book Description
This handbook provides a comprehensive account of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, exploring both their structures and features and their function and use in society. The first part of the volume provides background and general information relating to Ethiopian languages, including their demographic distribution and classification, language policy, scripts and writing, and language endangerment. Subsequent parts are dedicated to the four major language families in Ethiopia - Cushitic, Ethiosemitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic - and contain studies of individual languages, with an initial introductory overview chapter in each part. Both major and less-documented languages are included, ranging from Amharic and Oromo to Zay, Gawwada, and Yemsa. The final part explores languages that are outside of those four families, namely Ethiopian Sign Language, Ethiopian English, and Arabic. With its international team of senior researchers and junior scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages will appeal to anyone interested in the languages of the region and in African linguistics more broadly.

Author: George Hatke
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527565335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
South Arabia is one of the least known parts of the Near East. It is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains so under-explored. In pre-Islamic times, however, it was well-connected to the rest of the world. Due to its location at the crossroads of caravan and maritime routes, pre-Islamic South Arabia linked the Near East with Africa and the Mediterranean with India. The region is unique in that it has a written history extending as far back as the early first millennium BCE—a far longer history than that of any other part of the Arabian Peninsula. The papers collected in this volume make a number of important contributions to the study of the history and languages of ancient South Arabia, as well as the history of South Arabian studies, and will be of interest to scholars and laypeople alike.

Author: Getatchew Haile
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042917408
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Abuna Estifanos (Stephen), the edition and translation of whose hagiographical life is presented here, was the leader of a monastic reform movement that shook the foundations of the Ethiopian State and Church in the fifteenth century. Estifanos (Stephen) started his movement at the end of the reign of the king whom Emperor Yeshaq succeeded in 1413 AD. The reform movement of Estifanos and his followers, called Daqiqa Estifanos or Estifanosites or Stephanites, was known to the local clergy from the time of the reign of Emperor Zar'a Ya'eqob (1434-1468). As we know from Zar'a Ya'eqob's writings, including some miracles of Mary or Ta'ammera Maryam, the Estifanosites were at loggerheads with the monarch. The outside world first became aware of the Daqiqa Estifanos from the narratives of the Portuguese embassy that visited Ethiopia during the years 1520-1527. Since then several travelers and scholars have written about these monks. The basis of the Estifanosites reform movement was that monks should observe a strict monastic life, according to the rules laid down by the fathers of monasticism, and that the teachers of the Church should limit the doctrine of Christianity to what was found in the eighty-one canonical books of the Bible, recognized by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the observance of God's Commandments found in them. As they understood it, the main commandment neglected at that time was the order to worship God alone - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They considered the segdat, "prostration to the ground," a form of worship that should not be performed in reverence even to the Holy Cross or to the icon of the Madonna and Child, and certainly not out of respect for the king and his name. We hear little about the activities of the Daqiqa Estifanos after Na'od (1494-1508). But their history is a major component of the history of the Church. Although the acts of a few of the followers of Estifanos were published decades ago, the publication of the acts of their leader, the Gadla Abuna Estifanos, has somehow had to await the present day. Coincidentally, there is at present a movement to revive and pursue the reforms of the Estifanosites, which adds importance and urgency to the publication of this Gadla.

Author: Boris Adjemian
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755648420
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Täfäri, on a visit to Jerusalem, called on forty Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide of 1915-1916 to form his empire's royal brass band. The conductor, who was also Armenian, composed the first official anthem of the Ethiopian state. Drawing on this highly symbolic event, and following the history of the small Armenian community in Ethiopia, in this book Boris Adjemian shows how it operated on the margins of political society, hiding in its interstices, preferring intimacy and discreet loyalty to the glitter of open politics. The astonishing role of the Armenians in their host country was embodied in the friendship that the kings and queens of Ethiopia extended to them, a theme that is echoed in the life stories collected from their descendants. Bringing to light the political and cultural importance of a community that has long been ignored and has almost vanished, this study draws on the collective memory of Armenian immigration and the centuries-long history of proximity between the Armenian and Ethiopian Churches. The author argues for a sedentary approach to the diaspora, for a socio-history of this collective rootedness, which dates back to the 19th century and builds on historical representations of otherness from the early modern period up to the colonial era. Highlighting stateless immigrants halfway between the national and the foreign, this history reveals the agency of stateless immigrants and their descendants, their ability to play with identities and undermine assigned belongings. The Brass Band of the King is an original exploration of the social making of nationhood and foreignness in Africa and elsewhere.

Author: Walter Raunig
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447051750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Im Frühjahr 1906 fand die von Kaiser Wilhelm II. entsandte Deutsche Aksum-Expedition statt, die unter Leitung des deutschen Orientalisten Enno Littmann (1875-1958) stand. Schon 1913 wurden die Ergebnisse, zu denen erste systematische Ausgrabungen in Aksum, die Dokumentation von Kirchen und Klöstern, die Aufnahme von 37 Gesängen in amharischer und arabischer Sprache und die Sammlung zahlreicher Inschriften gehörte, publiziert. Zur Vorbereitung der 100. Wiederkehr dieses Ereignisses fand vom 2. bis 5. Mai 2002 in München die Erste Internationale Littmann-Konferenz zum Thema "Archaeology and History of the Horn of Africa" statt, die in der Öffentlichkeit und in Fachkreisen ein breites Echo fand. Sie wurde nach dem Muster der von F. Hintze begründeten Internationalen Meroitisten-Konferenzen organisiert. In 80 Beiträgen wurde der aktuelle Forschungsstand auf ausgewählten Gebieten behandelt. Knapp die Hälfte davon ist in diesem Band abgedruckt. Drei der vier Hauptreferate sowie sechs Diskussionsbeiträge zum Thema "Archaeology of the Horn of Africa" (R. Fattovich), vier Beiträge zum Thema "The History of the Horn of Africa", sieben Beiträge zum Thema "The Ethiopian Church" (S. Munro-Hay) und sechs Beiträge zum Thema "Enno Littmann und die Deutsche Aksum-Expedition" (R. Voigt) liegen in dem voluminösen Band vor. Sie werden ergänzt durch sieben Beiträge zu "Recent Research and New Discoveries".

Author: Manuel João Ramos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351887777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In the rural plateaux of northern Ethiopia, one can still find scattered ruins of monumental buildings that are evidently alien to the country's ancient architectural tradition. This little-known and rarely studied architectural heritage is a silent witness to a fascinating if equivocal cultural encounter that took place in the 16th-17th centuries between Catholic Europeans and Orthodox Ethiopians. The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art presents a selection of papers derived from the 5th Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, which for the first time systematically approached this heritage. The book explores the enduring impact of this encounter on the artistic, religious and political life of Ethiopia, an impact that has not been readily acknowledged, not least because the public conversion of the early 17th-century Emperor Susïnyus to Catholicism resulted in a bloody civil war shrouded in religious intolerance. Bringing together work by key researchers in the field, these studies open up a particularly rich period in the history of Ethiopia and cast new light on the complexities of cultural and religious (mis)encounters between Africa and Europe.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004505253
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity constitutes an exceptional religious tradition flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa already since late antiquity. The volume places Ethiopian Orthodoxy into a global context and explores the various ways in which it has been interconnected with the wider Christian world from the Aksumite period until today. By highlighting the formative role of both wide-ranging translocal religious interactions as well as disruptions thereof, the contributors challenge the perception of this African Christian tradition as being largely isolated in the course of its history. Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity in a Global Context: Entanglements and Disconnections offers a new perspective on the Horn of Africa’s Christian past and reclaims its place on the map of global Christianity.

Author: Ayele Bekerie
Publisher: The Red Sea Press
ISBN: 9781569020210
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A groundbreaking book about the history and principles of Ethiopic (Ge'ez), an African writing system designed as a meaningful and graphic representation of a wide range of knowledge.