Habesha People - Origins

Origins

The Imperial family of Ethiopia (which is currently in exile) claims its origin directly from the offspring of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Ge'ez: ንግሥተ ሣብአ nigiśta Śabʿa, who is named Ge'ez: ማክዳ Makeda in the Ethiopian account. The Ethiopian narrative Kebra Negast "Glory of Kings", which was written in 1225 AD contains an account of Makeda and her descendants. King Solomon is said in this account to have seduced the Queen, and sired a son by her, who would eventually become Menelik I, the first Emperor of Ethiopia. The tradition that the biblical Queen of Sheba was a ruler of Ethiopia who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem in ancient Israel is supported by the 1st century AD Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who identified Solomon’s visitor as a queen of Egypt and Ethiopia. There is no primary evidence, archaeological or textual, for the queen in Ethiopia. The impressive ruins at Aksum are a thousand years too late for a queen contemporary with Solomon - at least on his traditional dating to the tenth century BC

In the past, scholars like Hiob Ludolf and Carlo Conti Rossini postulated that the ancient communities that evolved into the modern Ethiopian state were formed by a migration across the Red Sea of Semitic-speaking South Arabians around 1000 BC who intermarried with local non-Semitic-speaking peoples.Both the indigenous languages of Southern Arabia and the Amharic and Tigrinya languages of Ethiopia are South Semitic languages. However, the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia, is now known to not have derived from Sabaean, and there is evidence of a Semitic speaking presence in Ethiopia and Eritrea at least as early as 2000 BC. There is also evidence of ancient Southern Arabian communities in modern day Ethiopia and Eritrea in certain localities, attested by some archaeological artifacts and ancient Sabaean inscriptions in the old South Arabian alphabet. However, scholars like Stuart Munro-Hay point to the existence of an older D'MT kingdom, prior to any Sabaean migration c. 4th or 5th century BC, as well as evidence of to Sabaean immigrants having resided in Ethiopia for little more than a few decades Furthermore, there is archeological evidence of a region in Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea also called Saba, now referred to as "Ethiopian Saba" to avoid confusion.

There is little archaeological evidence to verify the story of the Queen of Sheba and the longstanding presumption that Sabaean migrants had played a direct role in Ethiopian civilization has recently come under attack. Sabaean influence is speculated by some recent authors to have been minor, limited to a few localities, and disappearing after a few decades or a century, perhaps representing a trading or military colony in some sort of symbiosis or military alliance with the Ethiopian civilization of D`MT.

In the reign of King Ezana (c. early 4th century AD, the term is listed as one of the nine regions under his domain, translated in the Greek version of his inscription as Αἰθιοπία Aithiopía, the first known use of this term to specifically describe the region known today as Ethiopia (and not Kush or the entire African and Indian region outside of Egypt). The 6th century author Stephanus of Byzantium later used the term "Αβασηγοί" (i.e. Abasēnoi) in reference to:

an Arabian people living next to the Sabaeans together with the Ḥaḍramites. The region of the Abasēnoi produce myrrh, incense and cotton and they cultivate a plant which yields a purple dye (probably wars, i.e. Fleminga Grahamiana). It lies on a route which leads from Zabīd on the coastal plain to the Ḥimyarite capital Ẓafār.

The Abasēnoi spoken of by Stephanus was located by Hermann von Wissman as a region in the Jabal Hubaysh (perhaps related in etymology with the ḥbš root). Other places names in Yemen contain the ḥbš root, such as the Jabal Ḥabaši, whose residents are still called al-Ahbuš (pl. of Ḥabaš). The location of the Abasēnoi in Yemen may perhaps be explained by remnant Aksumite populations from the 520s conquest by King Kaleb; King Ezana's claims to Sahlen (Saba) and Dhu-Raydan (Himyar) during a time when such control was unlikely may indicate an Aksumite presence or coastal foothold. Traditional scholarship has assumed that the Habashat were a tribe from modern-day Yemen that migrated to Ethiopia and Eritrea. However, the Sabaic inscriptions only use the term ḥbšt to the refer to the Kingdom of Aksum and its inhabitants, especially during the 3rd century, when the ḥbšt (Aksumites) were often at war with the Sabaeans and Himyraites.