Imagine you had the power to go back in time and change one major event, decision, or historical development in Ethiopia/Ethiopian history. What would you change, and why?

It can be something political, military, economic, social, cultural, religious anything else

From Yonatan Binyam and Verena Krebs "Ethiopia" and the World, 330 CE-1500 published in 2024 (headlines and highlights are by me).

Name and ethnic identity

"Traditionally, the Christian polity that stretched over significant portions of the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been associated with the kings of the so-called Zagwe dynasty. This term, while long2 established in scholarship, is somewhat misleading: it is an anachronistic exonym of unclear origin that is first documented more than a century after the dynasty was overthrown by Christian rivals. Indeed, it is absent from both local contemporary records and Egyptian sources. New research has revealed that the “Zagwe” kings referred to themselves, their ruling class, and perhaps even the kingdom itself as “[of] Bǝg wǝna” (Derat 2020a, 45–47). 26

Moreover, recent historical and archaeological scholarship has questioned firmly held academic beliefs about the identity, language, and geographic origin of the Zagwe dynasty, showing that many long-standing assumptions were based on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century readings of significantly later records (Derat 2018; Derat et al. 2021; Muehlbauer 2023a). This shift becomes evident when we consider recent findings challenging the belief that the Zagwe were Agäw and thus belonged to a Cushitic language group. In fact, all surviving Zagwe sources were composed in Gǝʿǝz, the ancient and Semitic liturgical language of Aksum and the Ethiopian Church, which ceased to be spoken around the turn of the millennium. Some land grants of the 1100s CE even contained words in Tǝgrǝñña, the language of contemporary Tigray and Eritrea, rather than the far more southerly Agäw. Within the last decade, scholarly consensus holds that there is little to no concrete evidence to support the assertion that the Zagwe were of Agäw origin (Derat 2018, 242–56; 2020a, 50)."

Geography

"To this day, much remains enigmatic about the rulers of the “Zagwe” dynasty. Recently discovered twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century land grants, property registers, and dedicatory inscriptions, however, offer fresh insights into the reigns of two Zagwe kings: Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala (Derat 2010; 2018, 261–72). 27 Despite the fragmentary nature of our sources, it has become evident that the dominion of these Zagwe monarchs (or, more aptly, the territory governed by the “great men of Bǝg w ǝna” 28 ) spanned a vast stretch of the highland plateau. Previously, the kingdom was thought to center on the city of Lalibäla in today’s North Wollo Zone of the Amhara regional state of Ethiopia, far south of the territories of late antique Aksum and the lands ruled by earlier ḥaṣ'ani kings [The has'ani seem to have been post-Aksumite Christian chiefs about whom very little is known].

As we know today, things weren’t quite that simple. The surviving sources produced by the Zagwe kings themselves, preserved in both monasteries in the Ethiopian-Eritrean borderlands and the churches of Lalibäla hundreds of miles to the south, indicate, for instance, that twelfth-century King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm outlined military activities and the deployment of numerous officers in today’s Tigray, a regional state of Ethiopia. King Lalibala, in the early thirteenth century, issued similar documents, one of which names an administrator with the title baḥǝr nägaśi, or “king of the coast,” indicating dominion over the littoral of what is now Eritrea. King Lalibala’s wife, Queen Mäsqäl Kǝbra, was often referred to as the “Lady of Biḥat,” a locality in present-day Eritrea near the village of Ham. Her title suggests significant influence over these northernmost areas of the highland plateau, the very region where Christianity had persisted after the decline of the Aksumite kingdom (Derat 2020a)."

Building activity

"Despite his wife’s northern connections and his ancestor ’s use of Tǝgrǝñña, King Lalibala is renowned for constructing numerous monumental monolithic churches and buildings in the southerly historical region of Lasta at the turn of the thirteenth century. These structures, meticulously hewn from the native reddish volcanic rock, demonstrate the considerable resources at the Zagwe kings’ disposal (see Figure 5). Their murals and furnishings display the kingdom’s contemporary connections to Coptic Egypt alongside architectural elements from late antique Aksum (Finneran 2009; Mercier and Lepage 2012).

The town of Wärwär, subsequently named “Lalibäla” after the king who enabled the churches’ construction and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, 29 clearly held great significance for King Lalibala: he dedicated nine altars here. The architectural complexity of Lalibäla, its dozen churches and chapels connected by trenches carved deep into the stone, suggests its deliberate design as a Christian pilgrimage center, possibly modeled after the holy city of Jerusalem. Recent archaeological discoveries furthermore revealed that the town and the churches were built over sites of an earlier, non-Christian, troglodytic culture, suggesting that the territory had only recently come under Zagwe control by the 1200s CE (Bosc-Tiessé et al. 2014; Derat et al. 2021). All in all, it seems that Lalibäla and the region of Lasta, long presumed to be the heartland of Zagwe power, were, in fact, a frontier zone deliberately transformed into the spiritual heart of the kingdom in the early thirteenth century.

We now know that the dynasty also invested heavily in the realm’s religious infrastructure, and refurbished churches in Tigray and Eritrea that dated back to the Aksumite period. By the mid twelfth century, a new metropolitan seat had been established at Maryam Nazret, about thirty miles south of present-day Mekelle. The site, strategically located midway between Lasta and the Red Sea coast, lay along an extension of the ancient trade route that had witnessed the development of rock-hewn churches and Muslim settlements in previous centuries. The now largely ruined cathedral at Maryam Nazret was once a grand structure – a five-aisled basilica built upon a 100-foot-long Aksumite platform, supported by spolia piers. Coptic metropolitan Mikaʾel, who had been appointed to the highlands by the 1120s CE, initiated the building of the cathedral shortly after his arrival. Its five altar chambers, crowned with domes and a triumphant arch, combined local stylistic and iconographic preferences with architectural elements that were fashionable in twelfth-century Egypt, likely the result of the tastes of Egyptian craftsmen traveling in the metropolitan’s entourage (Derat et al. 2020; Muehlbauer 2023a; 2023b, 45–46)."

Successors of Aksum

"Contemporary records likewise show that the Zagwe kings strove to present themselves as successors to the region’s preceding Christian realms in words and deeds. In the mid twelfth century, potentially during King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s reign, metropolitan Mikaʾel reconsecrated the vaulted cruciform basilica of Mikaʾel Amba in Eastern Tigray, carved from the living rock by the elites of the ḥaṣ ́ ani kingdom(s) about fifty years earlier. Similarly, the Zagwe kings refurbished the cathedral in the old capital of Aksum, and their churches, whether in Lalibäla or Nazret, consistently featured Aksumite architectural elements, with some even constructed atop Aksumite monuments. Such monumental endeavors were paralleled by a deliberate emulation in governance. Recent research shows that the Zagwe dynasty conscientiously adopted the language of Christian Aksum in its administrative practices and public declarations. Both King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and King Lalibala employed a form of Gǝʿǝz that deliberately echoed phrases from Aksumite epigraphy to administer their kingdom. In his land grants, King Lalibala not only emulated the language of early Aksumite kings but also styled himself as King ʿEzana had done in the fourth century, thereby underscoring both his Christian faith and his claim to Aksum’s heritage (Derat 2020a, 52)."

Overthrow and their role in "Solomonic" literature

"These strong claims to continuity were disrupted only by a new Christian dynasty, whose founder overthrew the last Zagwe king in 1270 CE. Originally named the “lord of the land of Amhara” (ṣāḥib bilād Amḥara) or “lord of Amhara” in documents of the Mamlūk chancellery in Egypt (Loiseau 2019b, 639), this dynasty indeed had more southern and rather regional roots, hailing from an area just south of Lalibäla and Lasta. Within a few short decades, its kings – known as the “Solomonic” or “Solomonid” kings in scholarship – would similarly come to portray themselves as the legitimate successors to Aksum. Through their foundational dynastic text, the Kǝbrä nägäśt, these kings fashioned themselves into the spiritual and genealogical heirs of a supposed son of the biblical king Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

It has been suggested that these new rulers, likely seeking to reinforce their own claims to the throne, erased the records of their predecessors in an intentional act of damnatio memoriae. Indeed, as we saw earlier, few records of the once-sophisticated Zagwe administration have survived. More than 100 years after the end of Zagwe rule, new sources claiming contemporary authority on the dynasty were composed: by the fifteenth century, the “lives” and histories of the Zagwe kings were written by scribes working for the Solomonic elite. Thus, the “kings of Bǝg w ǝna” were renamed and became known as the “Zagwe,” and cast into the role of pious usurpers who had come to power illegitimately. They were also othered for their supposedly strange language and origin – yet simultaneously canonized as saints due to their many holy deeds, such as the construction of the churches in Lalibäla. Here, the history of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was, rather literally, rewritten – to an extent that modern historiography is only now beginning to uncover (Derat 2020a, 54–56)."