Languages (October 1908), and the work of E. W. Budge cited above.
A description of the chief ruins and the results of Dr D. R. MacIver’s
researches in northern Nubia, begun in 1907, will be found under
Sudan: Anglo-Egyptian.
The Axumite Kingdom.—About the 1st century of the Christian era a new kingdom grew up at Axum (q.v.), of which a king Zoscales is mentioned in the Periplus Maris Erythraei. Fragments of the history of this kingdom, of which there is no authentic chronicle, have been made out chiefly by the aid of inscriptions, of which the following is a list:—(1) Greek inscription of Adulis, copied by Cosmas Indicopleustes in 545, the beginning, with the king’s name, lost. (2) Sabaean inscription of Ela Amida in two halves, discovered by J. Theodore Bent at Axum in 1893, and completed by E. Littmann in 1906. (3) Ethiopic inscription probably of the same king, imperfect (Littmann). (4) Trilingual inscription of Aeizanes, the Greek version discovered by Henry Salt in 1805, the Sabaean by Bent, and the Ethiopic (Geez) by Littmann. (5) Ethiopic inscription of Aeizanes (so Littmann), son of Ela Amida, discovered by Eduard Rüppell in 1833. (6) Ethiopic inscriptions of Hetana-Dan’el, son of Dabra Efrem. These are all long inscriptions giving details of wars, &c. The sixth is later than the rest, which are to be attributed to the most flourishing period of the kingdom, the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The fourth is pagan, the fifth Christian, Aeizanes having in the interval embraced Christianity. It was to this king that the emperor Constantius addressed a letter in 356 A.D.
Aeizanes and his successors style themselves kings of the Axumites, Homerites (Himyar), Raidan, the Ethiopians (Habašat), the Sabaeans, Silee, Tiamo, the Bugaites (Beģa) and Kasu. This style implies considerable conquests in South Arabia, which, however, must have been lost to the Axumites by A.D. 378. They claim to rule the Kasu or Meroitic Ethiopians; and the fifth inscription records an expedition along the Atbara and the Nile to punish the Nuba and Kasu, and a fragment of a Greek inscription from Meroë was recognized by Sayce as commemorating a king of Axum. Except for these inscriptions Axumite history is a blank until in the 6th century we find the Axumite king sending an expedition to wreck the Jewish state then existing in S. Arabia, and reducing that country to a state of vassalage: the king is styled in Ethiopian chronicles Caleb (Kaleb), in Greek and Arabic documents El-Esbaha. In the 7th century a successor to this king, named Abraha or Abraham, gave refuge to the persecuted followers of Mahomet at the beginning of his career (see Arabia: History, ad init.). A few more names of kings occur on coins, which were struck in Greek characters till about A.D. 700, after which time that language seems definitely to have been displaced in favour of Ethiopic or Geez: the condition of the script and the coins renders them all difficult to identify with the names preserved in the native lists, which are too fanciful and mutually contradictory to furnish of themselves even a vestige of history. For the period between the rise of Islam and the beginning of the modern history of Abyssinia there are a few notices in Arabic writers; so we have a notice of a war between Ethiopia and Nubia about 687 (C. C. Rossini in Giorn. Soc. Asiat. Ital. x. 141), and of a letter to George king of Nubia from the king of Abyssinia some time between 978 and 1003, when a Jewish queen Judith was oppressing the Christian population (I. Guidi, ibid. iii. 176, 7).
The Abyssinian chronicles, it may be noted, attribute the foundation of the kingdom to Menelek (or Ibn el-Hakim), son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. The Axumite or Menelek dynasty was driven from northern Abyssinia by Judith, but soon after another Christian dynasty, that of the Zagués, obtained power. In 1268 the reigning prince abdicated in favour of Yekūnō Amlāk. king of Shoa, a descendant of the monarch overthrown by Judith (see Abyssinia).
See A. Dillman, Die Anfänge des axumitischen Reiches (Berlin, 1879); E. Drouin, Revue archéol. xliv. (1882); T. Mommsen, Geschichte der römischen Provinzen, chap. xiii.; W. Dittenberger, Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones selectae, Nos. 199, 200; Littmann u. Kroncker, Vorbericht der deutschen Aksum-Expedition (Berlin, 1906), and Littman’s subsequent researches.
Ethiopic Literature
The employment of the Geez or Ethiopic language for literary purposes appears to have begun no long time before the introduction of Christianity into Abyssinia, and its pagan period is represented by two Axumite inscriptions (published by D. H. Müller in J. T. Bent’s Sacred City of the Ethiopians, 1893), and an inscription at Matara (published by C. C. Rossini, Rendiconti Accad. Lincei, 1896). As a literary language it survived its use as a vernacular, but it is unknown at what time it ceased to be the latter. In Sir W. Cornwallis Harris’s Highlands of Aethiopia (1844) there is a list of rather more than 100 works extant in Ethiopic; subsequent research has chiefly brought to light fresh copies of the same works, but it has contributed some fresh titles. A conspectus of all the MSS. known to exist in Europe (over 1200 in number) was published by C. C. Rossini in 1899 (Rendiconti Accad. Lincei, ser. v. vol. viii.); of these the largest collection is that in the British Museum, but others of various sizes are to be found in the chief libraries of Europe. R. E. Littmann (in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, xv. and xvi.) describes two collections at Jerusalem, one of which contains 283 MSS.; and Rossini (Rendiconti, 1904) a collection of 35 MSS. belonging to the Catholic mission at Cheren. Other collections exist in Abyssinia, and many MSS. are in private hands. In 1893 besides portions of the Bible some 40 Ethiopic books had been printed in Europe (enumerated in L. Goldschmidt’s Bibliotheca Aethiopica), but many more have since been published.
Geez literature is ordinarily divided into two periods, of which the first dates from the establishment of Christianity in the 5th century, and ends somewhere in the 7th; the second from the re-establishment of the Salomonic dynasty in 1268, continuing to the present time. It consists chiefly of translations, made in the first period from Greek, in the second from Arabic. It has no authors of the first or even of the second rank. Its character as a sacred and literary language is due to its translation of the Bible, which in the ordinary enumeration is made to contain 81 books, 46 of the Old Testament, and 35 of the New. These figures are most probably obtained by adding to the ordinary canonical books Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Jubilees, Enoch, the Ascension of Isaiah, Ezra IV., Shepherd of Hermas, the Synodos (Canons of the Apostles), the Book of Adam, and Joseph Ben Gorion. For the distinction between canonical and apocryphal appears to be unknown to the Ethiopic Church, whose chief service to Biblical literature consists in its preservation of various apocryphal works which other parts of Christendom have lost or possess only in an imperfect form (see Enoch; Jubilees, Book of, &c.). It should be observed that the Maccabees of the Ethiopic Bible is an entirely different work from the books of that name included in the Septuagint, of which, however, the Abyssinians have a recent version made from the Vulgate; specimens of their own Maccabees have been published by J. Horovitz in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, vol. xx. The MSS. of the Biblical books vary very much, and none of them can claim any great antiquity; the oldest extant MS. of the four Books of Kings appears to be one in the Museo Borgiano, presented by King Amda Sion (1314) to the Virgin Mary in Jerusalem (described by N. Roupp, ibid. xvi. 296-342). Hence P. de Lagarde supposed the Ethiopic version to have been made from the Arabic, which indeed is in accordance with a native tradition. This opinion is held by few; C. F. A. Dillman distinguished in the case of the Old Testament three classes of MSS., a versio antiqua, made from the Septuagint (probably in the Hesychian text), a class revised from Greek MSS., and a class revised from the Hebrew (probably through the medium of an Arabic version). An examination of ten chapters of St Matthew by L. Hackspill (ibid. vol. xi.) led to the result that the Ethiopic version of the Gospels was made about A.D. 500, from a Syro-occidental text, and that this original translation is represented by Cod. Paris. Aeth. 32; whereas most MSS. and all printed editions contain a text influenced by the Alexandrian Vulgate, and show traces of Arabic. Rossini (ibid. x. 232) has made it probable that the
