u/Sad_Register_987

>"The army marched the next day on [the] Fine-Fini [settlement], where we stayed a day. The king had told me that curious ruins had recently been discovered in the vicinity of this place, I went to remind him of the promise he had given me to show them to me. Tomorrow, he said to me, when we leave, one of my officers will take you there. The next morning, in fact, the officer designated by the king came to pick me up with a large troop of cavalry. We followed to the summit a mountain occupied by the Kathafo-G*llas; it was there that the curiosity I was going to visit was located. The monument is announced by a causeway dug horizontally in a schistose rock; halfway up it widens in a circle, then it ends at an arch which pierces the rock raised vertically like a wall. One enters through the arch into a kind of open-air courtyard which forms a long square; At the bottom of one of the walls of this courtyard, we can see the entrance to an underground passage today obstructed by rubble. Time, by degrading the rocks, opened a crack through which one enters a cave dug by the hand of man, and to which the now closed underground passage must once have led. The cave is divided into two rooms lit by skylights pierced in the rock. A sort of stone bench is cut at the bottom of these rooms, and probably served as a seat for the guests of this mysterious retreat. Square pillars, which widen at the top and base, support the vaults; a net is only placed at the half-hip of these columns. Everything was cut from the same rock; moreover, no inscription can put one on the track of the date and the destination of this strange construction. To the south of the cave, 200 meters away, one can still see the foundations of a building which must have covered a vast surface area, and of which the cave was undoubtedly an annex. Sahlé-Sallassi asked me what I thought of this monument: I told him that I believed that it must have been used for religious rites, and that it had probably been dug at the time when Christianity was introduced into Abyssinia; this was also the opinion of the king, and he told me that the priests who had visited it attributed the same origin to it."

- Rochet d'Héricourt, Second voyage on both shores of the Red Sea, in the country of the Adels and the kingdom of Choa, 1846

*The drawing of the site as he saw it during Sahle Selassie's march is seen in the first picture, along with a complimentary map of Shewa (De Choa) detailing the location in the second picture.

Given the description of the location of the site in the accompanying map drawn by d'Héricourt, the closest approximate site would be the Washa Mikael Rock Hewn Church. The site itself is believed to have began construction during the reign of Zara Yaqob in the 15th century, about a century before the calamitous Adalite War and the subsequent southern invasions from Kenya.

This structure in it's descriptions as related by d'Héricourt as well as what we can find today, both in the ruins of Washa Mikael as well as the ruins surrounding Barara (modern-day Addis Ababa), give us a glimpse into the wonderful structures that our Amhara ancestors built and a broader understanding of the indigenous lands in which they lived.

Further reading on Washa Mikael and Barara:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/rockcut-churches-of-lalibela-and-the-cave-church-of-washa-mikael-troglodytism-and-the-christianisation-of-the-ethiopian-highlands/DC1B8FC2A2221141A7E648F9B9219755

https://www.academia.edu/44490229/Barara_by_Bus_The_Unexpected_Guide_to_Medieval_Addis

https://www.academia.edu/30552555/The_Missing_Tower_At_the_Entoto_Royal_Citadel_in_three_photographs_from_1897

Rochet d'Héricourt's drawing of the site at \"Katapho\"

Map drawn by d'Hericourt after his travels with Sahle Selassie; Thafo circled as proximate site

Modern images of the site of Washa Mikael

https://preview.redd.it/4g9sudmy23dh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=e53f7e517c2242415b6d13c8c4c0389804bef998

Here the pillars bear striking resemblance to the earlier drawing

https://preview.redd.it/egr987g033dh1.png?width=970&format=png&auto=webp&s=3df23b933cb596dcd620718fb53a0379921e3674

https://preview.redd.it/q7x1oc1133dh1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=976e7619bb783b74dbcc77fc93abf83ee18cb7f0

supplemental reading (link)

Gojjame Fukera for a fallen Fano fighter

unfortunately the pictures in the unroll didn't stick but the main source used (Bemerkungen Zur Kultur Und Sprache Der Galila Im Wonci-See" (Notes on the Culture & Language of the Galila in Wonci) by Eike Haberland) was noted here.

Has anyone else noticed this before?

People pretty often forget there was a very strong emerging undercurrent of ethnonationalist political organization happening well before the war even started with popular support region-wide. But as usual, whenever this third pole of political power starts to emerge in the Ethiopian political economy, it’s leaders usually end up dead, in prison, forced to go underground, or in exile. This was true 30 years ago and is still true today.

Funny article I was reading, thought people might have some interesting opinions on. Keep in mind, the author is from Konso so it makes sense why his writing reads the way it does.

Dr Mike Smith , Editor-in-Chief
Editor: JoM Science
Ulster University, UK
BSc (Wales), MSc (UBC), PhD (Sheffield)
Research interests in palaeo-glaciology, geomorphometry and spectroscopy

Professor Nigel Walford, Editor: JoM Social Science
Professor of Applied GIS, Kingston University, UK
BA (Sussex), PhD (London)
Research interests include contemporary and historical applications of GIS relating to population dynamics, people-environment interaction and land use change in rural and urban areas

SCIENCE:

Dr Gina Cavan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Research interests include the application of GIS to assess urban ecosystem services, climate change risk, vulnerability and adaptation across the UK, Europe and Africa

Dr Chi-Wen Chen, National Taiwan University
BSc (NTU), MSc (NTU), PhD (The University of Tokyo)
Research interests include slope disasters, engineering geology, and geospatial information analysis

PD Dr Tobias Heckmann, Senior Lecturer, Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt Dipl. Geogr. (Heidelberg), Germany
PhD (Eichstaett), PD (Eichstaett)
Research interests include geomorphological systems analysis in alpine areas (sediment budgets, natural hazards, environmental change)

Dr Martin Margold, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
MSc (Charles University), PhD (Stockholm University)
Research interests include glacial geomorphology, paleo-glaciology, quantitative geochronology, and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions

Prof. Jasper Knight, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
BSc (Anglia), PhD (Ulster)
Research interests include Quaternary climate and environmental change, geomorphology and sedimentary systems

Dr Jan-Christoph Otto, University of Salzburg, Austria
Dipl. Geogr. (Bonn), PhD (Bonn)
Research interests include alpine geomorphology, sediment budgets, human impact on natural systems, environmental change and geomorphological mapping

Dr Paolo Paron, UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, the Netherlands
MSc (Roma Tre), PhD (G. D'Annunzio)
Research interests in GIS / Remote Sensing, Physical Geography, River Geomorphology and Groundwater

Dr Tommaso Piacentini, Department of Engineering and Geology, University "G. D'Annunzio" Chieti Pescara, Italy
BSc (Rome La Sapienza), PhD (Roma Tre)
Research interests include tectonic geomorphology, landslides, geomorphological hazards, geomorphological mapping

Dr Monica Pondrelli, Università d'Annunzio, Italy

Prof. Dr Claudio Riccomini, University of São Paulo, Brazil
BSc (São Paulo), MSc (INPE), PhD (São Paulo)
Research interests include tectonics (Neotectonics), basin analysis and geological mapping

Prof. Uwe Ring, Stockholm University, Sweden
Dipl. Geol. (Darmstadt), PhD (Tübingen)
Research interests include the formation and destruction of mountain belts using geologic/tectonic mapping, structural geology, metamorphic petrology and geochronology.

Dr Fleur Visser, University of Worcester, UK

Dr Brent Ward, Simon Fraser University, Canada
BSc (Alerta), PhD (Alberta)
Research interests include sedimentology, stratigraphy, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, surficial mapping, drift prospecting and landslides

SOCIAL SCIENCE:

Dr Alistair Geddes, Univesity of Dundee, UK
BSc (Edinburgh), MSc (Edinburgh), PhD (Pennsylvania State University)
Research Interests: GIS applications focused on contemporary and historical population-environment relations; socio-spatial inequalities

Dr Piraye Hacigüzeller, University of Antwerp, Belgium
BSc (Middle East Technical University), MA (KU Leuven), PhD (UCLouvain)
Research interests include computational archaeology, digital humanities, and map art

Dr Paul Holloway, University College Cork, Ireland
BSc (University of Nottingham), MSc (University of Nottingham), PhD (University of Texas at Austin)
Research interests include movement science, geocomputation, geoprivacy and applications of GIS to a variety of topics

Dr Izabela Karsznia, University of Warsaw, Poland
Research interests  include automation of cartographic generalization with the use of Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Graph Theory, map design and visualization, application of maps and spatial analysis in other disciplines (e.g. UAV studies; historical hydrography; land use changes).

Dr Marynia Kolak, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
MS, MFA, PhD
Research interests include spatial epidemiology, spatial econometrics, and the application of GIS to assess the influence of place on health and the production of social, spatial, and racial inequalities on driving health disparities

CARTOGRAPHIC EDITORS:

Ms Jessica Baker, Ordnance Survey, UK

Dr Giedre Beconyte, Centre for Cartography, Vilnius University, Lithuania

Mr Steve Bernard, Financial Times, UK

Dr Bieke Cattoor, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands

Juliane Cron, Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Chandra Jayasuriya, Cartographer, School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia

Mr Andrew Lynch, Cartographer

Prof. Dr Menno-Jan Kraak, International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, the Netherlands
BSc & MSc (Utrecht University), PhD (Delft University of Technology)

Dr Chris Orton, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK

Prof. Makram Murad-al-shaikh, University of Wisconsin, Madison; ESRI, Inc.- Educational Services, USA
Research interests include GIS and cartography

Dr. Jirí Pánek, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

Dr Vit Paszto, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

Dr Thomas Pingel, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA

Mike Shand, GIS Cartographer, University of Glasgow, UK

Mike Siegel, Cartographer, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, USA

Dr Luis M. Tanarro, Department of Geography, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain