by Peter Boehm
And just outside Adigrat, another 60 miles further north, the bus window had another unexpected programme in store for me – model railway country. The landscape seemed to have been built in miniature on a piece of chipboard, then somehow inexplicably enlarged and thus scaled-up to form the real landscape. The model railway enthusiast certainly had plenty of papier-mâché to hand. He’d made lots of small rocky outcrops and had painted on ribbons of road winding along them in white loops. With laborious attention to detail he’d covered the houses, cowering on the slopes, with a checkerboard pattern, to give the impression that they’d been built entirely of rocks, without any mortar. And it was the same for the flat roofs. He’d set out layers of yellow flowing carpet for the fields, to give the impression of harvested teff fields. And he’d built small embankments of checkerboard papier-mâché on the carpet fields, as though the residents had built them, with much effort, from boulders, to prevent the soil from being washed away during the rainy season. In between, he’d put the occasional small donkey figurine, or a couple of miniature goats.
At first, I wouldn’t have been able to say what it was that confounded me about the landscape, why it struck me as so artificial. But after a while I realised. There were no trees. There just weren’t any to be seen. Here and there the model railway enthusiast had stuck pieces of fluff into the landscape, or put a couple of pretend eucalyptus trees on the outskirts of a settlement, but he’d forgotten the real trees.
The northern part of the Ethiopian highlands is among the oldest cultivated land in Africa. It has been farmed for over 2,000 years, without a break. Always with the same crops and the same methods. Unlike many other African countries, where ploughs are still not yet used, they’ve been known here for a long time and today you can still see the farmers ploughing their fields in this exact same way everywhere here.
The museum in Aksum has an ancient clay coffee pot, about two thousand years old. Identical ones are still made and used today.
And because the land has been farmed for such a long time, there is a huge amount of soil erosion. The plots of land the farmers work are often the size of a European living room. Aid organisations, the government and the farmers have worked hard to stop the erosion. But this still hasn’t made the trees return.
Excavation in Aksum (Aksum)
I’d bought the report of the “German Aksum Expedition” on my first trip to Ethiopia. The expedition had spent three months in the northern Ethiopian town in 1906. One of the British professors involved with the current excavations in Aksum considered their results to be significant, and published a shortened version of them with an Ethiopian publishing company.
The report and, in particular, the conditions under which the three German researchers produced it, really are remarkable. Their photos show that the inhabitants of Aksum in the early 20th century were completely unaware of the value of their ancient heritage.
A glance at their history is extremely worthwhile here. The Kingdom of Aksum lasted for most of the first millennium AD. Its heyday was in the third century, under King Ezana. In those days it was considered one of the most powerful kingdoms of the known world, along with China, Persia and Rome. It was the first major kingdom to accept Christianity.
Aksum always had a close relationship with South Arabia, on the opposite side of the Red Sea. The legendary palace of the Queen of Sheba is said to have stood in Aksum, and the city is said to be the location of the Ark of the Covenant – the chest containing the first Ten Commandments.
When the German Aksum Expedition arrived in the city in 1906, however, the women there were pounding grain on the front panels of the largest stone stelae still in existence. And children were playing a game there with small balls in troughs arranged in rows. Someone must have bored the holes for the mortar and the troughs in the front panel of what is today the symbol of Aksum.
The longest stone stela – although broken into several pieces and lying on the ground – had been used by someone as a foundation on which to build a wall around his property. Someone else had laid a smaller stone stela in front of his hut as a ramp, to get in and out more easily.
Since then, a residential development has been built on the south eastern field of stone stelae – at the time still a virgin wilderness. No-one knows exactly where its stone stelae have ended up – whether they were destroyed, or simply moved elsewhere.
Column bases and shafts, as well as corner stones, have since also disappeared from King Gebre Meskal’s tomb. Some may have been taken to the Ezana Gardens, a small park which is now a daytrip destination.
The expedition members thought that the Ta’akha Maryam, a complex of about 250 x 400 feet, was a royal palace. They’d only discovered it because the Aksumites were digging stones out of the ground there.
The locals even intentionally tried to hide “Ruin A”, to the north of the Ta’akha Maryam, from the expedition. They used it as a source of stones for their huts and boundary walls, and had covered the hole with straw so that the researchers wouldn’t discover it.
And in the western wall of the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, built in the 16th century, the expedition discovered a carved ornamental stone which they believed was part of the backrest of a stone throne, which was spread around the city. The stone was thought to be important for reconstructing a throne. Apart from this, there was no other backrest still in existence. But today no-one knows where this stone ended up.
The same applies to an enormous floor slab, which must have been the base of a huge statue. Despite recent excavations, it simply couldn’t be found again.
The message of the report of the German expedition is clear. At the time, straw-covered huts were springing up all over the ancient ruins – next to them, between them, on top of them. Children were scampering around on stone stelae which were already worryingly slanted. And there could be no doubt that a significant number of the city’s huts and walls had been built out of stones from the ancient walls.
The modern was growing on and out of the ancient – and the ancient was disappearing. It had no value for the city’s residents, except as a building material. Or at least, no value which made it appear worth preserving. It had no historical value.
But that was almost a hundred years ago. Since then Ethiopia has seen a period of modernisation and of increasing openness. A lot must also have changed in Aksum during this time.
When I first visited Aksum at the start of the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, in June 1998, the city didn’t seem particularly inviting. We briefly got out of the car by the park of stone stelae, and were immediately hassled by a couple of teenagers. It seemed that they hadn’t seen many visitors before.
As Aksum is only about 30 miles south of the Eritrean border, you needed special permission to visit the city during the war. So, I thought to myself, you’ll go there when the war’s over.
After all, Aksum is doubtless one of the most important ancient cities in Africa. UNESCO had already declared the city’s relics to be a World Heritage Site in the 1960s. Aksum is famous, above all, for its precisely carved granite stelae, over 65 feet high and dating from the first century AD. According to current research, the largest ones were built over the Aksumite kings’ burial chambers. They are the highest columns made of a single stone anywhere in the world.
Besides this, you can still see traces of the Sabaean period, when the region was still closely tied to the south of the Arabian Peninsula. The legend that the Queen of Sheba had lived in a palace in Aksum dates back to this era. And that Menelik, her son with King Salomo, had brought the original Ark of the Covenant back with him from a journey to the Holy Land. It’s allegedly still kept, today, in a chapel in the grounds of the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion.
Now, arriving in Aksum for the second time, I was looking forward to looking around the city in peace.
As soon as I got off the bus, I had the impression of being stranded in some kind of intermediate sphere. I was on Earth, certainly, and as I r
ealised from the adverts for lemonade, the rickety vehicle hadn’t transported me to another era either. But I was in a strange, unreal world.
The main street was completely deserted. It was tarred, but a car only came along it once every ten minutes. Instead, the city had a minibus – for over 35,000 inhabitants! It waited at the bus station, or in the main square, until it was full, and wobbled along the main street a couple of times a day.
I used it once. The driver stopped, unbidden, took a child with a schoolbag onto his lap, deposited her again 300 yards further on, and explained to me that she was his daughter. She’d just got back from school.
Whenever I wanted to get from the Africa Hotel to the city, I had to stand by the roadside and wait for a horse and cart. There, I hired a bike – a bright red mountain bike – and used it to get around in the city. Full of enthusiasm, I left the tarmac road and turned into the maze of bumpy alleyways and old houses.
There, I immediately had a surreal encounter. A young woman, who had just stepped out of her house, suddenly froze stock still when she saw me, and stared tensely at the ground.
What had she seen? An apparition? An alien life form? A mirage on a mountain bike? After I’d ridden past she seemed to pull herself together again. I saw her stride bravely into her garden.
The old part of the city enthralled me. Its shabby alleys, walls, huts and sheds, build from millions of flat stones layered neatly one on top of the other, gave it an air of the unreal. The people’s lethargic slowness, as though clocks didn’t tick, the way time seemed to trickle by here, sent me into a dream. And the children, gazing at me with their mouths wide open as I rode past them on my mountain bike, just reinforced my impression of this strange city. I hoped that, when the time came, I’d find a way back out of this intermediate sphere.
The following day, the tourist office gave me a guide. His tour of the city, however, left a lot of questions unanswered. He showed me the museum, the park of stone stelae and the large grounds of the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. But what about all the other ruins described by the German Aksum Expedition?
So, the next day, I took up my expedition report, got on my bike again and, together with a young English-speaking man, set off to find the remaining ruins.
We looked first for the Ta’akha Maryam. The graphical reconstruction by the German Aksum Expedition shows a complex as large as a castle, with two enormous towers.
We thus came to the property of Mulu Gabriel Kidane, on the road to Shire. We had to knock for a while on the rickety corrugated iron door before a woman opened it. She didn’t even look to see who was there, but immediately disappeared back into her hut. She was long accustomed to visitors searching for the ruins of Ta’akha Maryam. Around her shoulders she wore a hand-woven cotton shawl, and her forehead and chin were covered in the blue tattoos traditional in the region.
She told us, however, that she wasn’t happy about having a palace in her garden. It meant that she and her family might have to move one day. But she said that she currently didn’t know of any excavation plans. But then again, you never know with things like that!
All that remains to be seen in Mrs Kidane’s garden is a knee-high wall built from the characteristic, precisely cut granite stones. If you didn’t know that it was once part of a palace, you’d probably just have taken it to be a perfectly normal garden wall.
And this was what it was for the Kidane family too. They’d built a shed up against it, and they stored all kinds of junk, garden tools and battered boxes and kindling on top of it.
At the time of the German Aksum Expedition – made clear from the photos of the excavation site – the Kidane’s hut couldn’t have been here then. But the 46-year-old said that she had been born in this hut. And when we asked when the hut was built, she replied, “Over a hundred years ago.”
Over a hundred years ago – by this she probably meant “a long time ago”, or “longer ago than anyone can remember”.
After all, a woman living nearby later gave us the same estimation of the age of her house. By chance, we discovered the ancient relief of a cross. Who knows which palace, tomb or throne that was once part of!
And Misan Negash Haile, the son of the family which had built its home on the ruins of the next ancient palace, said the same. His family’s two huts were just a few hundred yards north of the Kidane’s property.
We interrupted Haile just as he was studying. He was sitting in his windowless, dark hut, bend over a chemistry book. In the room, there were also two dirty beds, with still dirtier bedding, and two rounded pitchers for Ndalla, the region’s dark unfiltered beer. The 17-year-old lived here with his mother. But she was out. So he showed us round.
When his family had built this second hut for him four years ago, Haile explained, they’d discovered “a huge triangular stone” in the ground. Clearly a relic of the almost 2,000-year-old Enda Mika’el palace.
This building complex, too, looks like a huge castle crowned with battlements, on the German archaeologists’ graphical reconstruction. Haile said that they’d left this huge stone in the ground. “It’s too hard. You just can’t break it into smaller pieces.”
But there’s a long, regularly cut granite block sticking out of the family’s garden wall. And there are other cut granite blocks scattered around just thirty feet away on the other side of the road, where the camel drivers tether their animals in the mornings when they come in from the surrounding areas with a load of firewood, and stop for a drink of Ndalla. They must have once been a corner of Enda Mika’el. “They used to be on top of each other too”, the translator told us.
Many of the stone witnesses of Aksum’s heyday, both inside and outside the city, have now been removed, built over or buried. Others are just lying around. Right by the road, above the large church, there are three granite slabs, on which the council’s thrones once stood. Admittedly, they’re slightly overgrown with scrub, but they’re ready to be loaded up. And in the Ezana Garden, a local restaurant which has somehow come by stone tablets and granite relics, the waiters use ancient column bases as small tables on which to put their trays.
I’d sent the translator home by this point. I was now going to the alleged palace of the Queen of Sheba, slightly outside the city. There, I coincidentally bumped into my guide of the previous day. He also worked for the Aksum Museum. A small boy in ragged clothes, with a shaven head, offered me a worn coin for about £12. I gave it to the guide.
He looked at it and said, “Byzantine cross, 6th century AD.”
I asked whether the boy was allowed to sell it.
The guide briefly reprimanded the boy, and then drove off with his visitors in an SUV. I had a bike. The boy ran behind me. I’m sure that, in the end, I could have got the coin for just a couple of pounds.
• The End of the World (Aksum – Gondar – Border)
Have you ever suffered a fear of flying, but in a bus? I have.
Admittedly not right at the start. At that point, the journey to Gondar still seemed to be a chance for some peace and quiet, with views of a picturesque mountainous landscape. From Shire, the Simien Mountains, which rise to over 13,000 feet, looked as flat as though they were made from see-through paper. The first layer was the darkest. The mountain peaks outlined behind it, however, became increasingly transparent the further away they were.
Now, as we wound our way up the endless hairpin bends to the little settlement of Debark, I’d long been regretting the paper comparison. The driver jerked at the steering wheel as though in a tug-of-war. And at some point the bends became too tight. He couldn’t get round them anymore.
The road was a gravel track, and the bus was old and rusty. A bundle of dirty cables protruded from the metal box where you’d have expected the dashboard, and the design of the speedometer led me to guess the vehicle had been built in the late 1950s.
The driver had already made me break out into a sweat when he’d descended a pass. His co-driver, in the passenger seat, had had to hold the
gear lever in place, because it often came out of reverse, while the driver enjoyed the panoramic view into a gorge many hundreds of feet deep. At the same time, he had one foot on the brake, and the tip of his foot on the accelerator, as the engine would otherwise have cut out. He edged slowly backwards, and finally slowly rounded the bend.
But now, ascending, the driver took things a little too far for me. I don’t know if he didn’t trust his brakes. In any case, he put it into first gear, engaged the clutch, and let the bus roll backwards towards the precipice. If the engine had stalled, we’d certainly have come off this gravel road, in spite of full braking.
Of course, I felt silly, but in situations like this you lose your grip on yourself. As I sometimes also do on aeroplanes, when they bank steeply, I stood up and lent away from the precipice with all my might. The other passengers in the bus dosed peacefully.
How do you know that you’ve reached the edge of the map? The end of the world, the last point before the great nothingness, the place after which you fall off backwards?
I don’t know. But I think Metemma can claim to have a lot of the characteristics you’d expect in such a place – ankle-deep sand in the main street, the shacks lining it, the cinema – itself a cobbled-together shack, where an ancient action film was shown in the evening – and above all the feeling that things just don't go any further here.
During the twelve hours I spent in Metemma and Gallabat, on the Sudanese side, I didn’t see a single car cross the border. Neither did I see any people crossing it. Just a couple of Ethiopian children, running errands on the Sudanese side for a couple of pence.