December 6, 2018

The Hatsani Daniel of Aksum

By Stuart Munro-Hay

There is one internal clue to the end of Aksum as a power center; the inscriptions of a certain Hatsani (ruler, or perhaps at this time merely commander or general) Daniel, found on one of the ancient granite pedestals at Aksum (Littmann 1913: IV, nos. 12-14). The title Hatsani is that which became the usual one (with negus or Najashi) for the kings of Ethiopia, sometimes rendered as hadani, hatse, atze, etc. Apart from Daniel’s inscriptions, it first appears in Ethiopia as a royal title in the Zagwé king Lalibela’s land charters. From the inscriptions, it appears that Daniel was engaged in military campaigns, and not only another hatsani, Karuray(?) but a `king of Aksum’ is mentioned. It appears that among other military activities the Wolqayt people had attacked the land of Hasla, and then gone on to Aksum. Daniel claims to have expelled them and killed and captured a number of men and animals.

Other campaigns may have led him to fight the Barya, and to the Kassala region — but the reading of the texts is very uncertain (Schneider 1984: 163). In the inscription DAE 14, which is better preserved than the others, it appears that Daniel forced the king of Aksum himself into submission, making him in effect a tributary ruler. Whatever the exact political alignments of the time, Daniel was able to set up his (badly carved) inscription on an Aksumite statue base.

Several explanations of the situation are possible. The inscriptions could even allude to the time of Ashama, with the people of Wolqayt from over the Takaze being repelled by Daniel in support of the king of Aksum; if this is the case, the Najashi must eventually have triumphed after almost successful attempts by Daniel to seize power. Later in the same reign, between 615 and 630, the old capital at Aksum would have been finally abandoned as the eponymous center of the Ethiopian kingdom. If the tales about the splendors of Aksum’s cathedral told to Muhammad by his wives (see Ch. 13: 3) are true, they may indicate that the exiled Muslims were actually at the court in Aksum after 615, during the city’s last days as a capital. The next recorded permanent capital was that of the Najashis or hadanis who ruled from Ku`bar, the city mentioned in the ninth and tenth centuries by Arab writers (see Ch. 4: 8).

Whatever the case, with the Arab take-over of the routes and many of the destinations of Aksumite trade after the preliminary Persian incursions into Arabia and the eastern Roman world, the `Aksumite’ Christian kingdom changed its policies and bowed to events. The trade with the Mediterranean world had decayed and even the Red Sea route itself, when the Abbasid shift of the capital to Baghdad after 750AD had emphasized the role of the Persian Gulf, became much less important, not reviving until the Fatimids were able to police and develop it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Aksumite cultural heritage (now bound firmly with Christianity), though no longer directed by a king of Aksum from Aksum itself, but by a Hadani or Najashi from elsewhere, continued its southward expansion, gradually retiring from the north and the coast over the centuries. The process seems to have been Gradual since Arab writers long refer to the size and wealth of the Najashi’s realm, and certain regions, though occupied by Muslims, still remained tributary. In the later tenth century the state may have almost succumbed to `Gudit’, enabling the Agaw Zagwé eventually to seize control; but even then the churches of Lalibela, attributed to the Zagwé period, still indicate a strong continuity with the Aksumite cultural tradition.

By the mid-seventh century, then, Aksum had lost its political pre-eminence in the region of the Ethiopian plateau, the coastal plains, and the Red Sea. The Ethiopian monarchy had left Aksum and undoubtedly the nobility and the merchant community were also departing. The city’s monuments were falling into ruin, and, the result of a slow process of attrition, the formerly rich agricultural land surrounding the city was now capable of only a reduced yield. These were troubled times, and neither invasion nor revolt can be ruled out; the undefended former capital would have been easy prey to invaders, as it was to Gudit and Ahmad Gragn later. Nevertheless, even the most miserable conditions did not deprive Aksum of its legendary heritage, and the departure of the king, the court, the bun and all the trappings of a capital still left it pre-eminent in the possession of its cathedral and religious tradition. The damage was done to the cathedral, and the plunder of its riches, did not seem to diminish the reverence of the Ethiopians for the venerable structure; the church was rebuilt and coronation at Aksum was reinstituted as the symbol of legitimate kingship. Aksum managed to survive the hardships of its declining fortunes, and, a political backwater, it became enshrined in Ethiopian tradition as a sacred city and the repository of the national religion and culture.