Horn and Crescent. Connections, Mobility and Exchange between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in the Middle Ages

Project Information

HORNEAST

Grant agreement ID: 726206

DOI

10.3030/726206

Project closed

EC signature date 6 October 2017

Start date 1 November 2017

End date 31 December 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 859 656,00

EU contribution

€ 1 859 656,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE D'AIX MARSEILLE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - HORNEAST (Horn and Crescent. Connections, Mobility and Exchange between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in the Middle Ages)

Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project offers the first comprehensive study of medieval connections between Christian societies of Nubia and Ethiopia on the one hand, and their Islamic environment on the other, in both local and regional contexts, ie. within the Horn of Africa and in the whole Middle East. It pursues the hypothesis that mobility and exchange along trade and pilgrimage routes, on both sides of and across the Red Sea, were not only vectors for the spread of Islam but also factors of African Christianities’ resiliency and reconfiguration in the Middle Ages.
Apart from their relationships with other Eastern Christian churches in Egypt and Palestine, Ethiopian and Nubian Christianities have long been considered as isolated islands, cut off from the wider world by the 7th-century Arab conquests and later on by Islam’s expansion in the Horn of Africa. In this perspective, Islam was regarded as a foreign import in the area, playing a marginal role in the history of local societies. By reassessing the connections of Ethiopian and Nubian Christianities with their medieval environment, mainly governed by Islamic powers, this project provides the opportunity to reconsider the place and role of Islam in the Horn of Africa which remain poorly known. Islamic communities and principalities might have locally emerged in medieval Nubia and Ethiopia in symbiosis with Christian societies. Along with their conflictive relations, the former would therefore have acted as brokers between the later and the rest of the world.
This project also provides the opportunity to reassess Christian-Muslim relations and the process of islamization in a context where Islamic communities flourished in territories mainly inhabited by Christian populations and ruled by Christian kingdoms. This configuration contrasts with that of the territories included by the 7th-century Arab conquests in the Islamic empire, where non-Muslim communities (mainly Christian) suffered a long-term demographic decline under Islamic rule. If in Nubia (ie., present Sudan) Christianity eventually disappeared, it has remained (culturally and demographically) dominant in present Ethiopia and Eritrea. Conversely, the hegemonic role played by Christianity in the national narrative of modern Ethiopia raises the question of the room made to Islam in the collective memory of the country while Muslims currently represent one third of its population. In this respect, by investigating the Islamic history of the Horn of Africa, the ERC project HornEast aims to contribute to the debate on the definition of the national identity of the second most populated country of the African continent.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first key objective (KO 1) consists in providing a comprehensive survey of connections between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in the Middle Ages supported by a database. Connections in the whole area could have taken different forms: human mobility, trade, letter exchange, circulation of artefacts and manuscripts, dissemination of models and narratives. Inquiries have been conducted in Arabic and Ge’ez source material. The database has been developed with FileMaker software and is currently hosted by the TGIR Huma-Num.
KO 2 consists in investigating human mobility between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in various configurations: Christian and Muslim pilgrimages, slave trade and slavery, regional attractiveness of major cities such as Cairo. The second issue is addressed by a PhD candidate under the PI’s supervision. The third is the topic of an edited volume under preparation.
KO 3 consists in exploring cultural transfer and dissemination between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East through the circulation of books, models and narratives. This was the topic of a two-years seminar held in 2020-2021 in Aix-en-Provence. Its main contributions will be published in an edited volume under preparation.
KO 4 consists in evidencing regional connections and interreligious relations through archaeological survey at a very localised level. Survey and excavations were conducted in 2018-2018 in Eastern Tigray, looking for evidence of ancient Islamic settlements in an area which was in the heart of the medieval Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Official permission was given by the Authority for Research and Conservation of the Cultural Heritage (ARCCH, Addis Ababa) and by the Tigray Culture and Tourism Bureau (TCTB, Mekelle). The successive campaigns resulted in the discovery and survey of several ancient Muslim cemeteries, in the partial excavation of the Muslim cemetery of Bilet, in the discovery of about 60 Arabic funerary stelae dated to the 10th-14th centuries, and in the partial excavation of the tell of Kwiha, evidencing continuous settlement in the area between the 3rd and the 18th century CE. Fieldwork operations were interrupted since 2020, due to the Covid pandemic and to the outbreak of civil war in Ethiopia.
KO 5 consists in making available new source materials related to the history of Islam in the Horn of Africa. The corpus of Arabic inscriptions from medieval Tigray, the three quarters of which were unknown prior to this research, will be published in a monograph under preparation.

Dozens of papers directly related to the project have been given in workshops, research seminars and international conferences, in France as well as in various European and non-European countries. First achievements and researches in progress have already resulted in several publications, the most significant being: a special issue in the Journal of Northeastern African studies (2019) edited by the PI, contributions to Brill’s Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea (2020), a paper in the Cambridge journal of archaeology Antiquity (2021), and the first academic monograph devoted to the medieval kingdom of Ethiopia ever written in Amharic. A research blog (https://horneast.hypotheses.org/) and a Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/ehorneast) provide good visibility to the project. Fieldwork operations have been the subject of a film in 2020 (https://news.cnrs.fr/videos/ethiopias-puzzling-history) and of a photo exhibition in 2021 in Aix-en-Provence.

The project’s Data Management Plan has been reformed in 2022 with the help of a professional archivist. See https://horneast.hypotheses.org/2195

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The results of the first 54 months of the ERC COG project HornEast are beyond expectations and has lead to slightly reformulate the project’s priorities in order to consolidate its progress.

Fieldwork conducted in Eastern Tigray (Ethiopia) has highlighted the previoulsy unknown importance of Muslim communities at the very heart of the medieval Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. The corpus of Arabic inscriptions from Eastern Tigray multiplied by 4. The results achieved during the first half of the project’s lifetime give more emphasis on fieldwork in the Horn of Africa than it was thought prior to the action’s implementation. However, other fields of inquiry such as Yemen, Egypt and Palestine have gained in importance during the second half, through researches in written sources.

The outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 resulted in the interruption of research missions abroad and in the cancellation or postponement of various events initialy scheduled. The outbreak of the civil war in Ethiopia in November 2020 has struck another blow to the project, not to mention the tragedy faced by the project’s local collaborators.

11th-century Arabic funerary stele excavated in Kwiha, Eastern Tigray, Ethiopia, November 2019