It's crazy how little progress has been made in the field since Cerulli's last major works in the 60's. It's been 60 years since then .If they examined more of these Ethiopian christian chronicles they would probably see the same thing, instead of accepting what's in them blindly , they will see them as just fabricating events that never took place.
We have one such case where the Portuguese missionary Pedro Paez was shown the chronicles of Gelewados after it was written and it followed the same same Amda Seyeon epic fiction trope of an all conquering idealized King and they had to call BS on it. Because they couldn't sell them this lie as they were there to witness the war as it happened and remember what took place.
He never went to Awdal or the Muslim territories, nor did he conquere their lands. Infact the opposite happened Emir Nur succeeded Gurey persued him deep into the highlands and slayed him at his courts.
King Claudius, is latin rendering of Gelewadeos
Pedro Páez's History of Ethiopia, 1622 - Partie 2 - Page 17
''Not only did Emperor Claudio not do those things in [Chronicle) , Kingdom of Adel, but he never went there in his life. Nor did the Moors lose so much with Granh's defeat and death that they could not have defended themselves very well, had he gone there. Rather, the Moor who succeeded Granh as guazir silicet ''governor'' came from there with an army against Emperor Claudio a few years later and on giving battle, defeated and killed him not very far from where he had his court, as everyone says and his history recounts''
And Emir Nur defeated him with very tiny army in comparison.
'' Owed God for the remarkable victory that He had given him...because his army had been incomparably smaller than the emperor''
The corrections he makes is also confirmed in the local Muslim chronicle(Tarikh Al-Mulukh) referring to Emir Nur as the Second Conqueror, that more accurately described the events that followed.
This is more less an eyewitness account as well "I personally saw the head of the King with my own eyes". I proves how reliable the muslim chronicles are in comparison.
The same Gelewados chronicle also fabricates fantasy narrative that it conquered or invaded Mogadishu. He of course never went there in his life .
Thread on the history of Coffee (New Manuscripts Uncovered)
- Thread starter MacrobianPrince
- Start date
Idilinaa
VIP
You could say the lack of progress is mainly due to regional politics and displacement.
Since you need a stable source of funding, resources , materials, institutional backing and stable environment to conduct your research in.
I think Somali traders can be credited for spreading it to Yemen and beyond but what is today SW Ethiopia is likely the ultimate origin. The wild gene pool shows the highest diversity in regions like Kaffa, Jimma, Sheka, Bench Maji.The coffee plant itself was first domesticated in Eastern Ethiopia basically Galbeed which a new scientific study actually reveals. So it was in the Muslim lands.
As the Eastern population of wild coffee was the primary source for domestication.
The genome and population genomics of allopolyploid Coffea arabica reveal the diversification history of modern coffee cultivars - Nature Genetics
Chromosome-level genome assemblies of allotetraploid Coffea arabica and representatives of its diploid progenitors, Coffea eugenioides and Coffea canephora, provide insights into Arabica’s diversification history.www.nature.com
Which makes sense to be honest those medieval sources talking about it originating in Land of Zayla, Bar Sa'Adin and Al-Jabarta don't just talk about a coffee culture but rather widespread cultivation or original crop cultivation center.
This aligns perfectly with folktales and a linguistic clue that the the name “coffee” seemingly derives from the Kaffa province and Omotic-speaking Kafficho people. Some of you laugh at the Kaldi folktale but it's likely not a coincidence that these stories are mostly based in the Kafa and Jimma areas where as mentioned, the plant's genetic diversity seems to be the highest.
In fact, your own source seems to indicate that the Gesha region (majority Kafficho territory) as most amenable to domestication:
The picture to me seems more like a West ---> East transfer and probably some subsequent gene-flow from Eastern species, perhaps even further domestication and cultivation giving rise to the modern variants rather than a totally independent eastern domestication:
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Idilinaa
VIP
There is zero historical records that backs this up. The name coffee in European language is from Turkish Kahwe which is borrowed from Arabic Qahwa. It has no links to Kaffa province name.
And in Harar Ogaden regions they call it by the Somali name Buun.
The Eastern riftvalley is (eastern highlands (Harar) and Ogaden region) and Western side of riftvalley is where( Gesha, Kaffa) is located.
What they found in that study i linked in the first image you shared is that the Eastern coffee population split from the western one 30.000 years ago and the eastern descendant one is what was brought to Yemen after being domesticated whilst the western side remained wild.
Ancient DNA Revolution - Coffee's Epic Journey - Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2024
Great Rift Valley, Ethiopia
archaeology.org
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New Hornaristocrat thread of this very topic.It was probably me.
I linked a study that examined it and found it to be a work of pure fiction:
The account of the wars of King ʿAmda Ṣeyon against the Islamic sultanates, an epic fiction of the 15th century
Le récit des guerres du roi ʿAmda Ṣeyon contre les sultanats islami...
Tous les commencements sont difficiles.Chaïm Potok, Au Commencement, 1976 [2019]. Le récit des guerres menées par le roi ʿAmda Ṣeyon contre les souverains de l’Ifāt et, plus globalement, contre les...journals.openedition.org
Not only were the sultanates independent, sophisticated and were in actuality rival kingdoms especially Awfat and Awdal that had the military and economic upperhand over them , not tributary rebel provinces in the way they are depicted.
The text also fabricates stuff like it claims that ʿAmda Ṣeyon appointed sultans (e.g., replacing Ṣabr al-Dīn with Ǧamāl al-Dīn) contradicts Walasmaʿ genealogies, which show smooth successions. Uninterrupted, with no puppet ruler imposed from the outside.
It gets the chronology of succession between the sultans wrong as well from what we know through local and external arabic sources that documents the walashma genealogy and it makes no sense at all. It also lumps older sultans with newer ones like they existed in the same time frame. (e.g., Ḥaqq al-Dīn II [14th c.] with Ǧamāl al-Dīn [15th c.]) into a single conflict.
But yeah the whole thing is nonsense , imagine seriously entertaining the idea this mythical "Amda Seyon" single-handedly crushed all Muslim sultanates in one year (1332/3). No archaeological or Muslim sources confirm this. Awfāt and Awdal remained powerful for centuries after.
The text also includes mythic propaganda themes and literary tropes like angels helped him fight and the Qadi Salih (The sorcerer judge). It reads like some medieval fantasy epic fantasy work. Amda Seyon is imagined as the Heroic King, invincible warrior the ideal and Sabr Ad din in the story is the anthesis the cowardly traitor lmaoo. The narrative includes exaggerated battles, lists of territories, and eschatological themes, emphasizing a clash between Christianity and Islam.
But safe to say that the vassalage narrative is pure Christian propaganda, you can also see how this could be false in Muslim sources. The Walashma sultans defeated Ethiopian's armies multiple times often with much smaller armies. They had economic independence: Awfāt controlled trade routes to Zeila, taxing caravans, not the reverse. Diplomatic prestige: Sultans exchanged ambassadors with the Mamlūks (per al-Maqrīzī), something vassals couldn’t do.
After Saʿd al-Dīn’s death (1415), his sons built Awdal into a stronger power hardly behavior of crushed vassals. Sa'd a Din himself had vast military victories against them and was seen as the sovereign of Al-Habash(The Horn of Africa) in Cairo. He became legendary and famed in the entire Muslim world.
You can also tell from muslim sources and descriptions that the early Awfat rulers originated from Awdal launched military campaigns to conquere the Showa plateu and then built miltary garrison towns that act as buffer frontiers that seperates the Christian highlands from the Muslim Lowlands. So most of the battles that took place were border skirmishes and small scales raids.
On the Ethiopian side the short unsuccessful raids was pure gaajo(hunger) tactics as @novanova pointed out. They want the wealth and riches that the Muslims had and as they were living under starvation and feudal opression.
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Damn.
What makes this even crazier is that every paper that talks about islam in the horn of africa says that maybe they shouldn't use these "rich Christian Ethiopian sources " to talk about islam in the horn. When in actuality the world being constructed by these Ethiopian sources is all just nonsensical.
I think the even bigger question is if these sources are just outright making stuff up. How much of the last several deacdes of historiography concerning the horn of africa during the 1200- 1600s is just all made up.
You're parroting a sloppy paraphrase by that article meant for a popular audience. Again, what the study actually found:What they found in that study i linked in the first image you shared is that the Eastern coffee population split from the western one 30.000 years ago and the eastern descendant one is what was brought to Yemen after being domesticated whilst the western side remained wild.
Ancient DNA Revolution - Coffee's Epic Journey - Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2024
Great Rift Valley, Ethiopiaarchaeology.org
The Gesha plants seem to be the closest to the wild ancestor and most likely the site of initial domestication and gene flow with Eastern variants likely occurred later.
The Ethnoarchaeology of coffee production and consumption: three case studies from Southwest Ethiopia (Kafecho, Majangir and Oromo)
This paper is a fantastic read - among other things, it details ethnographic evidence how the deeply entrenched forest management practices among Kaffa and Jimma farmers mirror the likely ancient processes of domestication:
We also have remains of coffee seeds in the region as early as 1740bp alongside some other possibly domesticated plants:
The ethnographic evidence, genetics, oral traditions, and admittedly currently speculative yet intriguing linguistic links seem to converge towards the Kaffa zone [encompassing Kafficho, Majangir, and Oromo and probably other southwestern highland peoples] as the cradle of coffee domestication.
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Idilinaa
VIP
It’s not a sloppy paraphrase at all . I directly linked to the "Nature Genetics" study it was based on:
The genome and population genomics of allopolyploid Coffea arabica reveal the diversification history of modern coffee cultivars - Nature Genetics
Chromosome-level genome assemblies of allotetraploid Coffea arabica and representatives of its diploid progenitors, Coffea eugenioides and Coffea canephora, provide insights into Arabica’s diversification history.
www.nature.com
I was showing that my explanation aligns with the findings there
The material you linked focuses on the wild coffee populations that still grow in the western highlands (like Kaffa and Jimma). Those are indeed the ancestral wild forms. What the Nature paper discusses, however, is the cultivated and domesticated lineage , the one that was taken eastward and eventually introduced to Yemen
The study shows that the wild progenitor originated in the western side (around Gesha), while the domesticated eastern population descends from that western lineage. In other words, the cultivated variety that spread to Yemen was an eastern descendant of the original western wild plant.
It’s actually a fascinating study because it maps out the entire genetic and geographic journey of the coffee plant’s domestication and spread.
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You're conflating "domesticated" and "cultivated" here. In doing so, and characterizing the Western variant as "wild" and the eastward variant as "cultivated and domesticated" as per that article's oversimplified paraphrase and binaric framing, you're subtly writing the aforementioned peoples out of the story by glossing over their centuries long domestication or proto-domestication process and history of cultivation with the plant. That the modern cultivated varieties cluster with the eastern population, would not mean that the initial process itself occurred there. The initial "domestication" process itself most likely took place in the western highlands before the lineage spread eastward likely via trade networks and admixed with local varieties.It’s not a sloppy paraphrase at all . I directly linked to the "Nature Genetics" study it was based on:
View attachment 376991
The genome and population genomics of allopolyploid Coffea arabica reveal the diversification history of modern coffee cultivars - Nature Genetics
Chromosome-level genome assemblies of allotetraploid Coffea arabica and representatives of its diploid progenitors, Coffea eugenioides and Coffea canephora, provide insights into Arabica’s diversification history.
I was showing that my explanation aligns with the findings there
The material you linked focuses on the wild coffee populations that still grow in the western highlands (like Kaffa and Jimma). Those are indeed the ancestral wild forms. What the Nature paper discusses, however, is the cultivated and domesticated lineage , the one that was taken eastward and eventually introduced to Yemen
Idilinaa
VIP
Nah, you’re mixing it up. The study shows the western Gesha population stayed mostly wild, while the eastern population is where cultivation and domestication actually took off before spreading to Yemen. So yeah, the ancestor was from the west, but the cultivated coffee we know today came from the east.
That sped Habesha tryna steal our landmark Coffee, even though his ancestors viewed Coffee as a form of apostacy lol
Ethiopian Christians do not consider camel meat forbidden to distinguish themselves from Muslims, because Muslims consume camel meat.
Ethiopian Christians do not consume camel meat, primarily because the camel is not considered legitimate ( kosher ) and their religious dietary laws are based on Old Testament prohibitions. Although the New Testament abolished these biblical restrictions, abstinence from camel meat has remained a deeply rooted cultural tradition rooted in these Old Testament beliefs.
From :
Meat Consumption Culture in Ethiopia - PMC - PubMed Central:
( Both, Ethiopian Christians and Muslims in common do not eat pork as it is forbidden by their religious beliefs (Teklehaimanot, 2005).
On the side of all of the Christian sects in Ethiopia, they have a common restriction for some animal meats which is based on the old testament of Holy Bible that characterizes the animals used for consumption. For mammals, so as to be served as a food, they need to be ruminants as well as not to have hoof of two fully splits, and for birds, they need to have fingers of fully splits with no attachment one another. By relating with this stated religious belief, therefore, pig doesn’t fulfill the stated criteria. Therefore Ethiopian Christians don’t eat pigs and it is among the “forbidden” called as ‘erkuse’ alike the term “Haram” used with the Muslims context.
Meat of camel isn’t also eaten by Ethiopian Christians using similar affiliation criteria that are used for animal selection in order to be served as food.) .
Outside of the Jewish communities who observed the dietary laws of Leviticus, no broader Middle Eastern societies—certainly not ancient Christian ones—were avoiding camel meat because of anything in the Old Testament. It's pretty strongly implied it's—for Habeshas—tied to differentiating themselves from Muslims the same way they avoided khat and coffee due to that where they outright saw coffee in particular as a "Muslim drink". In the first quote below the scholar in question notes that when they condemned the consumption of camel meat they outright associated it with the "practices of Muslims":
At any rate, this is besides the point. The whole focus of my original post and this thread is... coffee.
The Semiotics of the “Christian/Muslim Knife”: Meat and Knife as Markers of Religious Identity in Ethiopia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025.
Food and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity:
( Broadly speaking, food is believed by many to be no issue for Christians (Barclay Reference Barclay2010), usually referring to the biblical accounts on food for Christians such as in Matt. 15:11 and Rom. 14:1–22. However, it is an issue for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians for their own relation to God as well as to people of other faiths, mainly Muslims. In relation to this, the EOTC’s history of isolation from other churches illuminates our discussion. As Adrian Hastings observes, the EOTC was isolated for many centuries such that its sociocultural requirements were very different, the most unique feature being its Hebraic substructure (Reference Hastings2008). As a result “the pattern of Orthodox worship and religious life was as much one of the Old Testament as of the New” (35). The Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity is unique among other sister Oriental Orthodox Churches as well for various reasons among which are the veneration of the tabot (replica of arc of the covenant), the observance of the Sabbath, and the observance of Mosaic food laws dividing clean from unclean, to mention just a few (Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968; Pawlikowski Reference Pawlikowski1972; Shenk Reference Shenk1988; Hastings Reference Hastings2008, 35). David Robinson (Reference Robinson2004, 110) states about “the relative isolation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from the dominant forms of Christianity around the Mediterranean, led by the Roman Catholic Pope and the Patriarch in Constantinople.” More to the point, he writes, “Ethiopian Christianity developed mainly from internal sources, encouraged by the Aksum court, local monks, and missionaries” (110). Concerning food laws, there are several Judaic elements in the church. For example, like Judaism, “Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church forbids eating animals with uncloven hoofs and those that do not chew their own cud” (see Beyene Reference Beyene1994; Lyons Reference Lyons2007, 354). In addition, “The pig is subject to … ‘pan-Ethiopian’ avoidance rule” (Braukamper Reference Braukamper and Rubenson1982, 433). A feature also of Islam, pork abstinence is the most rigorous food prohibition observed throughout Ethiopia (Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968, 103). Therefore, the church, because of its unique history that traces back to Judaism, of its indigenous elements, as well as of its veneration or imitation of the Old Testament has unique food proscriptions (Beyene Reference Beyene1997; Zellelew Reference Zellelew2014). More importantly, the dietary law of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christians that plays a great role in their commensality with Ethiopian Muslims is almost directly linked to the purity concerns observed in early rabbinic food laws concerning questions like who eats with whom, who slaughters the animal, and what and where is eaten, and so forth (see Finger Reference Finger2007; Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum2010).Footnote8 More specifically, as Reta Finger (Reference Finger2007, 177, my emphasis) writes, “In this system like eats with like. . . . Some food is clean if it comes from the right kind of animal and has been prepared with the right utensils and dishes.” These and other elements such as the fasts and feasts make the Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity unique (Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968) among not only the broader Christianity but also its sister Oriental Orthodox Churches including the Coptic Orthodox Church, under whose synod the EOTC stayed for centuries (Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 25; Shenk Reference Shenk1988, 261; Tamene Reference Tamene1998, 96). )
