History Summarized: Ethiopia

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Wait, who's Indigo?

👍︎︎ 10 👤︎︎ u/SunsBreak 📅︎︎ Mar 13 2020 đź—«︎ replies

This was an amazing video! I had no idea their royal line traced itself back to the time of Solomon, which is pretty badass. And the fact that they built all those beautiful churches and avoided the pitfall of the Crusades is really interesting to me, especially when the rest of the Christian world seemed to be losing their minds around that whole time.

Also, their art looked really beautiful. Like, the illustrations in their books seem really impressive and vibrant.

I love learning about nations like this, because we don't often hear their story!

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/SeasOfBlood 📅︎︎ Mar 13 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Shit yes!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Fidel_Costco 📅︎︎ Mar 13 2020 đź—«︎ replies
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Anybody familiar with ancient Egypt is pretty well aware that the Nile River is easily one of the most OP water features in History. But head a little further down and you’ll quickly find that there’s a lot more to East Africa than our old pyramid-bois. East of where the Nile forks between its White and Blue streams is where we’ll find Ethiopia. Consistently one of the most intriguing and puzzling civilizations in African History, Ethiopia is an outlier in all kinds of ways, like having a native Christian tradition as old as Constantine, and being the only African country to dodge colonization. That is quite the combo! So, to find out how it happened, Let’s do some History! This Video is Brought to you by our amazing Patrons! Support our channel and get cool rewards at Patreon.com/OSP Ethiopian “History” in a neatly traceable form starts with the Kingdom of Aksum in the first century AD, but Human activity in Ethiopia in general is… way the hell older, because the first people in Ethiopia also have the distinction of being the first people. It’s here that researchers discovered the famous Australopithecus Afarensis skeleton “Lucy”, and we have records of a Kingdom of D’mt starting sometime in the 10th century BC, probably, but the archaeology is slim so our knowledge of them is slimmer. Whether D’mt evolved into early Aksum or whether it collapsed and the Aksumites rose out of it is honestly anyone’s guess. According to Ethiopian legend, which isn’t the same as history, but is still extremely valuable, the first proper Ethiopian emperor has his origins in Biblical times. Specifically, the Queen of Sheba had traveled up the Red Sea to the court of King Solomon in Israel, and their son Menelik became the first king of Ethiopia. This origin story is essentially The cultural backbone of Ethiopia. Now, the timing of Menelik’s reign is hard to quantify, and geography is also a bit of a question mark. Back in the day, the label of “Ethiopia” basically meant “The Not-Egypt part of Africa”, and while context clues imply it’s coastal and probably near the Nile, that’s still not super helpful. But point stands, and with a couple exceptions, the Solomonic dynasty would rule in Ethiopia from its very start up to the 1970s. Now not to get technical on you but we in the historical community would refer to that as a long-ass time. As for Aksum, it had the advantage of sitting at the cross of two major trade arteries — the Nile provided access up through Egypt and into the Mediterranean, and the adjacent Red Sea opened the door for the entire East African Coast all the way to India. And coinage backs this up, as we’ve found Aksumite coins all along the trade routes that linked Classical India to the Roman Empire. Some of our best sources for coastal Aksumite cities came from accounts by Greek and Roman merchants. And as with all trade relations, cultural exchange followed swiftly after. In particular, early Roman Christians made their way to Ethiopia and converted King Ezana in the 4th century. Ethiopia had previously worshipped the Sun, Moon, and Stars. But now, the newly Christianized Ethiopia was tied with Armenia as the first Christian kingdom, even quicker on the draw than Rome. Though Aksum did away with practices like the construction of giant obelisks, they soon developed a strong biblical literary culture in their native Ge’ez language. Now, in addition to arranging a massive religious transformation, King Ezana was also a notable conqueror, as he expanded Aksum’s territory up the Nile to yoink the entire Kushite Kingdom, and he also hopped across the Red Sea to Yemen. Two centuries later, the empire reached its greatest height under King Kaleb, who significantly strengthened Aksum’s hold on the southern Arabian Peninsula, and effectively monopolized Red Sea trade between Rome and Asia. Unfortunately, while geography had been one of Ethiopia’s greatest strengths, it soon became its most tragic flaw. The lightning-fast spread of Islam completely isolated Ethiopia from their nearest Christian neighbors, and with a commanding hold on both major coasts, the Muslim caliphates had several ways to circumvent Aksum’s ports on the Red Sea. Unsurprisingly, sources for this period are basically zilch, but it seems like this pressure from the Muslim north and an inability to effectively govern the pastoralists to the southeast hastened Aksum’s decline into a very tiny pocket of land around the capital. By the mid 900s, the Aksumites were beaten for good, and in the 11 and early 1200s, the Zagwe Dynasty ruled the land east of lake Tana. By this point, a half century of Islam had left its mark on Africa, as even the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt right next door was a fraction of its former size — But despite its isolation, Ethiopia was still as Christian as ever, and at the turn of the 1200s, while the rest of Christendom was busy crusading their way to financial and moral bankruptcy, Ethiopia took a more productive approach. In response to the loss of Jerusalem, King Lalibella constructed 11 new churches across the Zagwe kingdom. Though, “Constructed” is probably the wrong word, because these churches were each actually carved out of a single stone monolith. How Do You Even DO That? With the Holy Land gone, the king basically said “alright fine, we’ll build our own” and that’s the kind of positive thinking we need more of! For all their success, the Zagwe’s one sticking point was that they didn’t have that same sweet Solomon lineage, and they were overthrown in 1270 in a Solomonic restoration. Among the first orders of business for this new dynasty was asserting its ancestral legitimacy, so they got to work on a book called the Kebra Nagast, or “The Glory of Kings”, which is a codified collection of old Ethiopian legends. It mainly gives an account of the ancient Solomon story, among snippets of later Ethiopian history like their conversion to Christianity. The book ends with a curious prophesy that the power of Ethiopia will eclipse the might of the Roman Empire — and hold that thought, because we’re gonna double back to that juicy little prediction several centuries down the line. With the New Dynasty set, the kingdom began expanding in all directions, down to the Blue Nile, up to the Red Sea coast, and southeast across the Great Rift Valley. These borders didn’t stay put for very long, however, because the kingdom faced constant conflict from coastal Muslim sultanates to the East. At its diciest, the Ottoman-backed Adal Sultanate almost conquered all of Ethiopia in the mid 1500s. Luckily, a Deus Ex Portugal arrived at the last minute to offer their fellow Christians a buttload of muskets. This swiftly turned the war around, but the Ottomans kept propping up rival sultanates for the next 300 years. So while territory stayed more or less as it was, several internal factors were at play over the next two centuries. In particular, northward migrations of the Oromo people and the growing presence of Portuguese Catholic missionaries led Ethiopia to become less centralized than it already was. So despite all the awesome trade and cultural production going on in the new capital at Gondar, provincial lords steadily became less and less pleased about having to support the king. And in 1769, they killed him about it. The following century is called “the Age of Princes” because the monarchy was surrounded by rival lords and able to do exactly nothing about it. Meanwhile, everybody was fighting for power and resources and the farmers were playing a weekly game of spin-the-wheel to see which prince was going to come steal their crops this time. This century of constant peril was finally ended by Tewodros II, whose banditry funded an army that then conquered the rival princes and united Ethiopia. Well Played. But Tewodros had less success in foreign policy, as a diplomatic spat with the British Empire in 1868 ended with a teeny tiny invasion, whereafter the royal treasury was looted and Tewodros killed himself. This was a dire turn of events, but subsequent Ethiopian Kings rapidly learned how to handle these outside threats. Just a few years later, Ethiopia wiped the floor with an Ottoman-backed Egyptian invasion. And it’s here at the tail end of the 1800s that the European Scramble for Africa made life a constant hell for an entire continent in basically no time flat. It’s impressive how terrible it was. By 1887, the Kingdom of Italy had conquered the Eritrean and Somali coasts, and they signed a treaty with Ethiopia recognizing their claims — or at least, that’s what the Ethiopian version of the treaty said in their native Amharic. The Italian translation was… different, I have a copy here, lessee, “Tutta la tua base sono appartiene a noi”… Okay I think I see the problem here. Italy basically wrote it in that Ethiopia was an Italian vassal state. So when King Menelik II realized this and immediately tore up the treaty, Italy declared war. Now, Italy thought that Ethiopia was going to be a stompfest, and technically they were right, but they mixed up which side would be doing the stomping. See, Menelik was a smartboi, and he had leveraged Ethiopia’s Orthodox Christian heritage to acquire modern firearms from fellow Orthodox Russia. In 1896, Italy marched into Ethiopia with more hubris than sense, and Menelik’s army just obliterated them. The new treaty was properly translated, and recognized full Ethiopian independence, making it the only country to avoid European colonization. Bravo. With his state secured, Menelik II rapidly modernized Ethiopia, introducing rail networks, communication infrastructure, more complex financial institutions, and a booming coffee export business. 4 decades later, Mussolini’s Bargain-Bin Roman Empire returned with half a million soldiers to avenge their earlier embarrassment. Though fascist propaganda claimed that Italy’s occupation was a triumph of colonization, the reality was that Ethiopian resistance made it impossible for the army to exert any significant control, and the Ethiopian campaign became a massive drain on the Italian military. So it may have taken a couple millennia, but true to the ancient prophesy, Ethiopia did end up eclipsing the might of Rome, if not by force then at least by sheer humiliation, so I say job well done. In a very belated apology from Britain, their army helped Ethiopia kick out the Italians and restore the Solomonic monarchy. Unfortunately, the Cold War soon found its way to Ethiopia, as Haile Selassie’s government was overthrown in 1974 and replaced with a series of socialist-leaning states over the next 20 years, whose reforms led to infighting, famines, and a lot of forced relocation. And you can’t have a Cold War without a good Proxy War so America and the USSR took turns funding insurgents to either support or topple the standing government. This constant mess mercifully came to an end in 1991 when unified rebel groups captured the capital of Addis Ababa and created a transitional government, leading to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1995. And far from the overbearing soviets, the modern Ethiopian state went out of its way to protect its diversity ensure regional autonomy, so all provinces have the option to leave at any point they’d like, which coastal Eritrea immediately took them up on. So, that’s a very zoomed-out look at the history of Ethiopia. It certainly wasn’t without hardship, and that continues to the present, but it’s just so extraordinary in countless ways. From its most ancient of origins to its wildly unique relationship with biblical history and Christian culture, up through its remarkable independence amid the single biggest land-grab in history — Ethiopians have a lot to be proud about. Now, I never give homework for these videos, but this time is different: because your assignment is to go to your nearest Ethiopian restaurant and order some Injera bread, and then eat as much of it as you possibly can, because that stuff is borderline magic oh my god it’s so delicious. Thank you so much for watching. I always have fun when I get to take a really really long perspective on the history of a place. And If you’d like to see more videos like this, as well as more videos on African history, please let me know in the comments! And as always, let’s hear it for these lovely patrons who make this channel possible. You guys are the best, and I’ll see you all in the next video!
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Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions
Views: 526,652
Rating: 4.9579535 out of 5
Keywords: William Shakespeare (Author), Shakespeare Summarized, Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Legends, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, History, Ethiopian, Abyssinia, Africa, African, Italy, Britain, Empire, Colony, Colonization, Aksum, Axum, Historical, Glory of Kings, Christian, Christianity, Ezana, Zagwe, Solomon, Menelik, Tewodros, Nile, Egypt, Church, Orthodox, Eritrea
Id: xZjHIUHm6gY
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Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)
Published: Fri Mar 13 2020
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