The first time I read the book, I could not make head or tail
of it. It is a congeries of apodictic statements on historiography,
especially African historiography; a handful of observations on the
Ethiopic script, many of them factually incorrect; an overview of
classical Ethiopian literature and esthetics; and personal attacks on
certain European scholars. I then came upon Stephen Howe's
"Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes" (1998), a survey of
the background, claims, and practices of that discipline, and on a
second reading, various aspects of AB's "Ethiopic" were clearer.
Howe's work also reintroduced me to a number of Afrocentric dogmas
that I had first encountered in the same place where I first
encountered AB, viz., the Athena Discussion List established by the
publisher HarperCollins a few years ago ostensibly to foster
discussion of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" (1987, 1991) via
structured debate between Bernal and Mary Lefkowitz, whose own screed
against Afrocentrism, "Not Out of Africa", had just been published,
not coincidentally, by HarperCollins (1996). However, alleged
electronic glitches prevented Bernal's fourth contribution from
appearing, and Lefkowitz apparently took this as a personal snub and
declined further participation. The Athena List thereupon became a
stew of vicious and racist name-calling into which an occasional
serious Afrocentrist would contribute assertions about ancient Egypt
based on Herodotus and other ancient authors, and an occasional
serious Classicist would attempt to explain critical method and
contextual interpretation of sources; others would put forward claims
about historical connections between Egyptian and other African
languages, and an occasional serious linguist (including this one)
would attempt to explain historical linguistics methodology and to
reveal the flaws in the language-oriented publications of Cheikh Anta
Diop and Thophile Obenga. >From time to time, a posting by AB
would appear, making odd-seeming claims about the Ethiopic script.
Requests for elucidation were met with the statement that a book was
in preparation; the editor of H-Africa, who sometimes contributed to
the discussion, said he would ask me to review it. When I espied
"Ethiopic" in a bookstore, I reminded him of his offer, and here is
the result.
>From Howe, I learned that the dogmas I had earlier been
exposed to have been common coin in some (mainly American) circles
for well over a century, and that they have been handed down ever
since, uninfluenced by more recent research and scholarship, often
complete with the original century-old attributions, often without. I
learned that the concept of a critical approach to sources does not
exist in Afrocentrist teaching--that appeal to authority is decisive:
that the writings of Diop in particular are sacrosanct, and that a
particularly authoritarian figure is Temple University's Molefi K.
Asante, whose edited volumes and journals virtually never carry any
contributions challenging any Afrocentrist teaching. In the
intellectual realm, I learned that guiding principles of Afrocentrism
include hyperdiffusionism, indigeneity, and an ethnology grounded
firmly in the now completely discredited racial science of
nineteenth-century Europe. These three principles in particular find
expression in AB's book.
There are an Introduction (pp. 1-30) and five chapters: The
Arabian Peninsula in Ethiopian Historiography (pp. 31-60), The
History and Principles of the Ethiopic Writing System (pp. 61-103),
"The Book of Hnok" and African Historiography (pp. 105-18), "Se'en":
Aesthetics and Literary Traditions of Ethiopia (pp. 119-39), and
Conclusion (pp. 141-49). Each chapter includes bibliographic
endnotes, though many of their entries are not repeated in the
Bibliography (pp. 151-64) and many of the entries in the Bibliography
are not cited in the book. At the end is a detailed Index (pp.
165-76).
Specific difficulties with AB's book can be grouped in four categories: theory of writing, Semitic languages, Ethiopic writing systems, and conduct of scholarship.
Although my concern here is not Afrocentrist theory per se, I note that within the Introduction, sections on a "Locational Theoretical Model" (pp. 12-18) give evidence of a schism, with AB defending the position of his teacher C. T. Keto against an assault by Samir Amin. This passage is sandwiched within the initial characterizations of writing systems, to which I now direct my attention, and I do not think that the obscurities of the following extracts can be attributed to Afrocentrism:
***
"Signs, symbols, syllographs, and writing systems are mechanisms of knowledge systems, which may be shown at various stages of knowledge creations, conceptions, development and transmissions." (pp. 1-2)
"What is writing? What is a writing system? Writing systems are components of knowledge systems. Writing is a means by which people record, objectify, and organize their activities and thoughts through polygraphs in order to facilitate and ensure existence, growth, nurturing, creativity and continuity from generation to generation. Writing could also be simply defined as a representation of speech and thoughts through various forms of sound graphs. A writing system then is a conventional and principled way of actualizing activities and thoughts, such as languages, natural science, theology, commerce and aesthetics, through polygraphs depicting polysounds and meanings." (p. 2)
"Close and careful examination of writing systems ... reveals layers of knowledge beyond language and linguistics. It could be argued that the study of writing systems may help us to understand thought patterns or how people organize their thoughts. It may also enable us to probe the scope of human liberty that permits the creation of ways and means to improve and enhance 'beingness' and togetherness. Writing is a way of transforming our sensual perceptions into recognizable imagery. It is a means to describe phenomena." (p. 3) ***
("Syllograph" is AB's word for what in English is called a
syllabograph; he writes "syllabry" for "syllabary," even injecting
the spelling into quotes from other authors, e.g. p. 91.)
These quotations show at least that AB is not familiar with the
literature on the history and nature of writing systems, and at best
that his approach is mystical rather than scientific, and that he has
not found the words to express this mystical approach in such a way
that others can grasp his viewpoint. In the absence of explanations
of many of the terms used, I am at a loss to understand how AB's view
fits into or contrasts with mainstream interpretations. The last
quote says that a particular suggestion "could be argued"--but it is
not argued anywhere in the book.
(Compare my definition of writing, published e.g. in "The World's Writing Systems", p. 3: "A system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer.")
There is one major point where Afrocentric dogma seriously impacts
AB's investigation of Ethiopic writing, and that is the insistence on
total autonomy of African culture and civilization. From the moment
the Ge`ez (Classical Ethiopic) language came to the attention of
European scholars, in the sixteenth century, there was no doubt of
its similarity to Arabic, Hebrew, and the other languages that would
later (1781) be dubbed "Semitic." Whatever sort of color prejudice
there may have been in Europe at the time, it was never suggested
that the language of "black" people was disqualified from relation to
these other, better known languages.
The similarity is patently obvious to anyone with the most
superficial familiarity with any of the languages concerned, and the
data may be examined in any number of standard reference sources on
Semitic comparative grammar (e.g. Moscati 1964, Bennett 1998). Yet AB
writes (p. 49), "The Kibr Ngst [and other Ethiopian classics]
classifies Ge'ez as a language of the house of Ham. ... Ge'ez sources
are clear on that score. If Ge'ez is not a Semitic language, then
much less so would be the other Ethiopian 'Semitic' languages like
Tigr, Tigrinya, Amarinya, Harari, Gurag. The classification of Ge'ez
as a Semitic language is a rather arbitrary and recent European one."
(There is a close-quote quotation mark at this point, with a footnote
referring to an "unpublished manuscript" by one Haile Habtu of the
City College of New York. This ms. is heavily relied on by AB, but
the numerous quotations give the impression that it cannot have been
anything more than an undergraduate term paper, since they are wildly
inaccurate.) I do not see that there is any conflict between Ge'ez
being a Semitic language (which is a matter of an arbitrary label for
a language family and simple observation of the characteristics of
the languages assigned to that family) and a traditional label for it
as "of the house of Ham," which is hardly the result of linguistic or
philological examination.
Similarly AB writes (p. 44) "Hamitic/Semitic divide, of course was nothing but a means to keep the Ethiopian people divided." This is complete nonsense. "Hamitic," like "Semitic," in linguistics is an arbitrary label, taken from the genealogies in Genesis 10 but implying nothing as to the historicity of the Biblical account of tribal relationships nor especially of its pertinence to the genetic relationships of languages (which are independent of ethnic and even cultural relations between peoples). "Hamitic" was applied to the set of language families that are known to be genetically related to the Semitic languages: Semitic is one of six branches of what is now called the Afroasiatic phylum of languages, as has been recognized since the second half of the nineteenth century; the other branches are Egyptian (ancient Egyptian and Coptic), Berber (spoken by millions in North Africa), Cushitic and Omotic (found in the Horn of Africa, from northern Sudan to Tanzania), and Chadic (mostly in and around northern Nigeria, the best known Chadic language being Hausa). The name "Hamitic" for the other five has been abandoned because the compound "Hamito-Semitic" incorrectly suggests that the other five are more closely related to each other than to Semitic. The Hamitic/Semitic divide, then, is nothing but a recognition that Ge`ez, Amharic, Tigrinya, and so on are much more distantly related to languages like Oromo and Somali than they are to Hebrew, Arabic, and so on.
AB makes a number of assertions about the history of the Ethiopic script that are less than accurate. In his zeal to deny any South Arabian influence on the beginnings of Ethiopian (Aksumite) civilization, he makes the claim that the monumental South Arabian script is a development from (an early form of?) the Ethiopic. At the same time, he claims that one of the "issues" of Ethiopic studies "for future scholarly investigation" is, "What is the significance of having more than one syllograph for some of the phonemes in the Ethiopic writing system?" (p. 148). This is not at all an issue requiring investigation; it is a simple fact that the script underlying the Ethiopic was devised for a language richer in consonants than Ge`ez; when some of the consonantal phonemes (laryngeals, sibilants) merged in Ge`ez, the letters for them were retained in the script even though the scribes could not know from the sound of a word which letter to write it with. Only the investigation of Semitic etymologies makes it possible for lexicographers to catalogue words with the historically appropriate spellings. If, conversely, the South Arabian script derived from the Ethiopic, there is no way the homophonous letters could have been consistently assigned to the etymologically appropriate sounds.
AB suggests that the ultimate origin of the Ethiopic script
is the so-called "Proto-Sinaitic," which dates to some time in the
first half of the second millennium BCE and was found on some votive
objects near mines in the Sinai (in this he reflects mainstream
scholarship of the history of the alphabet, although many scholars
are no longer certain that the "decipherment" of the Proto-Sinaitic
inscriptions published by W. F. Albright is successful). He seems,
though, to have the impression that but a single such inscription
exists, and that it is on a sphinx (p. 70); in fact, about twenty
inscriptions have been found, on a variety of items that seem to have
been dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. But, departing from
the usual understanding (Daniels 1997) whereby Proto-Sinaitic
represents the earliest attested state of the West Semitic script,
from which or from something similar to which two descendants
developed, one in the northern Semitic-speaking realm, which through
Proto-Canaanite led to Phoenician, Aramaic, and eventually the Greek
and Latin alphabets, and the other in the southern Semitic-speaking
realm, which through the Old North Arabic inscriptions (Safaitic,
Thamudic, Lihyanic) led to the script of the South Arabian
inscriptions, which was brought into the Aksumite region and
developed into the Ge`ez script (others prefer to derive this from
Thamudic, references and discussion in Bernal 1990:63), AB would have
Ge`ez script somehow come directly from Proto-Sinaitic, somehow
passing through the Nile Valley without leaving a trace. Somehow,
moreover, it crossed with hieroglyphs and took on pictographic
properties.
The one piece of evidence offered by AB in support of his notion of the Egypt-mediated background of Ethiopic script comes from letter-order. The northern Semitic scripts exhibit the familiar letter-order
' b g x d h w z H T y k S l m V n Z s ` p c q r F G t
(where capital letters are an Internet expedient corresponding with a variety of diacritics; "V" and "F" represent the interdentals, equivalent to English th in "thy" and "thigh" respectively, which are found in Ugaritic, Arabic, and South Arabian but merged with other consonants in the other Semitic languages)
but the Ethiopic order is different:
h l H m S r s q b t x n ' k w ` z y d g T P c D f p
AB claims that the first and last letters in Ethiopic correspond to Egyptian words "ha" 'the beginning' and "peh" 'the end'; the shape of the first letter--like the roman letter U--is said to correspond both with the horns of a bull and with a man's arms upraised to heaven (p. 82). No explanation is given for the shape of the last letter--like the roman letter T. These two letters are also (p. 83) associated with hieroglyphs representing the forequarters and hindquarters of a lion respectively. In fact, according to the standard signlist in Gardiner's "Egyptian Grammar" (1957), the former (sign no. F4) represents the word "H`t" 'front' and not the sound H (note, moreover, H, not h); the latter (sign no. F22) represents the word "pHwy" 'hindquarters, end' and hence the sound sequence pH (not p alone).
AB's only other suggestion for a connection with hieroglyphs
concerns the letter S--shaped like a rounded roman letter W--which he
compares with the hieroglyph he describes as "a garden or farm ..., a
sign representation of alternate raws of papyrus and lotus" (p. 83),
presumably (there is no illustration) 'pool with lotus flowers' (sign
no. M8), which represents both the word "S`" 'lotus pool' and the
sound sequence S`. In isolation this one case is useless for showing
dependence or relation of Ethiopic on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead,
the shape of Ethiopic S relates to the shape of the corresponding
letter in South Arabian in ways similar to those seen with the other
letters of the two scripts.
AB offers no suggestions as to the order of the rest of the
letters between the first and last.
The Ethiopic order does, though, find at least a partial explanation
in the ancient order of the South Arabian letters, which was
discovered about twenty years ago (summary in Ryckmans 1985) and is
now known to have been in use well before 1000 BCE (Bordreuil and
Pardee 1995):
h l H m q w C r b t S k n x c s f ' ` D g d G T z V y F Z
(where C stands for the consonant corresponding to Hebrew sin)
What has not yet been explained is the divergence between the
ancient South Arabian and the modern Ethiopic letter-orders.
Moreover, the letter p is unique to Ethiopic script; it corresponds
to no letter in any other Semitic script (including Proto-Sinaitic,
South Arabian, and Thamudic) and is placed at the end, as is usual
for letters added to a standard inventory after its adoption.
AB is aware of the most striking difference between Ethiopic
writing and all other West Semitic writing--the incorporation of
explicit vowel indication into the letters, so that there are 7 x 26
= 182 syllabograms (and not just 26 consonant letters) in the basic
script--but his only allusion to the origin of this unusual practice
is to pooh-pooh the theory that it represents influence from India
(where vowels had been notated similarly for about 600 years by the
time Ethiopic script took on vowel notation--took it on along with
Christianity). AB politicizes the suggestion: "The South Arabian
paradigm, found difficult to defend, has been conveniently replaced
by the Indian paradigm, for the purpose is to assert the non-African
origin of the Ethiopic writing system. The presence of a close
relationship between the Ethiopian and the Indian does not
automatically mean the latter is a source to the former" (p. 19). If
only the caution of the last sentence were observed in connection
with other hyperdiffusionist Afrocentric claims. Of course the
suggestion of Indic inspiration for the Ethiopic vocalization system
has no bearing on the South Arabian origin of the consonant shapes.
Nor is it shameful for one civilization to make use of an innovation
of another!
AB's discussion of the history of Ethiopic script does nothing to displace the accepted understanding that it is a development from a form of the South Arabian, or Sabean, script. This accounts for the apparent duplication of letters for the same sound and for the idiosyncratic letter order. Any pictographic background of the letters (that may or may not have played a part in the origin of the script) has long since been obscured by millennia of gradual calligraphic alterations to their shapes.
AB takes a number of pages to discuss a topic that seems to have
little bearing on the history and principles of the Ethiopic writing
system: the book of Enoch. In Western Christianity, this work (which
has survived complete only in a Ge`ez translation; fragments in
Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some portions are
known in Greek as well) forms part of the Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. In Ethiopia, the book is
canonical.
With what sadly looks like paranoiac nativism, AB insists that
Enoch must have been composed in Ge`ez, that it cannot have been
translated from Greek or Aramaic. Without considering their evidence
for the languages underlying the Ge`ez, he condemns the scholars who
have discussed it: Knibb, Milik, Ullendorff, Charles. AB seems to
think that it is necessary to have a complete original-language text
in order to demonstrate that a book has been translated: "The fact
that "The Ethiopian Book of Hnok" is found in very fragmentary forms
in the Aramaic and Greek languages has raised the issue regarding its
original language" (p. 112). This is utterly untrue; it was obvious
when the book first became known in Europe (1773) that it was a
translation, and the Greek fragments did not become known for another
century, the Aramaic more than a half century later than that. "It is
hard to agree with Knibb's suggestion of Aramaic being the original
language of [Enoch] given the above statement" [that the DSS Aramaic
fragments relate to just 196 of the 1,062 verses of the complete
book] (p. 114). But the fact of a translation can be determined even
in the absence of the slightest shred of original text.
AB makes his assertions without the least familiarity with the
philological methods that demonstrate the fact of translation. This
one example from M. A. Knibb's 10-page discussion of the problem (The
Ethiopic Book of Enoch, vol. 2, pp. 37-46) may illustrate the
thinking: "In 101:4 the Ethiopic text reads 'do you not see the kings
of the ships [Ge`ez text given]?' where the context requires rather
'the sailors of the ships'. Halvy long ago suggested that the
rendering 'kings' derived from a misreading of [Aramaic] "mlHy" as
"mlky", and this explanation was generally adopted" (p. 39). Knibb,
like Edward Ullendorff, sees the Ge`ez as translated directly from
Aramaic, with, apparently, consultation of a Greek version.
Ullendorff gives this example (Ethiopia and the Bible, p. 61)
showing a Greek background: "One need only think of the misreading in
Enoch 22:2 where the context seems to require 'hollow places' and
where the Ethiopic version is likely to have mistaken [Greek] "koloi"
for "kalo" ([Ge`ez] "Sanayat")."
R. H. Charles, writing nearly a century ago (thus long before
the discovery of any Aramaic fragments of Enoch), discussed the
relationship between the two main Greek fragments known to him and
the Ethiopic: "Even the most superficial study makes it clear that E
and Gg are more closely related than E and Gs or Gs and Gg. Indeed
the evidence makes it clear that "E was translated from a MS. which
was also the parent or ancestor of Gg." This follows from the fact
that "the same corruptions" appeear in GgE over against true readings
in Gs where this exists" (The Book of Enoch, p. xviii). He deduces
that there was an "Original Greek Translation from the Semitic" from
which were copied Gs and a lost copy; and from this lost copy were
made both Gg and the Ethiopic version (p. xix). Much later in his
introduction he discusses at length what the original Semitic
language might have been (pp. lvii-lxx), concluding that Enoch
chapters 6-36 were written in Aramaic and chapters 1-5, 37-104 were
written in Hebrew.
AB reserves special scorn for J. T. Milik, who edited the
Aramaic fragments of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls: "Milik,
perhaps, has no parallel in his contempt of "The Ethiopic Book of
Hnok". Milik used unscholarly and unscientific methods in his long
and quite dormant effort to establish the Aramaic fragments of
Qumranic Enoch as the original source of the Book. Just a glance at
his Aramaic - Greek Ethiopic Glossary clearly shows his brutal
contempt and, perhaps, ignorance of Ge`ez. While the Aramaic and
Greek words are written in their respective scripts, Milik used the
Roman or English script for the Ethiopic words, as if the Ethiopic is
devoid of its own script. This is actually the case throughout the
text. To a lay reader, the absence of the Ethiopic writing system may
suggest that the Ethiopic is an oral language" (p. 116). This is the
most specious claim of all. Had AB read even just a few pages of
Milik's book, he would have seen that the only non-Roman type used is
Hebrew (for the Aramaic text itself), Greek, and (curiously) Coptic.
More than twenty other languages are cited (see Milik's indexes, pp.
408-26), and not one of them--not even Syriac or Arabic--is printed
in its own non-Roman script.
>From Milik's conclusion (not quite accurately quoted) that
"collation of [the Aramaic fragments] with existing witnesses of
Enochic Books reveal the very secondary, periphrastic, and often
confusing nature of the Ethiopic text. One should never trust any
given detail of the version" (p.116, quoting p. 88), AB draws the
inferences that "Milik, who cannot even read Ge`ez, reached a
conclusion that is more a reflection of his bias than a product of
his unfermented experience. [The last quoted sentence] is nothing but
a good example of hegemonic scholarship" (p. 117). Milik's knowledge
of Ge`ez is certainly not nonexistent, but as was brought out by his
reviewers--Ullendorff and Knibb--twenty years before AB was writing,
it was not adequate to studying the relation between the Aramaic
fragments and the Ethiopic text; whereas they pay due respect to his
"profound attainments in Aramaic" and conclude "If only he could have
been persuaded to restrict the quite gratuitously wide compass of his
disquisition! Had he given us less, it would have been infinitely
more."
AB thus rejects all modern scholarship not only on the history of Ethiopic writing, but also on the book of Enoch. In so doing, he impoverishes his own understanding of this document that is so vital for Ethiopian civilization.
Several chapters of the book are devoted to subjects even more
distant from the study of the history and principles of the script.
The passages on philosophy and esthetics are quite interesting; the
passages on numerology merit a comment. AB describes an equivalent to
Hebrew gematria, where a numerical value is assigned to each
character and calculations are made based on the letters with which a
word or name is written. According to the diagram on p. 88, each
simple letter (consonant plus a) represents a number (h = 1, l = 2,
..., p = 800) and the vowel variations represent multipliers (hu = 2,
lu = 4, ..., pu = 1600, ..., ho = 7, lo = 14, ..., po = 5600); but in
all the examples of numerological calculations, the vowel variations
are not taken into account.
Not surprisingly, AB denies the obvious fact that the Ethiopic numerals are taken directly from the Greek numerals (i.e., the letters of the Greek alphabet). Instead, he attempts (p. 89f.) to match the numerals to Ethiopic letters (and actually gets one of the correspondences right: 3 < gamma = g). He shows 12 of the 19 different numerals, and assigns letters to 8 of them. Not only is no principle suggested for which letter is assigned to which numeral, and not only are four (or eleven) of the numerals unassigned, but the letter g is assigned to three of them, and h to two!
I could have quoted many additional outrageous statements concerning facts of the history of Ethiopic writing and the conduct of scholarship by Europeans. The whole book is so confused that even if there were an Afrocentric case to be made for a revision of our understanding of the history of Ethiopia, it cannot be found here. If this is simply a transcript of AB's Temple University dissertation--still more if it is a revision of it--it casts more of a pall than even Stephen Howe imagined on intellectual life in its Department of African American Studies.
I am grateful for assistance and comments to Martin Bernal, Gene Gragg, Grover Hudson, and M. O'Connor.