Abyssinia, Ethiopia, Axum, Meroe, Yemen, History and Modern Politics - by Prof. M. S. Megalommatis

Published on 15 Jun 2016 <br /> <br />TO READ THE TEXT GO: https://www.academia.edu/26199165/Aby... <br /> <br />Several misconceptions diffused by colonial historians and totalitarian governments need immediate refutation. <br /> <br />Ancient Ethiopia and its borders <br /> <br />Part of the Abyssinian state propaganda advances the idea that in the Antiquity “the Cushites populated the whole of Eastern Africa” and that “the majority lived in present day Abyssinia”. Even worse, these falsifiers diffuse the idea that at those days “Sudan and Ethiopia were one country” to add that “Abyssinians were just a few Sabaean (Yemenite) refugees who intermingled with the Kushite population”. <br /> <br />This is absolutely wrong, although there are some correct elements in it. In addition, it is said in a very misleading way! Even more, it is self-contradictory. <br /> <br />The Cushites, as part of the Hamitic family, were living for millennia in the South of Egypt. We now know that the famous non-Egyptian Hyksos dynasties ruled Egypt to some extent thanks to their alliance with the people who developed the Kerma civilization in Sudan during the 2nd millennium BCE. These were the ancestors of the Cushites, who formed later (in the 1st millennium) their capital at Napata, the area of present day Karima. <br /> <br />We know that the term Kas was used by the Egyptians to describe the area, the people and the kingdom at the area of modern Sudan, long before the term is disfigured into ‘Mat Kusi’ in Assyrian - Babylonian, ‘Kush’ in Hebrew, and ‘Hus’ in the Greek Biblical text. Then, comes the introduction of the Greek term ‘Aithiopia’ for the same land, people and state. In most of the cases, the Greek Biblical text renders ‘Aithiopia’ what stands in the Hebrew text as Cush. <br /> <br />But it is a state, namely the Kushite state of Napata, whose rulers reigned in Egypt for some time (Piankhi, Shabaka, Shabataka, Taharqa and Tanut Amon, the ‘Ethiopian’ dynasty according the term employed by Manetho for the 25th dynasty), before being expelled by the Assyrians emperors Assarhaddon and Assurbanipal, who annexed Egypt. <br /> <br />The same term is used in Greek for later phases of Sudan's (Ethiopia’s} pre-Christian history. When twice in the sixth century Psammetichus II (595 BCE) and Cambyses, the Iranian invader of Egypt, (525 BCE), go so far in the south as Napata (Karima lies at 1050 km in the south of Aswan, so 1900 km in the south of Cairo – alongside the Nile) and destroy that city, the Cushites – Ethiopians transfer their capital further in the south, to the area of today’s Bagrawiyah (1550 km in the south of Aswan), as if they wanted to ensure that nobody would undertake an attack against them from the north anymore! Then, rises Meroe (with its numerous pyramids built between 400 BCE and 350 CE and preserved today in Bagrawiyah), about which we have the valuable narrations of Heliodorus (in his ‘Aithiopica’, a description of the Sudanese Meroitic kingdom). Meroe was the capital of Aithiopia. <br />First published in AfroArticles on 21st April 2007