Indigenous Women Eritrea

The two large photographs are of a young Eritrean lady taken near her village during October 2000.  Originally I had used color film, but the resulting prints are now badly deteriorated.  So, after digital scanning I was able to rework them as black & white images to preserve as much quality as possible.

The fourteen smaller images are the product of unknown Italian photographers, probably taken between 1869-1899, during the pre-post Italian colonial period (photography was commercially introduced in 1839).  These images are found on postcards and in a few other formats, most are now held by private collectors.  The images included here were captured from postcards and foldouts I purchased at various markets and shops in Asmara during my stay in country Sep-Dec 2000.

The Eritrean-Ethiopian region[1] has been exposed to population movements and migrations from northern Africa, across the Red Sea, and from the south. On the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia, one also finds traces of some of Africa’s oldest civilizations.[i] The Axumite empire, which emerges into the light of history in the first century C.E. , comprised the Akkele-Guzai region of highland Eritrea and the Agame region of Tigray, Ethiopia. The empire expanded and its port city of Adulis, south of present-day Massawa, became an important trading post hosting ships from Egypt, Greece, the Arab world, and other far-off areas.[2]

The fabled Queen of Sheba (1005-955 BC) was an Ethiopian, or possibly half-Yemeni queen, who lived three thousand years ago.[3] She is named as Makeda in the Ethiopian chronicle, the Kebra Negaste, or Bilqis, in the Koran. She presided over Ethiopia and Yemen and thus controlled the Red Sea, a great trade route.[4]

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Footnotes

[1] The region known today as Ethiopia did not exist as a separate entity during the period of ancient Rome and Greece. The writers of this period used the term ‘Ethiopia’ to apply to and identify Black people whom previously and still at that time inhabited a vast territory.

[2] Read more: http://www.everyculture.com/Cr-Ga/Eritrea.html#ixzz4kKy9UJVm

[3] Robin Walker. ‘When We Ruled’. See Foreword, p.5, Para. 2.

[4] Ibid. p.86.

Endnotes

[i] Human Origins – Africa has a key role in the early history of humanity, in fact, the cradle of the human race. Diodorus Siculus, an outstanding Greek historian of antiquity, wrote an encyclopedic work on world history in the first century BC, and demonstrates the state of historical knowledge in his time. On human origins we find: “Now the Ethiopians [i.e. Africans], as historians relate, were the first of all men…For that they did not come into their land as immigrants from abroad but were natives of it and so justly bear the name of “autochthones” [i.e. sprung from the soil itself] is, they maintain, conceded by practically all men; furthermore, that those who dwell beneath the noon-day sun were, in all likelihood, the first to be generated by the earth, is clear to all; since inasmuch as it was the warmth of the sun which, at the generation of the universe, dried up the earth when it was still wet and impregnated it with life, it is reasonable to suppose that the region which was nearest the sun was the first to bring forth living creatures. (Reference: C. H. Oldfather (Translator), Diodorus Siculus. Library of History, Vol. II, US, Lorb Classical Library, 1976, pp.89-91).