Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HORNEAST (Horn and Crescent. Connections, Mobility and Exchange between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in the Middle Ages)

Teaser

This project offers the first comprehensive study of medieval connections between Christian societies of Nubia and Ethiopia on the one hand, and their Islamic environment on the other, in both local and regional contexts, ie. within the Horn of Africa and in the whole Middle...

Summary

This project offers the first comprehensive study of medieval connections between Christian societies of Nubia and Ethiopia on the one hand, and their Islamic environment on the other, in both local and regional contexts, ie. within the Horn of Africa and in the whole Middle East. It pursues the hypothesis that mobility and exchange along trade and pilgrimage routes, on both sides of and across the Red Sea, were not only vectors for the spread of Islam but also factors of African Christianities’ resiliency and reconfiguration in the Middle Ages.
Apart from their relationships with other Eastern Christian churches in Egypt and Palestine, Ethiopian and Nubian Christianities have long been considered as isolated islands, cut off from the world by the Arab conquests of the Seventh century and later on by Islam’s expansion in the Horn of Africa. In this perspective, Islam was regarded as a foreign import in the area, playing a marginal role in the history of local societies. By reassessing the connections of Ethiopian and Nubian Christianities with their medieval environment, mainly governed by Islamic powers, this project provides the opportunity to reconsider the place and role of Islam in the Horn of Africa which remain poorly known. Islamic communities and polities might have locally emerged in medieval Nubia and Ethiopia in symbiosis with Christian societies. Along with their conflictive relations, the former would therefore have acted as brokers between the later and the rest of the world.
HORNEAST has the following objectives:
1. Providing a comprehensive survey of connections between Christian societies of Nubia and Ethiopia and their Islamic environment (places, individuals, contexts) supported by a database.
2. Analyzing human mobility in the whole area within different configurations: Christian and Muslim pilgrimages in the Middle East, long-distance trade from and towards the Horn of Africa, more specifically slave trade and slavery of Nubian and Ethiopian individuals, attractiveness of major cities such as Cairo.
3. Exploring cultural transfer and dissemination in the whole area within Christen- and Islamdom, as well as between them, through the circulation of artefacts, books and letters, models and narratives.
4. Evidencing regional connections and Christian-Muslim relations in Eastern Tigray (Ethiopia), a central area of the medieval Christian kingdom where Muslim communities are documented between the Tenth and the Thirteenth centuries, through archaeological survey, excavations and a geographic information system.
5. Making available new source materials related to the history of Islam in the Horn of Africa by expanding the corpus of Arabic inscriptions from medieval Ethiopia, Nubia and Sudanese Eastern desert through surveys of museum collections and archaeological fieldworks, by providing a geographic information system of this corpus along with a scientific edition of the artefacts previously unknown, by publishing new editions and commentaries of Arabic historical texts written in medieval Ethiopia.
This project is groundbreaking in rallying around the PI historians working on the area’s various realms in their several written languages (Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Greek, Coptic, Ge’ez, Latin, Roman languages), in both Christian and Islamic contexts, from the Arab conquests until the eve of the Ottoman era. It ultimately aims to reconnect the Horn of Africa to the global history of the area by connecting disjoint fields of research.

Work performed

Overview of the action’s implementation

Initial goals
The ERC COG project HornEast has been conceived as a way to challenge the tradional narrative of the history of Ethiopia and Nubia as besieged fortresses facing Islamic countries in the Middle Ages. HornEast has been intended to focus on connections, mobility and exchange in the area on both regional and local scales, ie. between the Horn of Africa and the whole Middle East on the one hand, between the Christian societies of Ethiopia and Nubia and their Muslim neighbours in the Horn on the other. The project’s originality consists of its ambition to put the history of the Horn of Africa back in its global context by investigating fields of research usually disconnected, due to language diversity of the source material (in Ge’ez, Coptic, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Greek, Old Nubian…), religious boundaries (between Islam and Christianity) and modern national narratives (in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan, but also Yemen and Egypt). Such a Connected studies agenda has been conceived as a way to open new avenues of research on the still poorly known history of Islam and of its expansion in the Horn. But it also pursues the hypothesis that human mobility, economic exchange and cultural transfer have favoured as well the resiliency of Christian societies in the Horn and even, in the Ethiopian case, the expansion of christianity during the Middle Ages. Arabic sources and Islamic history are indeed at the core of the project, due to the understudied richness of the former for the history of the Horn, to the structuring nature of the latter when dealing with connections and exchange in the area, and to the PI’s field of research. But HornEast nevertheless aims at highlighting a global history of the Horn of Africa beyond religious, linguistic, national or academic boundaries, by focusing on cross-cultural connections and interreligious relations.

Team building
The first stage in the action’s implementation was the building of a team of junior and senior researchers around the PI in order to cover the various academic fields of the project. Prominent senior academics in Ethiopian studies (Bertrand Hirsch, Marie-Laure Derat, François-Xavier Fauvelle) as well as in Islamic studies (Giuseppe Cecere, Sobhi Bouderbala, David Bramoullé) are supporting, and participating in, the project on non-permanent basis since its launching meeting in February 2018. A senior Ethiopian researcher, Deresse Ayenachew (Debre Berhan University), expert in Ge’ez and Amharic sources, has been recruited for three years in the project. The latter is also providing an invaluable help for the implementation of fieldwork missions in Ethiopia.
Three post-doc fellows are making major contributions to the project: Amélie Chekroun (HornEast post-doc fellow between January and September 2018) in Islamic history of Ethiopia; Damien Labadie (HornEast post-doc fellow since September 2018) in Ge’ez, Coptic, Greek, Old Nubian, Arabic and Persian litteratures; Robin Seignobos (post-doc fellow at the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in Cairo, associated to the project) in Nubian studies. Note that Amélie Chekroun has been recruited as full researcher by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in October 2018 and assigned to the IREMAM, the research unity which is currently hosting the project at Aix-Marseille University: she continues to be actively involved in the project on a full-time basis.
Three PhD candidates are also working on their doctoral researches in the framework, and with the full or partial support, of the project: Shahista Refaat (HornEast doctoral fellow for three years since October 2018 at Aix-Marseille University under the PI’s supervision), working on the social history of Ethiopian slaves, freed men and women in Mamluk Egypt and Syria; Camille Villenave (PhD candidate under the PI’s supervision since October 2018 at Aix-Marseille University, whose HornEas

Final results

Results and prospects of the first 18 months

The results of the first 18 months of the ERC COG project HornEast are beyond expectations and will lead to slightly reformulate the project’s priorities in order to consolidate its progress.
Fieldwork conducted twice in 2018 in Eastern Tigray (Ethiopia) has highlighted the previoulsy unknown importance of Muslim communities at the very heart of the medieval Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Arabic funerary stelae had been collected near the present town of Kwiha between the 1930’s and the 2000’s, suggesting the presence of Muslim families in the area in the 10th-12th centuries. But the Muslim cemetery from which the stelae came remained unknown. Research and survey made its identification possible in March 2018, along with an important settlement close to. Excavations of both sites have begun in December 2018. Prospections conducted at the same time within a radius of 30 km led to the identification of three ancien Muslim cemeteries previously unknown. Rather than few Muslim foreign families temporarily established in Eastern Tigray, an extensive network of local Muslim communities is starting to appear at the very heart of the medieval Christian kingdom. Several other Muslim cemeteries, reported by local informants, are waiting for further investigation. The corpus of Arabic inscriptions from Eastern Tigray has already multiplied by four in 2018, with the finding by the project’s team of 52 previously unknown funerary stelae. It represents almost 70% of the total corpus of Arabic inscriptions from medieval Ethiopia (exclusive of Dahlak Islands).
Researches conducted during the first 18 months of the project made it also possible to identify new primary sources on various topics such as unknown Arabic inscriptions from Nubia and the Sudanese Eastern Desert found in the storages of the Sudan National Museum; Arabic documents from Egypt related to the history of the Banu Kanz dynasty established between Egypt and Nubia; Arabic and Ge’ez texts related to the reign of the Ethiopian king Yeshaq; Arabic texts preserving diplomatic letters from the Ehiopian kings. The oldest Arabic text from Ethiopia, the so-called Shoa Chronicle, only known through its 1931 edition, has been reassessed on the basis of the manuscript and a critical edition provided, opening to new interpretations of the history of the first Ethiopian Islamic polity. One of the most famous narratives from medieval Ge’ez litterature, the History of the wars of Amda Seyon (against Muslims), has also been reassessed, pointing out to later events than previously thought.
The four main objectives of the project have already been partially addressed with promising results forthcoming: 1. the survey of connections between Christian societies of the Horn and their Islamic environment, through the ongoing inventory of Nubian and Ethiopian individuals recorded in the Middle East by Arabic sources; 2. the analysis of mobility and exchange in the whole area, currently addressed through the study of Muslim and Christian pilgrimages, slave trade and slavery, with ongoing PhD dissertations on these topics; 3. Christian-Muslim relations in Eastern Tigray through archaeological survey and fieldwork. Results achieved lead to assign a fifth objective to the project: making available new source materials in Arabic related to the history of Islam in the Horn of Africa, by providing an up-to-date inventory of Arabic inscriptions from Nubia and Ethiopia, supported by a geographic information system and systematic publication of the artefacts previously unknown, along with the publication of new editions and commentaries of Arabic historical texts written in medieval Ethiopia.
Generally speaking, the first 18 months of the project were mostly devoted to investigations in Sudan and Ethiopia. The results achieved give more emphasis on fieldwork in the Horn of Africa than it was thought prior to the action’s implementation. However, ot

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More info: https://horneast.hypotheses.org/.