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29 July 2009
analysis
Abuja — Ethiopia is a place where adventurous travellers, if they so desire, can ask directions to the remains of the Queen of Sheba's palace. You can easily stumble upon ancient gold mines and historic fortifications, and you may even discover a lost city.
This is exactly what French archaeologists François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch did this year, after going in search of the ancient city of Gendebelo. The pair based their explorations on a fragment of the chronicle of the Muslim kingdom of Shoa, which the Italian scholar and Ethiopia expert Enrico Cerulli found in a souk in the walled city of Harar in 1936. This Ajami manuscript - a form of Arabic supplemented with Amharic script - described the legendary city and was being used as packaging for sugar. They also studied the writings of a 16th-century Venetian traveller called Alessandro Zorzi, who wrote of finding a lost city in Ethiopia.
'Call me Ethics,' says Fauvelle-Aymar when I meet him in his office at the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. I am slightly taken aback by his moniker - is he trying to emphasise that his method is more grounded and ethical than, say, the whip-wielding Indiana Jones? I am sure he is, but as it turns out, what he is actually saying is: 'Call me F-X' - short for François-Xavier, of course.
F-X, or Fauvelle-Aymar in his academic capacity, is tall and boyish, a whirlwind of ideas, periodically jumping up from his seat to thrust books into my hands and point at the maps on the walls to back up his points. To make sure I have not missed anything, he kindly weighs down my bag with a copy of The Travels of Ibn Battutah, works by lesser-known Arab writers such as Ibn Fadl Allah Al-Omari, as well as Father Azaïs and Chambard's Five Years of Archaeological Explorations in Ethiopia.
Despite feeling bewildered and intrigued, I appreciate Fauvelle-Aymar's passion. He wants to turn the old idea of an Abyssinian Christian kingdom on its head: 'Everybody says Ethiopia is a Christian state, but not only is that not true now, when at least 50 per cent of the population is Muslim; it wasn't true in the past, either. It was much more complex than that with trade links between different peoples. They needed each other. They had a symbiotic relationship.'
Fauvelle-Aymar is also rather fond of unusual sources, Zorzi's Itineraries being one. 'In the early years of the 16th century, Zorzi spoke to every Ethiopian who set foot in Venice,' he says. 'He would find out where the travellers had begun their journey, the route they had taken, and the time they had spent travelling from one place to another.'
Zorzi then produced a range of itineraries, full of obliterated landmarks and the spaces in between, which now form a snapshot of the Ethiopia of the period. At the time, Venice was famous for its mapmakers, such as the geographer Fra Mauro, who had released his masterpiece - a world map - in 1459.
Zorzi chronicles the distances in walking days between Debre Sina and Ancobar - landmarks that still exist today - and Muslim trading cities such as Gendebelo.
When Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch started searching for Gendebelo, they looked at obscure clues, such as a source that defined the city as 'the place where mules are to be unloaded and camels take over'. With a day's walk equating to around 30km, and the place to swap mules for camels being at the edge of the highland escarpment and the Danakil Depression, the pair formed a picture of where their destination might be.
With this knowledge, they followed the escarpment - an eastern extension of the Rift Valley - asking local people as they went if they knew of ruins. The researchers soon found the remains of the medieval towns of Nora, Masal and Asbari, at around 1,300m above sea level, on the natural limit between the Danakil Depression, the realm of Afar pastoralists, and the high Ethiopian plateau, traditionally occupied by agrarian orthodox Christians.
The archaeologists began to wonder if one of these ruined outposts could be the famed Gendebelo. From Ahmed's Cleft, a well-known viewpoint in the highland escarpment, it is not difficult to believe. Here, at more than 3,000m you can watch gelada baboons romping and browsing amid the emerald highland grass. Behind the cleft are fields of barley, and in front, 2km below, lie the arid wastes of the Danakil Depression. 'These two contrasting environments needed a link, a go-between,' says Fauvelle-Aymar. 'To put it in a nutshell, the mule-drivers were in dire need of the camel-loaders and vice-versa.'
What Nora - and its recently discovered neighbours - shows us is a complex and mutually beneficial relationship between trade partners. The highland kingdom had the raw materials - gold, slaves, grain - while the cities on the plain had access to the trade routes and the know-how to get products to market. The traditional image of a beleaguered Christian state surrounded by enemies - made famous by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - does not add up.
Ethiopia has always been the ideal backdrop for tall stories, for example The Sign and the Seal, by Graham Hancock, which claims to prove 'conclusively' that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia; the book was key to creating the evangelical tourist trend in the country.
More recently, Helmut Ziegert, an archaeologist from the University of Hamburg, who has been conducting digs in Axum for 15 years, was convinced he had finally found the 10th-century BC palace of the Queen of Sheba. This, he believed, would have been a likely home for the Ark of the Covenant, adding that evidence of animal sacrifices was proof that what he had discovered had been a temple where the Ark could have been housed.
The Ark story has inspired many, but archaeologist Stuart Munro-Hay, who had a lifetime of Ethiopian experience, concluded in his book The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant, that there was no evidence the object had ever been there.
But while the lost Ark may never have made it to Ethiopia, many interesting characters have. One of these is Count Byron Khun de Prorok, a real-life Indiana Jones, though an archaeologist who preferred to witness cultural scenes such as female circumcision, possession cults and slave caravans than sift through dirt on his hands and knees.
Count de Prorok's ripping yarn Dead Men Do Tell Tales, published in 1942, tells of expedition mishaps with seeming disregard for the damage they caused, such as falling through floors and destroying precious artefacts.
His activities are often more extreme sport than scientific enquiry - as when he nearly comes to grief in an ancient tomb: 'My foot slipped, and I fell and crashed through and into a wooden mummy case. Another cloud of the peppery mummy dust engulfed me. When I did manage to light a match, I saw a dozen mummies lying on stone benches on either side of the tomb. I was surrounded by broken pieces of sarcophagi that had been smashed by the falling stones. They were beautifully painted, and covered with hieroglyphics of scientific value.'
De Prorok's writings, whether or not they are wholly true, are proof of Ethiopia's enduring mystery. Fauvelle-Aymar, however, wants to stick to the facts. He believes a volcanic eruption or climate change could be the reason for the abandonment of Nora and its neighbours, though it is also possible collapse came in the aftermath of conflict between the Muslim states of the east and the Christian kingdom of the highlands.
The local Muslim Argobba people have their own explanation. They still use the mosque at Nora and their legends talk of the people of the city becoming so rich that, to celebrate the wedding of one of their young men, they had enough surplus flour to pave the road to the bride's town with the flat rounds of injera bread. Angered by this profligacy, God sent a shower of ash that covered up the sinful community for good.
Little remains of Nora's past glories. Fauvelle-Aymar imagines the place would have centred on a medina similar to that in the city of Harar, with four mosques, water reservoirs, terraced fields and numerous tombs. Today, the archaeologists' excavations peek out of acacia scrubland where goats and camels graze. Gendebelo, emporium of the world, is no more, but its possible site will forever attract adventurers from across the world - though minus the fedora and leather jacket.
Culled from Saudiaramco World
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