The flourishing of Nubian, Ethiopic, and Coptic cultures was abruptly cut off by the conquering Muslims. Many Africans were forced to abandon their native religions and languages.
In the southernmost areas of Africa, animism, a pre-religious or proto-religious system, was a common belief. Northeastern Africa had embraced Judaism and Christianity.
The Africans had paid dearly for this choice. Roman domination had persecuted the Christians and Jews, and many of them lost their lives.
It is worth emphasizing that Christianity and Judaism were at home in Africa. They were well-established there before they ever appeared in Europe. When European explorers entered Africa, they encountered a Christian tradition there which was much older than their own.
The Africans brought Judaism into Ethiopia sometime before 800 B.C., and Christianity was a native belief system by 50 A.D.
Some measure of relief arrived when the Roman persecution stopped in the early 300s A.D.
As these cultures grew over the centuries, historian Basil Davidson notes, civilization grew and “in the Sixth Century emerged the glories of Christian Nubia.” The “Christian kingdoms of ancient Nubia” had five centuries of momentum behind them, and “have left behind some proofs of their achievements.”
Notably, texts written in Nubian go back to the 700s A.D., just before the destructive Islamic invasions which wiped out so many of the Nubian cultural artifacts. Nubian is one of the oldest written African languages.
Centuries older than Christianity in Europe, “the kingdoms of Christian Nubia” received representatives from the Byzantine Empire. The visitors found a functioning Christian community, much to the surprise “of monks from Constantinople.”
Nubia already had a functioning ecclesiastical hierarchy since the 300s, when records show that a bishop was installed. Julian, a Byzantine monk, established communications between Constantinople and Nubia around 543 A.D.
A century after Julian's arrival, Egypt was overrun by Muslim Arabs, and Nubia was all but cut off from the rest of the Christian world. For 600 years its kings and bishops, contemporaries of the kings and bishops building the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, were practically unknown to that Empire, and had only themselves to rely on for faith and reassurance. To the north lay Muslim Egypt.
Living under the constant threat of Islamic invasions, Nubia and Ethiopia continued to develop their civilizations. The Copts in Egypt gradually assumed the role of an oppressed minority under Muslim domination.
It was the proximity of Egypt that eventually brought on the Nubian kingdoms' downfall.
At first, it seemed that Ethiopia and Nubia might work out a peaceful coexistence with the Islamic colonies and thus share the continent. The Fatimid dynasty, which initially ruled the territories conquered by the invading armies, allowed the Africans to retain some of their native culture, religion, and language.
Although an oppressed group, the Nubians and Ethiopians kept some sense of their identity. But when the Fatimid dynasty lost power, even this bit of ethnic distinctness was threatened:
Egypt under its Fatimid rulers accepted the Nubian Christians under sufferance, just as it accepted the Coptic Christians within its own borders. But in the 12th Century the Fatimids were ousted by the Saracens, Muslims of a more militant cast, who invaded Egypt from Syria under their powerful leader Saladin.
The Saracens did not want to tolerate any significant cultural practice of the native African religions. Solidifying their hold on Egypt, the soon looked to expand.
Egypt was governed during this time by the Mamluks, a type of military warrior caste, which emphasized its aggressiveness in imposing Islam on neighboring nations. Basil Davidson notes that
The Saracen rulers of Egypt soon moved south to deal with the Christians nearer home. In 1276 they placed their own nominee on the throne of Nobatia, the most northerly of the Nubian kingdoms. Makuria, the middle kingdom, held out for another century, and Alodia, southernmost of the Christian trio, was not engulfed by Islam until the 15th Century.
In Nubia and in most of Ethiopia, “Christian times were over.” African Jews were also forced to stop practicing their way of life, and the Mamluks forced Islam upon the local populations. There was an exception:
Far away, at the other end of the Red Sea, however, another branch of African Christianity lived on undefeated. Ethiopia, whose King Ezana had put down the Red and Black Noba in the Fourth Century, had become officially Christian with Ezana's conversion. But its legendary contact with Christianity was rooted much further back in time, in the Biblical story of the Queen of Sheba, who went up from Ethiopia to King Solomon's Jerusalem "with a very great train, with camels that bear spices, and very much gold and precious stones." King Solomon fell in love with her, and gave her a son. That son, Menelik, became a famous Ethiopian ruler and founded the line of the Lion of Judah, from whom the current ruler, the Emperor Haile Selassie, claims to be descended.
Ethiopia’s Jewish and Christian communities were some of the oldest, not only in Africa, but in the entire world. For centuries, both faiths had flourished there, peaceably, side-by-side.
Now the Islamic armies set their sights on Ethiopia. The Ethiopians were not parochial or provincial:
Like their Kushite contemporaries at Meroe, these early Ethiopians were an enterprising lot. They welcomed merchants from Greek-ruled Egypt, and their principal port, Adulis, soon became a major point of interchange for goods from the Mediterranean, Arabia and the eastern lands of the Indian Ocean. Their trading contacts extended far down the African coast, and they made expeditions into the inner African lands. By the Second Century A.D. they had built a strong state behind the coastal hills, with a capital at Axum. It was from Axum that King Ezana rode north to punish the Noba.
Ethiopia grew and flourished economically, politically, and culturally. It became an intellectual center, with scholars producing texts in Ge’ez, the literary language of the land.
As a center of learning, Ethiopia was home to acknowledged specialists in Judaism and Christianity. Ge’ez texts are still studied in universities today.
Axum remained the chief power in the region washed by the southern Red Sea until the Eighth Century, leaving behind as monuments to its majesty tall needles of masonry and finely wrought gold coins. Merchants of Axum and Adulis, wrote an Alexandrian merchant in about 523, traded as far as Ceylon and sold their ivory in Persia, Arabia, India and Byzantium. Their merchant vessels were so famous that a Mesopotamian poet used them to describe the progress of a royal caravan: it forged ahead, he said, like one of the ships of Adulis, whose "prow cuts through the foam of the water as a gambler divides the dust with his hand." In 531 the same Julian who ministered to the Nubians was sent by the Emperor Justinian to the Axumite court. He reported that the King received him dressed in a linen garment embroidered with gold and set with pearls, and that the royal throne was a gilded chariot drawn by four elephants; flutes played during his audience.
The emergence of Ge’ez as the scholarly language of Ethiopia included the development of a new alphabet. By contrast, Nubian texts used a modified Greek alphabet.
The script is syllabic in nature, with each character representing the sound of a consonant-vowel combination.
Greek was still officially the language of this court, but Sixth Century Axum was in the process of acquiring a literary language of its own, Geez. The New Testament had already been translated into it — probably by a group of Syrian monks, since the text was based not on the Bible used in Alexandria, but on the one used in Antioch, in Syria.
This scholarship, however, also made Ethiopia a target for Islamic armies. One by one, the countries which bordered on Ethiopia fell to the Muslim invaders.
With the rise of Islam the history of the Axumite empire becomes obscure. Cut off from the rest of the Christian world even more completely than the Nubians to the north, the Ethiopians struggled to survive against Muslims.
Isolated and on the defensive, Ethiopia further developed its own culture. Both the spirituality and the architecture which housed it reflected a native African faith, harkening back to, and preserving, a Christianity which was at home in Africa before any form of it arrived in Europe.
For a long time nothing was heard but a confused and distant clash of arms. When the world at large took note of Axum again, it had been transformed. Its spiritual loyalties were still vibrantly Christian, but it was now a Christianity deep-rooted in the Ethiopian soil. In the 12th Century one of its most famous kings, Lalibela, presided over the construction of some of the most unusual religious structures in the world — a series of 10 chapels and churches, dark-aisled and pillared, hewn out of the living rock in the mountains of Lasta near his capital of Roha.
Ethiopia maintained, for centuries, ties to the oppressed Coptic Christians in Egypt who suffered under the occupying Islamic armies who dominated the native African populations.
Ethiopia was loyal to the Coptic bishops in Alexandria and refused to change. It was loyal to other old ways, too. "In this feudal country," wrote two French travelers, the brothers D’Abbadie, in the 1830s, "men are united by an infinity of ties which would count for nothing in Europe. They live together in reciprocal dependence and solidarity which they value highly and consider a matter of pride, and which influence all they do." A man with no fixed obligation to his society was "in their eyes outside the social order."
The forms of Christianity and Judaism which were native to Africa and which had been preserved in Ethiopia were not tied to a rigid social structure, but rather to an ethic of mutual interdependence.
Historians have called many of these African societies ‘stateless’ and this lack of structure encouraged, and was encouraged by, the native African spirituality, which preserved early and original forms of Christianity and Judaism.
Morality was determined by social service; each man had a moral duty to serve the group. This sense of identity with the social group lay at the root not only of complex societies like Ethiopia, but of primitive societies that had no apparent structure at all.
The high degree of freedom found in these “stateless societies” functioned as an incubator for spiritual activity and accounts, in part, for the deep roots which the native African forms of Judaism and Christianity were able to establish.
Ethiopia, which not quite “stateless,” maintained a relatively great degree of freedom, especially in contrast to some European states of the same era, which encouraged the scholarly and intellectual development of Ethiopic Judaism and Christianity.
