The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler
Today's date is: 5/12/2025
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| 29 The legend, according to some scholars, could have been created in order to find an explanation for the passage in Numbers 12: 1 which describes how in the wilderness of Sinai, after the people had consumed a surfeit of quails, 'Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman'. Whether this explanation is justified or not, the story has geographical merit for it provides a recognisable description of the site of Meroe- a place of great importance in antiquity - which stood south of the modern town of Atbara, not far from the confluence of the Nile and Atbara rivers in what is now called Northern Sudan or Nubia. The ambiguity of the name Ethiopia can easily give rise to confusion as its location in ancient-rimes was different from what is understood by Ethiopia today. The ancient Greeks invented the name, meaning the land of the burnt faces, and for long it embraced almost anywhere south and south-west of Egypt, far into central Africa and beyond. In the Septuagint the Hebrew word Cush (which was taken from ancient Egyptian) has been translated into Greek as Ethiopia, which corresponded with the ancient Meroitic kingdom. The modern state of Ethiopia which, until comparatively recently, was known abroad as Abyssinia is, for the sake of clarity, sometimes better referred to by that name. The modern state has a perfectly good claim to its name for, as Professor Arkell has remarked, (1) 'the king of Meroe was called 'king of the Ethiopians' in contemporary Greek in the third century AD and since the kingdom was later at least partly merged in the Axumite kingdom the name 'Ethiopia' is correctly continued in Abyssinia today'. This overlap between the borders of ancient Ethiopia, its successor Axum and the present state has left a lingering irredentist demand for the revision of frontiers which still crops up from time to time. When Burckhardt, the Swiss explorer, visited Shendy, 100 miles north of Khartoum, in 1814, he found 'the Ethiopians were still laying claim to it. They threatened to come down the Blue Nile once again and seize it'(2) following, perhaps, the example of King Ezana a millennium and a half earlier. Again, when the present western boundary of Abyssinia was defined by the Anglo-Abyssinian Treaty of 15 May 1902, Emperor Menelik II was reluctant to accept the suggested border with the Sudan. Eleven years earlier he had addressed a letter to the European powers in which he informed them of the boundaries of his (1)The History of the Sudan to 1821, p. 113. |