Reflections on Eritrea’s Distant Past
By Administrator
https://shabait.com/amp/2021/02/17/refl ... ssion=true
February 17, 2021
In the Press Department of the Ministry of Information, there is a picture of the Stele of Metera, just outside Senafe, in the South of Eritrea. It is in the middle of the open field, nothing, absolutely nothing stands near the stele. The camera, which people say doesn’t lie, doesn’t expose everything to our gaze.
Neither does it tell us, the whole story of the stele. At first sight, the location of the stele makes one think why it was erected in the middle of nowhere. Archaeology, however, has established that the place was not a nowhere, but a bustling town and a trading center during the Axumite Empire. Francis Anfray suggests the town the Periplus mentions as a
that wascity of the interior
during the 1st century could be either Qohayto or Metera.the trading post for ivory
Archaeology has shown that Semitic-speaking people, probably the Agazi, lived there and the stele testifies to their presence in that part of Eritrea.
Almost at the top end of the stele, a symbol, a crescent, representing a deity named Astar, a deity that generation worshipped before the introduction of Christianity to Eritrea, is curved into it. In excavations carried out in Metera, different kinds of houses, and churches, one of which was built on a burial vault, were unearthed. Archaeologists claim that the different kinds of houses reflected the different social strata that existed at the time. The Encyclopedia Ethiopica, gives this conclusive comment about Metera:
Based on pottery excavated, unearthed from a level as deep as 5m, archaeologists put the age of the Metera settlement between 10th and 8th century BC. Other objects recovered, including gold objects, and Roman and Axumite coins, with effigies of eight Axumite emperors, are of much later age. Other items testify to the different kinds of changes that visited Metera.The ensemble of the unearthed ruins in part of the site provides an actual outline of a town layout of ca. 6th-7th cent. A.D. that was not surrounded by defensive walls, since no trace of the latter has been found.
writes Francis Anfray in the Encyclopedia.Numerous inscriptions dating to various epochs, in stone or in potsherds, contribute to the bulk of epigraphic, philological, historical and religious information yielded by the site…,
One wonders what tools these ancients used to curve the crescent into the hard rock, and how they erected it in the absence of appropriate technology. One further wonders, how these ancients hewed the stele out of a bigger rock. As can be easily imagined, this is no easy task, and requires special skill and lots of knowledge about tools and rocks.Two small schist plaques … found in the grass nearby are of particular value since they document an archaic form of Geez….
Many other historical sites in Eritrea make you think of science, technology, and the transmission of knowledge to the next generation. In a monastery known as Debre Libanos in Ham, not very far from Metera, a number of corpses mummified hundreds of years ago lie intact. Speaking of Ham and its monastery, Mathew C. Curtis and Alessando Bausi state that during the 1980s, at least 60 wrapped and desiccated (“mummified”) ancient human bodies, some with sandals, crosses, and various tools, were found in burials near Enda Mariam Church in Ham. As ancient Egyptian history shows, mummification requires some specialized knowledge about the human body, its decomposition, and chemicals that can fight decomposition effectively.
One can mention many other instances from distant Eritrean past, that show ancient Eritreans possessed knowledge that we moderns don’t think they did. You can take Adulis or the ancient dam in the Qohayto area, which is thought to have been built during the Axumite period and still remains intact. These historical sites display, the kind of knowledge that helped ancient Eritreans lead their daily lives. It included knowledge about construction, trade, chemistry, biology, and a lot of things about the natural world and how it works.
In ‘Lords of the Sea’, Anthony D’ Avray (p. 14) quotes the author of ‘The Periplus of the Aeythraean Sea’.
Such information leaves us with an important question, with which scholars of Eritrean history should tackle and try to address: Why is it that ancient Eritreans who had such valuable knowledge in different fields, as mentioned above, failed to pass them to their children? Why is it that the ancient Eritreans, who in the eyes of the Romans earned so much respect, failed to pass the knowledge that proved so useful to the Romans, who influenced the course of Western history?Among the many ports he described, he gave significant mention to Adulis. It was in his time the entrepot for the trade into and from the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum: African ivory, gold and silver plate, copper sheets, muslin from India, are among the range of items mentioned in the ‘Periplus’. So important did Axum rank in its heyday that Emperor Constantine gave orders that its citizens should be treated as the equals of the citizens of Rome.
The ancient Romans, who conquered Ancient Greece, were so enamored by the wisdom of their conquered subjects that they made sure their children received knowledge in Greek wisdom. Roman nobles employed their Greek slaves and made sure their children were tutored in Greek culture. In other words, the conquered Greeks taught the conquering Romans Greek arts and sciences. As often happens, people or nations need an outside influence to perceive what they lack. I don’t think, the ancient Eritreans had such an outside influence.
Kwix, an online encyclopedia, describes how the Greek influenced Roman way of life.
However, as Horace gently put it:In the 2nd to 1st centuries BC, Rome conquered Greece piece by piece until, with the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, the Roman Empire controlled the Mediterranean.
… Conquered Greece has conquered the brute victor and brought her arts into rustic Latium. …
Ancient Eritreans had all the knowledge, skills, and way of life of any great civilization but failed to pass these to the next generations because they didn’t have formal mechanisms of transmitting this knowledge. I have not read the ancient Axumites had teachers or tutors, as the ancient Romans did. I have read there are books in Geez (the language of the Axumites) on astronomy, philosophy, religion and other subjects though this knowledge failed to cross over to modern Eritrean languages such as Tigrigna or Tigre. In short, the ancient Eritreans failed to teach this knowledge in formal schools, or places that ensured the transmission of this knowledge.Roman art and literature were calqued, upon Hellenistic models. Koine Greek, remained the dominant language in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. In the city of Rome, Koine Greek was in widespread use among ordinary people, and the elite spoke and wrote Greek as fluently as Latin.
In my view, the culprit is the shift in the ancient Eritreans’ preoccupation and their belief about the role of writing in daily life. Swedish missionaries had a difficult time convincing the Eritrean clergy to translate the Bible into Tigrigna and Tigre in the late 19th century, because the people with the capacity had the belief that the Scriptures should not be translated into Tigrigna which in the views of the clergy and a majority of the population was a language of shepherds, prostitutes, and scandal hungry-people.
This resistance is evident in the kind of attitude the first books to be printed in Tigrigna, a book of stories and parables aroused.
writes Solomon Amanuel, the author of Berhan Kone.It aroused a lot of controversy,
Quoting Elsie Winqvist, one of the translators of the Tigrigna Bible, Mr. Solomon explains how the Tigrigna people’s belief about the role of their language in their daily life limited the language to a religious domain and how it most probably affected the growth of secular literature in many Eritrean languages.
In short, the absence in ancient Eritrean societies of formal institutions of the transmission of knowledge, skills and the society’s experiences and culture to the next generation, which I believe was affected by the lack of serious preoccupation of the society with the natural world, influenced the course of our history.In the Ethiopian custom, paper and the alphabets are sacred things. Many people believed in employing them, one should write only sacred ideas. Using sacred things and writing worldly stories and parables only profanes the act of writing or even the sacred alphabets. In addition, these people believed one should start writing by invoking the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
