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The Obelisk of Maṭara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Edward Ullendorff
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Extract

The obelisk of Maṭara has long been known to bear the oldest Ethiopic inscription extant. Maṭara is a small village near Senafe, in the province of Akkele Guzay, on the frontier between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the obelisk stands on one of the most majestic sites of the Abyssinian highlands. When Littmann visited Maṭara at the beginning of this century he found the obelisk, broken into two parts, lying on the ground. The Italian Administration later had the broken monument repaired by means of two iron bars (see Photograph I) and set upright again in what was (wrongly !) believed to be its original position.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 83 , Issue 1-2 , April 1951 , pp. 26 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1951

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References

page 26 note 1 So already Kossini, Conti in “Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei”, 1896, pp. 250 seqq.Google Scholar: . . . “il più antico monumento della scrittura gi'iz a noi noto. . .”

page 26 note 2 This is the generally accepted indigenous spelling so also Littmann, Aksum Expedition IV, p. 61, against Conti Rossini's (loc. cit.).

page 26 note 3 In January, 1868, the H.Q. of General Sir Robert Napier, C.-in-C. of the British expedition against King Theodore.

page 26 note 4 Cf. Duncanson, D. J. in “Antiquity” 1947Google Scholar.

page 27 note 1 In the present case Šams and Sin.

page 27 note 2 Cf., among many other instances, Gl. 1089, lines 4, 5.

page 27 note 3 Cf. Littmann, loc. cit., p. 79.

page 27 note 4 The necessity of a different decipherment became apparent to me when I visited the site of the obelisk first in 1942, and it was then that the interpretation occurred to me which is offered in the following. A first—though largely different—version was later, in 1945, printed by the Government Printer, British Military Administration, for private circulation in Eritrea.

page 28 note 1 Professor Marcel Cohen very kindly informs me, however, that . . . “quand j'ai en 1911 essayé de copier cette inscription, il m'a semblé voir un trait vertical mal tracé qui donnerait à la ligne 1, au lieu de . . .” I cannot to-day see such a faint additional line on the stone.

page 28 note 2 Aksum IV, p. 61: . . . “Alle Buchstaben sind deutlich und sicher” . . .

page 29 note 1 Tigrinya “to help” is an Amharic loanword, since it occurs only along the southern fringes of the Tigrinya speaking area. There are a few instances in which Amharic ' has been taken over into Tigrinya as ḥ. This process has no phonetic reasons, but derives from a general Tigrinya suspicion of Amharic laryngals and the assumption of a fictitious Ge'ez root ḥgz. This root does, indeed, exist in Ge'ez as a hapax legomenon, but its meaning is “infrenari” and identical with Arabic “to detain, withhold”.

page 29 note 2 Cf. Dillmann, Ethiopic grammar, paragraph 200: “In Ethiopic, the most general connecting particle—viz. w—suffices to join clauses together, even in those cases in which other languages, more accurate in their expression of logical relations, make use of other uniting words or particles.”

page 29 note 3 I am greatly indebted to Professor Littmann for supplementary information on his reading.

page 29 note 4 Cf., e.g., Rossini, Conti, Chrestomathia Arabica Meridionalis Epigraphica, p. 183Google Scholar: wḥfr b'rhw . . . bnḫhw “and he dug his ditch in his plantation”.

page 30 note 1 See, for instance, Psalm VII, 16, which translates . . .

page 30 note 2 This view was confirmed by the Water Engineer of the Public Works Dept., Eritrea.

page 30 note 3 When I spoke to a peasant at Maṭara and suggested irrigation works, I noted down the following reply: kab ṣäḥay zәnabәn za'әza'tan bәzuḥ 'atto; “there is more rain and dew than sun.”

page 31 note 1 For further references see Dillmann, , Lexicon linguae aethiopicae, col. 160Google Scholar.

page 31 note 2 If we might assume an irregular laryngal correspondence (for which a number of instances can be adduced), the Accadian saḫāpu may possibly be compared; it is translated by Delitzsch, , Handwoerterbuch, p. 493Google Scholar, as “niederwerfen, ueber-waeltigen”.

page 31 note 3 The identification of “young men” with “warriors” occurs elsewhere; cf. only Hebrew which frequently stands for warriors, e.g. Isaiah, 31, 8; Jer. 18, 21; Amos 4, 10, etc. The same is true of South Arabian 'sd which means “young man” as well as “soldier”.

page 31 note 4 He added: ḥәǦǦi tärässi'u “now fallen into oblivion”.

page 31 note 5 Tigrinya adds a euphonic -i to nouns ending in two consonants.

page 31 note 6 My informant would not have got those names from the writing on the obelisk. No Abyssinian, however learned, ever looks at it when passing there. The absence of vowels from the script generally even precludes their identifying the writing with the Ethiopian alphabet.

page 32 note 1 For the twice suffixed -ni cf. Dillmann, grammar, paragraph 168, 4, and Tigrinya usage where this double suffix -n is the common conjunction “and”.