IMAGINATIVE WRITINGS ON ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN OF AFRICA: SUPPLEMENT AND UPDATE

ዋና ገጽ | የኢትዮጵያ ታሪክና ሥነጽሑፍ የምርምር ሥራዎች /Researches on Ethiopian History and Literature/
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IMAGINATIVE WRITINGS ON ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN OF AFRICA: SUPPLEMENT AND UPDATE


Richard Pankhurst - Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO)
  


 Ethiopia a and the Horn of Africa, a s noted in a previous article1, have been the subject o over the centuries of considerable number of novels,  short stories, plays and poems. The present study, which is based on further investigation in an area scarcely charted with bibliographies, is designed to supplement, as well as to update, the earlier work. Both articles, it should be noted, are concerned  exclusively  with  works in languages other than those of the region. The latter deserve a study, or studies, of their own.


Ancient Writings

  The ancient Greeks, whose writings were scarcely  covered in the earlier article, used the term Ethiopia, as is well known, to designate all dark-skinned people south of Egypt. They made many references to Ethiopia in their literature. In the 9th century B .C. Homer in his Odessey writes of the Ethiopians as eschatoi andron, or the most remote of men. In Book I of his Miad he has Zeus, the king of the gods, leave heaven for twelve days, with all the other gods, to visit  the "blameless Ethiopians", while the goddess Isis later goes to their country to participate in sacrificial rites to the immortal gods. In the Odessey  the sea god Poseidon is likewise aid to have " lingered delighted " at one of the banquets of the Ethiopians.
  Later, in the fifth century B .C., the dramatist Aeschylus had Io, the wandering woman of Prometheus Bound, travel to " a far-off land" inhabited by " a nation of black men" who lived near " the fountain of the sun" and the " river Aethiops ".
 Such ideas were slow to die. In the first century B .C. the historian Diodorus Siculus thus wrote, in Homeric vein, that Hercules and Bacchus, the son of Zeus, were both " awed by the piety " of the Ethiopians.
 In the 7th century A .D. the Byzantine writer Stephanus Placidus likewise observed that the Ethiopians were " loved by the gods because of justice " , and adds: " Juniper frequently leaves heaven and feasts with them because of their justice and the equity of their customs. For the Ethiopians are said to be the justest men and for that reason the gods leave their abode frequently to visit them". (Quoted in F.M. Snowden, Blaks in Antiquity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970, p. 148).


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Richard Pankhurst - Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO)
 
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