Talk:Ethiopian historiography

Article's current status

I've created the article and fleshed out all the current sections, but I think some outside input is needed about improving the article before a GA, let alone an FA. Anyone care to comment? I think a decent amount of sources are used, although there is a slightly heavy reliance on James De Lorenzi (2015) in all sections. His book was just too good not to use! I think the images are pretty good, and the layout of the article seems logical. The introduction seems fairly sufficient as well, although there's room for a whole other paragraph according to the strictures laid out in WP:LEAD (i.e. maximum four paragraphs for any lead section). --Pericles of Athens^Talk 11:11, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Nigeria and Tanzania

I recently had a clash with another editor about Bahre Zewde and his thoughts on Ethiopian historiography and its relation with other African schools of historiography. Just to make things absolutely clear, here is Haggai Erlich's (2002) passage in full, from p. 225, note #19, about Zewde (particularly the part that I chose to bold):

In a special issue dedicated to the Fourteenth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, the Journal of Ethiopian Studies (vol. 33, no. 2 [November 2000]) published articles discussing the state of the art in relevant fields. Professor Bahre Zewde, a leading historian and former head of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, presented a general overview titled "A Century of Ethiopian Historiography" (pp. 1-26). He mainly analyzed the works of his colleagues in the Department of History of Addis Ababa University and did so against the background of global historiography and the "African continental setting." Having identified African historical studies as revolving around schools and methods developed mainly in Nigeria and Tanzania (and also in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda), he concluded that "the integration of Ethiopian historiography into the African mainstream, a perennial concern, is still far from being achieved to a satisfactory degree."

Now then, is there any equivocation here in Elich's text about Nigeria and Tanzania? He states quite clearly that Zewde had identified these schools as being the most important within African studies. I included the general phrase "Sub-Saharan" because, well, Nigeria and Tanzania (and Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda for that matter) are technically located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Is there a problem with that somehow? --Pericles of Athens^Talk 04:32, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Article title

I believe it is necessary to move this article to Historiography of Ethiopia. I believe that is the more prevalent and more accepted form of these types of articles. Most article of this type follow the form _____ of _______ title format. —አቤል ዳዊት^?(Janweh64) (talk) 15:09, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Not a bad suggestion, but I contest the idea that it is "necessary" at all. It isn't necessary; it is purely a matter of preference. You should build consensus for doing that before trying to change the title of the article. In fact, you should wait on that altogether, because this article is a current Wikipedia:Good articles candidate. It must be stable, without any moves, in order for it to pass. How about we return to this idea after the nomination process is complete? In the meantime, though, I respectfully vote no to this idea, given the naming convention of many other articles such as Chinese historiography, Greek historiography, Roman historiography, Marxist historiography, etc. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:28, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Agreed.  —አቤል ዳዊት^?(Janweh64) (talk) 01:49, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

@Soupforone: hmm. You and I have had our disagreements here, strong ones, but I have to commend you for your recent edit job here, amending the "Islamic and Chinese historiography" section that I recently added to the article. The pictures you have added are great as well, although I have to go to their Wikimedia pages and fiddle with their licensing info a bit to bring them up to FA media status. In the meantime, I've also added Milkias (2015) to the ref list, and I plan on adding a few more citations from his encyclopedic entry. He was particularly useful in pointing out that Tewodros II was the first Ethiopian monarch to have his chronicles written in Amharic instead of Ge'ez, which by then was an extinct language. Pericles of Athens^Talk 23:46, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

I think the proposer was right here. To me, "Ethiopian historiography" would deal with history-writing in Ethiopia on any subject while "Historiography of Ethiopia" would deal with any history-writing anywhere on Ethiopian history. This is the approach taken at Historiography of Germany for example and see the examples in the category tree at Category:Historiography by country. —Brigade Piron (talk) 09:04, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Ethiopian historiography/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Iazyges (talk · contribs) 17:01, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Will start soon. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 17:01, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi, I just noticed this nomination. Based on my earlier involvement with Ethiopian articles, I'd like to offer some suggestions on content to help improve this article -- which otherwise IMHO is very close to GA status. -- llywrch (talk) 07:12, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

You're certainly free to make suggestions. I'll pay heed to anyone's advice if it will help to improve this article. Just bear in mind that it is @Iazyges: who is the one reviewing the article, though. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:44, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Criteria

GA Criteria
GA Criteria: 1 1.a Y 1.b Y 2 2.a Y 2.b Y 2.c Y 2.d Y 3 3.a Y 3.b Y 4 4.a Y 5 5.a Y 6 6.a Y 6.b Y

• No DAB links N: "Iranians" is a dab link.
• No Dead links Y
• Images appropriately licensed Y

@Iazyges:I fixed the "Iranians" link by pipe-linking it to Iranian peoples. Thanks for pointing it out! Pericles of Athens^Talk 06:15, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Prose Suggestions

• "their lost overseas territories in Arabia as part of their realm." perhaps "their lost Arabian territories as part of their realm", unless you've done this intentionally to avoid confusion with modern day Saudi Arabia/Arab world, since the concept didn't exist back then.
• I couldn't find anymore issues with prose; get any better at prose, and you'll put me out a job! -- Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 22:29, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Hah! I'll try not to have you lose your job here! Lol. I fixed the sentence according to your suggestion. I'm glad you liked the article! --Pericles of Athens^Talk 23:55, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Images and copyright issues

@Soupforone: hello. Thanks for your recent edits clarifying Kebede's input about Western historiography. However, there are some issues with the recent pictures you have added. Firstly, you added this image to the article: File:Etiopia cristiana, s.giorgio a cavallo, da gondar, chiesa di abba antonios, 1690-1710 ca..JPG, claiming that it depicted Abba Gorgoryos on horseback. That's easily falsifiable. Not only does it look similar to just about every Ethiopian depiction of St George in existence, with both spear and dragon, but I confirmed as much by doing a search and consulting Stuart Munro-Hay (2003) [2002], Ethiopia, the Unknown Land: A Cultural and Historical Guide, London: LB Tauris, pp. 147-148. He says that this Church of St Anthony (Abba Antonios) has wall paintings depicting Christian saints, among them St George, Protector of Ethiopia. He says nothing about Abba Gorgoryos, which would be an odd omission. It would also be very odd to have a contemporary Ethiopian cleric of the same century (17th century) depicted in a biblical fashion, especially one who disavowed his Orthodox faith and became a Catholic cleric, fleeing Ethiopia as a result due to the expulsion of the Jesuits by Fasilides.

Meanwhile, the image I added to the article, File:Aba Gorgorios, 1681.jpg is well-sourced: Hiob Ludolf, Historia Aethiopica (Frankfurt, 1681). St John's College, University of Cambridge. There's no equivocation here when their page says: "The second image below (from a supplementary volume published in 1691) is a portrait of Gorgoryos Abba, the Ethiopian scholar who taught the author, Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) Amharic after meeting him in Italy. Ludolf went on to publish the first Amharic grammar. Here Gorgoryos is surrounded by a border bearing inscriptions in Latin and Amharic."

As for the second picture depicting the Queen of Sheba, there's a potential licensing problem here, because it does not have an acceptable source (the URL has a dead link). If you can find the original source for the image and add it to the image page at Commons, we can keep it in the article. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll have to remove it. This article is undergoing a Good Article nomination process, and hopefully a featured one after that, so we are going to hold things to a higher standard in this article. I think you should familiarize yourself with Wikipedia image policies before adding further images. Please see Wikipedia:Image use policy. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 07:30, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

It appears that I may have conflated Abba Goryorgos with the similarly-named saint/author/monk Abba Giyorgis. The Abba Antonios Church mural is a portrait of Saint George, but also of Giyorgis; Giyorgis is therein portrayed as Saint George, his ecclesiastical namesake. The mural is based on a self-portrait by Giyorgis at the Abba Yohanni Church, next to portraits of the Twelve Apostles and the Virgin Mary [1]. Anyway, I have substituted the German stylization with an Ethiopian church portrait of Abba Giyorgis. I've also fixed the Makeda link. Soupforone (talk) 14:39, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

@Soupforone: Yep, Giyorgis of Segla and Abba Gorgoryos are most certainly two different people, from different centuries no less. I removed but then quickly restored your Queen of Sheba image, after inspecting the image source that you just provided. Seems fine to me and is definitely within the public domain due to its 1896 copyright. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:05, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Also, in the future, you should refrain from removing cited material from the article, from a St John's College, Cambridge webpage no less, as you did here in this edit by removing both the image and caption with citations. That sort of thing needs to be mentioned on the talk page first. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:11, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

You indicated that Abba Giyorgis was irrelevant to the modern historiography. This would apply to Abba Gorgoryos as well (who was also less influential than Giyorgis) since he too lived before the Zemene Mesafint era. Ergo, I've substituted the file with a portrait of the Empress Mentewab, an important figure of the linked Zemene Masafint period. Soupforone (talk) 15:39, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Your new image is fine, but not your deletion of File:Aba Gorgorios, 1681.jpg. Yes, he lived before the Zemene Mesafint era, that is true, but he's also discussed in the text as a collaborator with Hiob Ludolf and is entirely relevant to the discussion of Western historiography. Again, please refrain from removing cited material without proper justification. This is the third time you've removed that image. You seem to have a singular focus on that one. I'm not sure why that is, but I would ask that you stop this per rules about Wikipedia:Edit warring. Your edits are incredibly disruptive for an article that is currently undergoing a Wikipedia:Good articles nomination process. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:47, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Also, the idea that the theologian Giyorgis of Segla was more influential in Ethiopian literature is completely irrelevant, because Giyorgis of Segla is not described in this section of the article and, despite his literary reputation, has nothing to do with Western historiography. Abba Gorgoryos, on the other hand, actually contributed to the first Western-made history of Ethiopia. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 15:53, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that you had linked Abba Gorgoryos there since the file was placed in a different area. Anyway, it looks okay, but I adjusted the sizing so that they match. Soupforone (talk) 16:00, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Your edit, while perhaps well-intentioned, nevertheless produced text sandwiching per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images. Therefore I've combined a double set of images together for the modern section. We don't have to be so incredibly strict about aligning things just right with their sub-sections. That's not practical at all for a section with so many images now; these sub-sections are simply too small to accommodate that. So long as the images are all contained within the overall "Modern historiography" section then it is fine to place an image in a sub-section that happens to be unrelated to the image. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 16:35, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Files should generally be placed at the point in the text discussing what the image illustrates per MOS:SANDWICHING ("An image should generally be placed in the most relevant article section; if this is not possible, try not to place an image "too early" i.e. far ahead of the point in the text discussing what the image illustrates, if this will puzzle the reader."). I've therefore moved Abuna Salama to the abun area. I've also left justified the Makeda/Sheba file so that it matches and faces the Sheba text ("It is often preferable to place images of people so that they "look" toward the text"). Soupforone (talk) 03:44, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Okay. I suppose it doesn't look too bad. As a general rule, though, we need to avoid sandwiching in the future. I don't have any plans to expand this article much further, so I won't be adding any more images either. You seem fairly well-versed in this topic: is there any significant point that you think could be added to the article at this point? It looks fairly complete to me. Then again, I'm not an expert in Ethiopian studies; I'm more knowledgeable when it comes to Western (particularly Greco-Roman) and Chinese history, so it is hard for me to see any obvious gaps or glaring omissions. Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 08:16, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

@Soupforone: hello again. The recent picture you added to the Islamic and Chinese historiography sub-section depicting Yagbe'u Seyon (15th-century French miniature painting) is fine in terms of public domain licensing. However, I think there might be a licensing issue with the image File:Detail, "Battle of Adwa" (2141842256).jpg that you added to the "Italo-Ethiopian Wars" sub-section. This Ge'ez tapestry depicts the 1896 Battle of Adwa, but when was the artwork made? I can't find any information on it. If it was made before 1923, then it could easily belong to the public domain instead of having the "Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license" that it currently possesses. If you can find information on it quickly, I have no qualms about keeping it in the article. However, the licensing seems fishy given the omission of a creation date; it certainly wouldn't pass muster in a Featured Article review. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 21:22, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Okay. Since the tapestry is apparently without a date, I've replaced it with a 1930 local painting. Soupforone (talk) 05:36, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

@Soupforone: great! It looks appropriately licensed as well. Good find. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 09:23, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Okay. However, there appears to be a copyright problem with the Heruy file. The Asia-Pacific Journal indicates that it was taken from a 1999 conference paper [2], which may make it ineligible under a public domain license. It also contains watermarked text, which WP:WATERMARK discourages. I have therefore replaced it with a Byzantine style portrait of the Ethiopian Saint Arethas [3]. Soupforone (talk) 15:18, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Nice find, but I was able to track down a suitably-licensed image of Heruy Wolde Selassie. The Byzantine icon picture you shared is cool looking, but kind of out-of-place for the modern section. In either case, the picture I found is a suitable replacement for the previous one of Heruy. Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 18:06, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

I understand. However, that Heruy file is from an entertainment wiki, which does not have proper file licensing. The public domain wikimedia license also applies to the date of death of the author/copyright holder rather than to Heruy. I've therefore substituted it with a modern Western style cloth painting of Saint Abbo from the Bet Mercurious church [4]. This licensing stricture may apply also to the Adwa tapestry, so I've substituted the latter with a copyright-shared photo of the same tapestry. Soupforone (talk) 03:38, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Comments towards improvement

Hmm. I was hoping you might allow me to make some suggestions before this was awarded GA. Especially since I found it a topic where it was difficult to identify & obtain materials about, so one could write an accurate article. But since the article was so close to meeting it IMHO, I won't quibble over that; however, here are some items to consider if you want to push this to FA status. I'm going to progress from the tangible points to the less tangible ones that are harder to handle properly (e.g., Ethiopian culture).

• Although I know what "historiography" means, & I am familiar with the history of Ethiopia, I would have appreciated a definition of the concept at the beginning of the article. It ranges from epigraphy through hagiography to modern historical writing: without some idea of how these all tie together, I found myself lost.
• You need to bring out more strongly the point that Ethiopian literate culture comes out of its religious tradition. Traditional Ethiopian education (i.e. learning to read & write) was the province of the church, specifically the unique religious group known as the dabtara. Whereas in the European Christian church education was usually entrusted to a priest or minister, Ethiopian priests are notorious for being uneducated: Donald Levine discusses this in his Wax & Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (Chicago: University Press, 1972), pp. 169f). This is not to say Ethiopians are stupid or unable to appreciate knowledge; one of the most celebrated figures in Amharic folklore is the dabtara Gebre Hanna, known for his wit & trickery.
• European views of Ethiopia. I found this section somewhat distracting: is the article about how Ethiopians see their history, or does it cover non-Ethiopians? (Explaining this at the beginning in a definition would help.)
• BTW, fun anecdote: the Franciscan Remedius Prutky asked Emperor Iyasu II about whether he was the legendary Prester John, two centuries after Europeans had identified the Emperor of Ethiopia with that mythic personage. The question bewildered the Emperor, who eventually replied that the rulers had never been accustomed to call themselves by this name. (Prutky's travles to Ethiopia and other countries, trans. J.H. Arrowsmith-Brown (London: Hakluyt Society, 1991), pp. 115-117)
• The section "Conflict and interaction with foreign powers" --
  • I don't know if I'd call the Oromo "pagan pantheistic" in their religion. When I was writing articles about Ethiopia & had to describe the animalist religions of their people, I opted for "traditional" -- it's less pejorative. (Nevertheless, traditional non-Abrahamist religions in Ethiopia have been in decline for generations.)
  • Bahrey's brief essay (FWIW, I've read it) is important as one of the few examples of intellectual analysis in Ethiopian history. Most accounts where some policy or ideological dogma is established is done simply by appealing to authority -- e.g., the Kebra Nagast, where the legitimacy of the Solomanic dynasty is established as an edict of the First Council of Nicaea.
• To add to your list of Imperial biographies, there is one about Iyasu V -- Reidulf K. Molvaer (trans.), Prowess, Piety and Politics: the Chronicle of Abeto Iyesu and Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia, 1909-1930 (Koeln: Ruediger Koeppe, 1994). Iyasu V is a very controversial figure in Ethiopian history -- Haile Selassie deposed him in order to accede to the throne -- & this is probably the only work that comes close to presenting a neutral POV about him. I meant to rewrite the article on Iyasu V with material from this very informative book, but that was about the time I began to be affected with burnout about Ethiopian topics.
• One event in Ethiopian intellectual history you completely overlooked was its brief intellectual flowering before the Second Italo-Abyssinian War: a number of educated Ethiopians steeped in their own cultural traditions, confronted the ideas they had received from Europe, & wrote to varying lengths in response to them. Bahru Zewde, Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia (Oxford: James Currey, 2002) discusses them in a book whose major flaw is that it is too damn brief. (And this work probably should be mentioned in a historiography of Ethiopia.)
• I wouldn't include Sylvia Pankhurst in this article. Yes, she wrote a lot about Ethiopia -- almost as much as her son Richard. But Sylvia was more of an advocate for Haile Selassie & Ethiopia in general than an intellectual thinking about Ethiopia & its strengths & weaknesses. She had minimal effect on Ethiopian historiography or studies -- except, of course, giving birth to Richard Pankhurst.
• "Social class, ethnicity, and gender" -- here you touch on an important point of Ethiopian historiography, yet miss it's central thrust. If you thought I was speechifying before, here I will truly be on my soap box. (And here begin the points that will be difficult to incorporate into this article.)

  One of the effects that Haile Selassie had on Ethiopian intellectual history was to suppress all discussion of nationalities & ethnicities that were not Amharic -- which was one of the causes of the Ethiopian Revolution. Use of any language except Amharic was discouraged & education in any other language forbidden; religions other than Ethiopian Christianity were likewise discouraged; other ethnic groups were considered backwards, & had to be acculturated into Amharic standards. Obviously this caused a lot of resentment, especially amongst the Tigrean people, who were otherwise the same as the Amharic people, sharing a common history & culture. On 17 November 1969 college student wrote an essay that was considered radical at the time -- Walleligne Mekonnen, "On the question of nationalities in Ethiopia" -- simply for acknowledging there were other cultures in Ethiopia & suggesting that they had as much right to exist as Emperor Haile Selassie's idea of normative culture. One of the positive outcomes of the Ethiopian Revolution was the recognition that it is desirable & proper that all Ethiopians be literate in their native languages.

• When one moves past the histories of the dominant cultures of the Amharic & Tigrean peoples, one increasingly enters the realm of anthropological studies. In other words, writing about a given smaller ethnic group -- say the Agaw, the Kambaata, or even the Afar or the Oromo -- one finds oneself more of an anthropologist than a historian. There are several issues because of this. One is that we should not bother with recording their traditions because they are often entirely oral, but instead concentrate on describing their vanishing way of life. Another is the implication that the histories of these people are not a serious topic; these people existed in some ideal, pre-lapsarian existence -- which is what an anthropologist is expected to report -- & now that Euro-American colonialism has destroyed that world, the only recourse these peoples have is to "modernize".
• Amharic intellectual tradition is not introspective; few Ethiopian intellectuals understand the concept of intellectual debate, seeing the point of debate as a zero-sum battle of wits. An example of this was the theological dispute over the nature of Christ in the Ethiopian church from the 17th century forward. ( Further, Ethiopian intellectual history has been the victim of periodic mass extermination: educated Ethiopians of all ethnicities suffer a higher rate of murder or exile at various points of time. The attempted Muslim conquest of Ethiopia by Ahmad Gragn led to the destruction of untold churches, monasteries, their treasures & the holdings of their libraries; the Italian conquest led to the murder of every Ethiopian with a college education, which had been gained thru immense cost; the Ethiopian Revolution in the 1970s led to the death or education of the majority of its educated class. This results with a country that is rich in history/culture yet its inhabitants are remarkably ignorant of it.

Having written all of that, I must needs to praise you @PericlesofAthens: for having written this article. It does cover a lot of ground, & despite the faults I pointed out above -- most of which are easily fixable -- does a satisfactory job of it. Despite how much I wanted to, I could never have written something like this. Perhaps because I knew too much about Ethiopia, & knew that trying to tell them would bog me down in countless edit wars from people who accused me of introducing original research or of being racist when there is so much to write. (I'm just a white middle-aged guy who finds the history & culture of this country fascinating but too often tragic.) This is one reason I found myself burned out on these topics, despite how important they are & need to be included in Wikipedia.

Anyway, I hope these comments help you towards making this a Featured Article. If you have any questions I'm more than happy to help. -- llywrch (talk) 21:39, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Pericles' reply

@Llywrch: hello. Thanks for your input, suggestions, and commendation. I will try to reply in kind. However, I am going to be very blunt about this, so as to not give you the wrong impression about my commitment to expanding or improving this article (I certainly do not have immediate plans for it). --Pericles of Athens^Talk 09:28, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Hmm. I was hoping you might allow me to make some suggestions before this was awarded GA.

I'm not the one who decides when the GA review is finished. I actually replied to you there, but the review was closed before you could respond.

here are some items to consider if you want to push this to FA status

To be honest, I'd rather work on my articles Mosaics of Delos, Macedonia (ancient kingdom), or even Sino-Roman relations, even though the latter two are now Featured, but the former one is a GA that still needs work. In the single week that my article has existed, I have already gotten into several edit wars with another user who seemed quite adamant about rewriting large parts of the modern historiography section, systematically expunging any and all links to "Pan-Africanism" (even in "further information" headers), in addition to having an odd obsession with divorcing a double image of Emperor Haile Selassie and Abba Gorgoryos, the former a revered monarch in Ethiopian history, the latter a Catholic convert from Ethiopian Orthodoxy who aided Hiob Ludolf in creating a Western-made history of Ethiopia (how dare I put his image so close to the revered one). In all my years on Wikipedia, I've never seen such ready divisiveness or such an ideological edit warrior charging into an obscure, brand-new article to make sure it conformed to his understanding of Ethiopian literature and history. No offense, but I'm not surprised that in the 8 days this article has existed, it has somehow also attracted the attention of a pedantic scholar and seeming expert in this field with a wishlist of new additions, from various books that I do not have access to presently and probably won't in the near future.

Your suggestions are admittedly very good and you clearly know your stuff, but it perhaps foreshadows the FA-review demands of the nationalist/ideological warriors who would come to this talk page, like moths to a flame, with drafts of their own wishlists in tow. These things do not bode well for the future of this article, but at least it's a GA now, which means it will have higher standards before any old Joe Schmo can edit it with questionable material. An FA review would probably be a nightmare, so I think waiting a good long year would be wise, to see how stable this article really is in light of what's happened.

Although I know what "historiography" means, & I am familiar with the history of Ethiopia, I would have appreciated a definition of the concept at the beginning of the article. It ranges from epigraphy through hagiography to modern historical writing: without some idea of how these all tie together, I found myself lost

I have immediately addressed this concern of yours, because it is an excellent suggestion and because I can fix this sort of thing right away, without having to track down a bunch of sources (that would probably necessitate a trip to the library when I have no such time to do that sort of thing, least of all for my Wikipedia hobby).

You need to bring out more strongly the point that Ethiopian literate culture comes out of its religious tradition.

The article isn't perfect, but then again it's not a dissertation, and it's certainly not a book (ala Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not), meaning that it cannot possibly encompass everything. It's a free online encyclopedic entry. With the limited resources at my disposal (using my limited access to JSTOR and Google Books), I can only add so much compared to someone who personally possesses gigantic tomes on the topic. From what I can tell, I have mentioned and explicitly explained the connection of the institution of the Ethiopian church with historiography, in addition to the profound impact that Christian theology had on historical writing. This isn't enough to satisfy a Cambridge scholar, but for most people coming to this page it will be sufficient.

European views of Ethiopia. I found this section somewhat distracting

I have since amended the introduction accordingly, and mentioned the significance of the Western historiographic tradition regarding Ethiopia. The history of Ethiopia wasn't just recorded by the natives, a statement as true in ancient, medieval, and early modern times as it is today. Unfortunately, however, I cannot find anything by historical Muslim historians, and even made an attempt to find something in medieval/early modern Chinese literature about Ethiopia. The 14th-century Wenxian Tongkao, an encyclopedia compiled by Ma Duanlin during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty of China, seems to have described either the Sudan or Ethiopia. However, this Chinese text did not include a proper history of the country; it just offered terse descriptions.

I don't know if I'd call the Oromo "pagan pantheistic"

I have changed "pagan" to "polytheistic", which carries no negative connotation or pejorative meaning, just a statement of fact. I used it merely to contrast them with the Eastern Orthodox Christian Amharic ruling class of Ethiopia.

I wouldn't include Sylvia Pankhurst in this article.

I mention her name in conjunction with Richard Pankhurst, and only in the context of Crummey criticizing previous approaches to the study of Ethiopia's past, which often ignored social history. I see no profound reason to remove Sylvia's name from the single sentence where she is mentioned.

Bahrey's brief essay (FWIW, I've read it) is important as one of the few examples of intellectual analysis in Ethiopian history.

Interesting point. I wish I could elaborate on it further in the article, but I don't have access to the proper sources in order to do so. Perhaps you own something or have access to academic literature on the topic? Please, feel free to Wikipedia:Be bold and edit the article. You don't need me as a middle man. Just don't destroy my good hard work by rewriting everything. ;) Especially now that the article has been awarded GA status (so significant changes or removals should be hammered out here on the talk page first). I know you're squeamish about editing Ethiopian-history related articles on Wiki, but if you are this passionate about the subject, you should perhaps edit the present article to your own liking.

One event in Ethiopian intellectual history you completely overlooked was its brief intellectual flowering before the Second Italo-Abyssinian War

Again, I don't have access to the proper sources from which I could glean information about this. If you want this topic to be covered, I'm afraid you'll have to be bold and add it yourself. If it's so arcane that I cannot find it on JSTOR or Google Books, then I'm not going to make the special effort to go to the library (for Wikipedia, lol).

the Italian conquest led to the murder of every Ethiopian with a college education, which had been gained thru immense cost

Ah yes, Yekatit 12, 1937, one of the worst massacres in modern Ethiopian history. I'm not so sure about every single solitary person with a college degree throughout the entire country being executed (perhaps a wee bit of an exaggeration and more to do with the intellectual leaders of the resistance), but it was devastating nonetheless. There were also a lot of monks who were killed.

However, the purpose of this article is not to list the war crimes of fascist Italy during the 1930s. If you can directly and consistently link this to the historiographic tradition, by all means, add it to the appropriate section.

Once again, thanks for the review of the article. I hope you are not discouraged from editing the article according to your own suggestions, but I'm afraid that I won't be very active here from now on. Best of luck to you! --Pericles of Athens^Talk 09:28, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, in addition to the Chinese thing I mentioned above, I found a little information on medieval Islamic historians who mention Ethiopia, so I might be adding that to the article shortly. Beyond that, though, I cannot guarantee any further major contributions. Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 09:51, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Again, I can't guarantee that I will cover everything that you listed above, but I was able to beef up the section about the Italo-Ethiopian Wars and Italian Ethiopia by using De Lorenzi (2015). As mentioned before, I also created a whole new section on Islamic and Chinese historiography. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 14:41, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

@Llywrch: huh. Although I wasn't able to find Rudolf Molvaer's book, I was able to find two sources that describe both his translation and the original chronicle by Elyas (regarding Iyasu V and Zewditu). I think Rubinkowska's (2004) input here about Sellasie undermining works of historiography by concealing them from the public view is an invaluable contribution, so I have to thank you for bringing this up! --Pericles of Athens^Talk 16:04, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Reply: Well, you've made most of the changes I expected you would -- & the introductory material helps a great deal to understand how to read the rest of the article & renders some of my comments moot. The last three points are more a general recommendation for whoever wants to take this to the next step.

But as to the Italian liquidation of college-educated Ethiopians... it's simply a fact. (One source is Margaret Pelham, The Government of Ethiopia (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 248f.) While you are right that it was an adjunct of the events of Yekatit 12 (I had misremembered the details & thought it was a separate action), it still is an example of how Ethiopia seems to undergo a periodic extermination of its intellectuals that hinders its development. As for listing "war crimes of fascist Italy during the 1930s", that list arguably could be summed up with one name: Rodolfo Graziani. When that fascist brute was recalled to Italy, Italian administration of conquered Ethiopia proved to be surprisingly enlightened as compared to other colonial powers of the time, like Britain or France. After the Italians were removed, Haile Selassie had to fight a second war of liberation against the British who assumed POC didn't know how to govern themselves & didn't need all of the amenities the Italians had constructed in their territories.

As for Haile Selassie, his reputation with Ethiopians is not as high as it is with the rest of the world; he was very skilled with how to present his image to a world that felt guilty at how it had systematically abandoned the country to Italy, & how to hide his faults. In his A History of Modern Ethiopia (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), written by the Ethiopian academic Bahru Zewde who teaches at Addis Ababa University, is a valuable corrective to the Western POV about the last Emperor of Ethiopia.

FWIW, when you decide to come back to work on this article, I can help you with sources for this article. Due to the difficulty I faced in finding material about Ethiopia I ended up buying a lot of the books I used & cited above.

As for "a pedantic scholar and seeming expert in this field", if you mean whom I think you do IMHO you misunderstand the process of Wikipedia. Yes, it is infuriating when someone else edits an article you have been working hard on, & yes, it is doubly aggravating when that other person is making changes that don't improve the article. However, that incident was actually a fairly minor editwar over content, & from here on the outside it appears to me to have been handled reasonably calmly & successfully by all. So if this exchange soured your experience with this article, maybe the wise thing to do is to take a break from it for a long while. As you say, you have other articles to work on. BTW, if you figure out how to handle these kinds of conflicts successfully, please share that secret with me: after almost 15 years of editing & contributing here, I still haven't figured out how to successfully do that on a regular basis. -- llywrch (talk) 16:32, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

@Llywrch: hell again. Thanks for the reply. There's really no special secret I possess for conflict resolution with other editors. I just tend to go with the flow. Sorry if that doesn't help in your case. In either case, thanks for clarifying your position and earlier points. To be honest, in these past two days I have been surprised at how much I've been able to glean from Google Books and JSTOR. James De Lorenzi (2015) has proved to be invaluable, because without him I wouldn't have been able to create a whole new section about the Ethiopian and Western historiographic synthesis of the late 19th and early 20th century. I wouldn't have even known the name Heruy Wolde Selassie (recently added to the article), which perhaps demonstrates my personal lack of knowledge about this subject. I'm sort of learning as I go, which is interesting considering how much I've been able to learn in just a couple of weeks since I started the article. User:Soupforone and I have wrangled over this and that, but he has actually brought quite a bit to the table, including the Smidt (2001) citations concerning Du Huan and the medieval Tang dynasty Chinese historiography and reports concerning Ethiopia. I introduced the material using Abraham (2015), but Soupforone was able to rewrite certain parts using Smidt. I started the information on Islamic historiography, but shortly afterwards Soupforone introduced the information on Leo Africanus into the article. That's a name I wouldn't have even been aware of otherwise, so kudos to him for bringing this to our attention. I'd like to say this is "my article" but it has now turned into a collaborative effort, one that I hope you would join if you have the right materials. You seem like the right person to bring this article to FA quality. If the article proves to be stable throughout the month of August, I might even consider nominating it by September! Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 22:57, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

@Llywrch: activity has been awfully quiet here the past few days. Although I've had some contention with another editor recently, our problems seem to have dissipated and we've more or less come to an agreement about the wording of the text and various images presented in the article. Given this current trend, this seems to be a rather arcane topic that's perhaps not going to grab the attention of many edit warriors. With that in mind, I think an argument could be made that the article is now stable. I've addressed many if not most of the issues you've listed above, even though I wasn't able to use a single source that you mentioned. Do you plan on making significant contributions to the article sometime soon? Otherwise I might nominate this article for FA status much sooner than I had ever expected. Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 18:38, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

Hi @PericlesofAthens: it's been quite a while since I've routinely digested & explained stuff related to Ethiopia; I've spent the last 12 months dealing with Roman history, creating articles like Gaius Calpetanus Rantius Quirinalis Valerius Festus or cleaning up articles like Aulus Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento. (There are lots of articles either needing to be written or worked on.) So I'm a bit rusty on Ethiopia, beyond providing some general criticism. If you'd like my input, give me a couple of weeks to figure out how to integrate some of the sources I dropped above into this article. -- llywrch (talk) 07:51, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Hi again. You don't have to do that if time doesn't allow for it. I'm just glad that you brought up these issues in the first place, because it has led to several major improvements to the article already. Thanks once again for that. Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 14:47, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Bet Giorgis Church, Bet Mercurios Church, Adwa & Yared

I have adjusted the Bet Giorgis Church, Bet Mercurios Church, Adwa and Yared files per the FA recommendations [5]. It was suggested that:

• "File:St. George Astride His Horse, Church of Bet Giorgis, Lalibela, Ethiopia (3268383996).jpg needs a copyright tag for the underlying image (could be done in a similar way to File:Gebre Mesqel Lalibela.png, for example)" -- The licensing for the Bet Giorgis Church file [6] is identical with that of the Lalibela file [7].
• "File:Painting of St. Abbo, Church of Bet Mercurios, Lalibela, Ethiopia (3308268798).jpg" - needs an Ethopian tag to cover photography of 2D art images (NB: if this is legal in Ethopia, I don't know!) -- The uploader/2D photograph taker did not indicate who made this modern cloth painting. I have therefore replaced it with an older Western-style mural of the nine saints of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church at the Our Lady Mary of Zion Church in Axum [8].
• "File:Battle of Adwa tapestry at Smithsonian.png" - needs a tag for the underlying tapestry image (or painting, depending on which bit of the file you believe). - The date and maker of the Adwa tapestry are unknown. I've therefore replaced it with an inscribed tomb from the Adua Memorial [9].
• "File:"Yared An (sic) His Disciples Singing A Song In Front Of King Gebreme Skel . . ." (3171512810).jp" - needs an Ethiopian tag to cover photography of 2D art images. - The date and maker are also unknown. I've therefore replaced it with a portrait of the Ethiopian King Tewodros II produced circa 1860 [10]. Soupforone (talk) 17:07, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Excellent! Those are some fine replacements indeed, and I don't think any of them have licensing issues. --Pericles of Athens^Talk 17:24, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Featured article status

Yippee! This article has finally become a featured article! Thanks and cheers to everyone above who contributed to the article, bringing it to its present state. I think this is Wikipedia's very first featured article for an Ethiopian history topic as well. It's an area that still needs a lot of work, but we're getting there! Regards, --Pericles of Athens^Talk 23:24, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Reason for Edit

I deleted the phenotypical description of Ethiopians in the 'Early modern historiography' section as it was not only irrelevant to the subject of Ethiopian Historiography, but is also not supported by the sourced material. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HiddenHistoryPedia (talk • contribs) 03:32, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Ethiopian culture

These wiki articles present Ethiopian culture as nothing but a paracystic society they had developed a well established advanced culture that predates contact with the Greeks, Furthermore no evidence of a Zoscales to suggest that all their works were copied is false no evidence of such. 2A02:C7C:36FF:3600:193E:9488:7DF5:51CF (talk) 13:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Blatant distortioms

These wiki pages are all over the place concerning Ethiopia drawing on old Eurocentric nonsense. No evidence of the Kebra Negast copied 2A02:C7C:36FF:3600:193E:9488:7DF5:51CF (talk) 13:21, 15 March 2024 (UTC)