these legends, and it seems that Ku`bar's position must remain
a mystery for the time
being. It is almost certainly not Aksum, but could conceivably be some other major
Aksumite town which, for various reasons, was considered to be a more suitable spot for
the capital; possibly in the eastern region where many towns were built along the north-
south route west of the escarpment.
We thus have Arab authors writing of Jarmi from before 833AD to well into the
fourteenth or even fifteenth century, and of Ku`bar from the later ninth century until
c1259AD. There seem to be three possibilities here.
One is that the two cities were in fact one and the same. It is very unlikely that any of the
later writers did anything more significant than
simply copying the older works, and one
might propose that this town, wherever it was, lasted as capital of Ethiopia only from the
transfer from Aksum (between c616-630?), or later if there was another capital between
this time and the first mention of the new one in Arab sources, until the fall of the
kingdom to the Queen of the Bani al-Hamwiyya in the mid-tenth century (see below).
This would credit the work of al-Ya`qubi and al-Mas`udi, who generally seem well
informed.
The second possibility is that there are two cities in question. If the name Jarma were an
epithet
for the capital, perhaps from the Ethiopic word
girma, which means something
like venerable or revered, it would seem likely that Jarmi was Aksum, to which this
epithet was well- suited. Some authors would have simply repeated the outdated
information that it was still the capital, and continued to do so even after Ku`bar had
taken over that status, in spite of the more up-to-date reports of the better informed
writers such as al- Ya`qubi and al-Mas`udi.
In support of this theory, according to Vantini
(1975: 380, n. 1) it appears from al- Tusi's own map that Jarmi corresponds to Aksum.
However, the version of the map in Yusuf Kamal (1930-35: III, 1045r) as reconstructed
by Lelewel, shows `Dziarmi' considerably south of Aden following al- Tusi's longitude,
and Kammerer (1929: 48) noted that "
la carte de Ahmad el-Tusi est un croquis
élémentaire".
The third possibility seems the most likely; that Jarmi has nothing to do with Abyssinian
Ethiopia, but is in fact Ptolemy's town of Garami, metropolis of the Garamantes in Libya.
Arab geographers would have taken Garami in `Ethiopia' (the broad term used of all the
area occupied by dark-skinned peoples) as the capital of the `Habash', used as a similarly
general term. Jarmi is thus no longer a rival to Ku`bar as the post-Aksumite capital.
Other names for capitals are mentioned in the sources.
An anonymous treatise of
982/3AD, written in Persian, the
Hudud al-Alam, notes about the country of the Habash
that
"This country has a very mild climate. The inhabitants are of a black complexion. They
are very lazy and possess many resources. They obey their own king. Merchants from
Oman, Hejaz and Bahrain often go to that country for trade purposes. Rasun, a town on
the sea coast, is the residence of their king, while the army dwell in the town of Suwar:
the Commandant-in-Chief resides at Rin, with (another?) army. In this province gold is
abundant".
Rasun, it has been proposed, could stand for
Jarmi through miscopied Arabic, though the
coastal setting is unusual, and Minorsky proposed Aydhab and Zayla` for the other two
(Minorsky 1937: 164, 473-4; Vantini 1975: 173).
An Ethiopian legend mentions that king Degnajan, who is supposed to have lived at the
period just before Gudit's attack, left Tigray and made Weyna Dega his capital,
apparently a place in Begemder east of Gondar (Sergew Hable Sellassie 1972: 203, n.
115; 231, n. 98). Al-Idrisi, the famous geographer at the court of the Norman king Roger
II of Sicily, writing before 1150AD, called the greatest of
all the towns of the Habasha
`Junbaitah' (and variants), which seems likely to come from the Ethiopic phrase `jan-biet',
or king's house (Vantini 1975: 278; Conti Rossini 1928: 324). Another interpretation
identified the three Ethiopian towns mentioned by al-Idrisi (which Kammerer (1929: 54)
thought were `
toutes trois fantaisistes') with present-day villages; Miller (1927) decided
that Gunbaita (Junbaitah) was Genbita near Kassala, Markata was Hanhita near Gondar,
and Kalgun was Aganiti about half- way between Aksum and Ankober.
Al-`Umari (1300-1348AD) was aware of the antiquity, and even the (more or less)
correct name of Aksum. He was employed in the chancery of the Egyptian sultan, and
knew the protocol to observe when writing to the
haty or king (Munro-Hay,
The
Metropolitan Episcopate of Ethiopia and the Patriarchate of Alexandria 4th-14th
centuries, forthcoming), and perhaps had access to rather better
archival material than
many other writers. He states that a certain wadi
"leads to a region called Sahart, formerly called Tigray. Here there was the ancient
capital of the kingdom, called Akshum, in one of their languages, or Zarfarta, which was
another name for it. It was the residence of the earliest najashi, who was the king of the
entire country. Next is the kingdom of Amhara, where is the capital of the kingdom
nowadays, called Mar`adi; next is the territory of Shewa . . ." (Vantini 1975: 509).
Amda-Tseyon's (1314-1344) chronicler confirms that his court was located at Mar'adé,
apparently in Shewa (Taddesse Tamrat 1972: 274).
Finally, we have the town of `Arafa or Adafa. This is mentioned in the
History of the
Patriarchs as the `city of the king' of Ethiopia in 1210, with the additional note that the
king was called Lalibela (Atiya et al: III, iii, 192). The town is called Adafa in the
Gedle
Yimrha-Kristos (Taddesse Tamrat 1972: 59), and was the capital of the Zagwé dynasty.
This presumably means that those Arab writers who continue to mention Ku`bar after
about 1200AD are simply repeating earlier information without updating.
3. The History of the Patriarchs and Ethiopia.
Beyond the brief descriptions of the country in Arabic historical or geographical works,
we have almost no other information about events in Ethiopia except from the
History of
the Patriarchs of Alexandria (Evetts 1904 and Atiya 1948) and the Ethiopian
Synaxarium
(Budge 1928). The biographies of the Coptic
patriarchs of Alexandria, spiritual heads of