1 - The Inherited Tradition

Summary

“Speech is God's gift to man,” a historian once declared, “[but] the ability to know things that are hidden and to discover that which is secret is also inspired by God.” So begins an anonymous biography of the Emperor Gälawdéwos (r. 1540–59), the defender of sixteenth-century Christian Ethiopia. This preface illuminates its author's underlying conception of the historical enterprise. Historiography, in his view, was doubly revelatory: the historian should endeavor to narrate—to “speak”—the story of his chosen subject, while simultaneously attempting to excavate—to “discover”— its elusive deeper meaning. In point of fact, Gälawdéwos's biographer adeptly pursued these two goals. His long and nuanced study relates the events of his subject's tumultuous life, but it also seeks to reveal and explain the emperor's greater moral and historical significance. It is thus a history with two overlapping dimensions, one related to a man, and the other to his meaning. As a field of intellectual endeavor, historiography allowed the chronicler to proceed from the visible to the hidden, and from speech to discovery.

This interplay between the seen and unseen suggests a duality at the heart of the Ethiopian historical tradition. Like our anonymous chronicle, vernacular history has two sides. One relates to the articulation and organization of power. It has been argued that Ethiopian historiography is an official tradition, a branch of learning expressly predicated on celebrating the agents, values, and institutions of the Solomonid imperial order. This is certainly an apt description of many Ethiopian historians and the works they produced: royal biographies and dynastic histories, for example, document and generally laud the achievements of Ethiopia's Christian rulers, who routinely commissioned them. The elegiac chronicle of Emperor Gälawdéwos is in this respect an exemplary royal biography, since its author openly venerates his subject. This variety of history is closely linked to the observed personification of power in the present, and to the representation and collective remembrance of the past through the prism of Solomonid authority.

Yet it is equally true that Ethiopian historiography emerged from an intellectual culture profoundly shaped by traditionalism.