ANIMALS-CHIEF PLACES.

products; but its chief wealth is cattle. Begemder, to the eastward, has fine flocks of sheep; its people are warlike, and can send into the field a formidable levy of cavalry. Amhara Proper, farther south, is a chief province, and contains a numerous and brave race. Here is the famous state prison of Amba Geshen, now succeeded by another in Begemder. The former is surrounded by steep mountains, into which the prisoners are let down by a rope through a cave. In such a prison, the monarch confines all those of the royal family from whom he apprehends any danger; for, in consequence of the principle of succession to the throne being unsettled in the minds of the Orientals, the king's "foes are often they of his own household." The grandees of Abyssinia have repeatedly come to this prison to select a ruler whom they may call to the throne. Damot, a district of Amhara, has gold mines, and cattle with monstrous horns; it is described as one of the most temperate, healthy, and delightful countries of the whole world-as having the aspect of a pleasure garden, in a climate where the operations of sowing and reaping are common to all seasons.

Recently, Tigre has been a most imIt is portant section of the empire. extensive and populous, and contains several cities famous in antiquity or in modern times, as Axum, Dixan, Chelicut, and Antalo. Adowa is the chief town, though but an open village. The Abyssinian monarchs still resort to Axum to be crowned. Antalo stands on the eastern frontier, and, in the time of the traveller Salt, was the residence of the viceroy it consists of a thousand hovels of mud and straw, with a palace more distinguished for size than beauty. The Jesuit monastery of Fremona is here; it is a mile in circumference, surrounded by walls and towers, so as to present the most defensible place in the kingdom. Of the districts of Tigre, Lasta produces much iron; Samen contains the steep and almost inaccessible table land of Amba Gedion, with a soil of sufficient extent and fertility to support many thousands. This was the fortress of the Abyssinian Jews, who were once masters of the province.

Of the independent states of the south, Shoa is interesting to us as being the scene of Johnson's agreeable fiction of Rasselas. It is a large valley, very dif ficult of access. The more remote districts of the south are at present under the yoke either of various savage tribes, or of the ferocious Galla, who are described in our chapter upon Eastern Africa. These parts are little known, and, in fact, the same may be said of most, if not all the districts of Abyssinia,

but especially of the southern and interior re- | hand bench in judgment;" also "the master of the gions.

horse, the high chamberlain, and he who carried the On the east, the high grounds just back of the coast ten commandments and holy water." Though this shelter a miserable race, whose soil and climate have, story is deemed by some the ridiculous fable of a in all ages, kept them in a uniform state of sav-monk, yet it could hardly have been palmed off upon age wretchedness, under the name of Sukkiim, or the nation so as to become, as it is, the universal beTroglodytes, that is, " dwellers in holes." The hollows lief, had there not been some foundation for the tale of the rocks are their ordinary dwellings, and they get in actual fact. Nor is there aught incredible on the a scanty subsistence from their flocks of sheep and face of it; for Abyssinia was Sheba, or a part of it, goats, and from fishing. They live in tribes, under without doubt. Seba and the "tall" Sabeans, we may hereditary chiefs. Masuah, a safe harbor, is the chief approach to Abyssinia from the east; though much of the trade passes by Suakem, in Nubia, now held by the viceroy of Egypt. From this port, the "Land of the Sea King," as it was called, extended to the Straits of Babelmandel. On this wild shore, the Ptolemies procured elephants for their armies, and here an English admiral discovered a large harbor, which he called Port Mornington. Dhalac Island, off this coast, is the largest in the Red Sea, being sixty miles in circumference. It produces silky-haired goats and gum-lac, and was once famous for excellent pearls; but this product is now quite inferior.

Besides the Troglodytes, there are several negro tribes in Abyssinia who still remain in a state of paganism. The Shangallas are east of the Tacazze, inhabiting wooded heights. The faces of these negroes resemble those of apes. They spend half the year under the shade of trees, and the other half in caverns dug in the soft sandstone rock. Some live on elephants, others on rhinoceroses, lions, or boars; and one tribe subsists chiefly on locusts. Their soil, alternately parched with heat or inundated with water, refuses any successful tillage. They go quite naked, and are armed with poisoned javelins. The Abyssinians hunt them like wild beasts. The Agows, Gafates, and Gurags, are wild tribes, some of whom are famous as horsemen, others as intrepid robbers. The Falasja are an historical curiosity. They are Jews who have been for thirty ages more or less independent in the province of Samen, and are employed as weavers, smiths, or carpenters. They speak a corrupt jargon of Hebrew and other tongues. The Gallas, described elsewhere, have many customs to the last degree filthy and detestable; they live on raw meat, which, indeed, the Abyssinians esteem a luxury,-wear the entrails of their slain enemies around their waist, and braid them in their hair, and make murderous forays on their neighbors, in which they commit dreadful atrocities, sparing neither age nor sex. The envoy sent by England, in 1843, to the court of Shoa, found it to be the practice of the Abyssinian Christian king to make an annual incursion into the pagan countries around, displaying the prowess of his cavaliers by hunting down, plundering, torturing, and killing or enslaving the wretched victims of their fanatic fury.

Abyssinia has, like the rest of Ethiopia, an uncertain origin. Its people are probably an ingrafting of Arab adventurers upon an indigenous Berber stock, like the Tartars upon the Tajiks. We have no better history to give of them than what they themselves insist upon; the native accounts, indeed, invariably connect their religion, civil polity, and the pedigree of their royal family, with the queen of Sheba, who, they assert, had a son by Solomon named Menilec, otherwise called Ibn Hakim," the son of the sage." With this son, they say, came, in about the year 1000 B. C., "the twelve doctors of the law that form the right

here remark, were Meroë, or Axume, and its people, and a trace of the name is found in that of the port of Azab. The queen of Sheba is also reckoned by the Yemenians of Arabia among their sovereigns, so that she seems to have ruled on both sides of the straits.

The Abyssinians, or Axumites, as they were anciently called, enumerate seventeen kings from Menilec to the Christian era. But their chronology is bare of events. Christianity was early planted here,. and Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria, raised one Frumentius to the bishopric of Abyssinia. Constantius, the emperor, wrote a letter to Aizana and Saizana, the Aybssinian monarchs, in A. D. 356, to convert them to Arianism. The sway of these sovereigns then extended over part of Arabia, and as far down the Nile as the mouth of the Tacazze. Two hundred years after, the Abyssinians, as they commanded the trade of the Red Sea, began to take the lead in Eastern Africa. At great cost of blood and treasure, they had conquered Yemen with very little advantage; but, in 592, were driven out of the Arabian peninsula by the Persians, who were, in turn, displaced, during the next century, by the Mahometans.

Meanwhile Abyssinia, though within five hundred miles of the walls of Mecca, remained unconquered, and true to the Christian faith, presenting a mortifying and galling object to the more zealous of the followers of the prophet. On this account, implacable and incessant wars ravaged her territories, as the native princes on the eastern borders were supplied with money and arms by the sheriffs of Mecca, whose attention never ceased to be directed to the conquest of "infidel " Abyssinia. She lost her commerce, saw her consequence annihilated, her capital threatened, and the richest of her provinces laid waste; but her constancy to the true religion remained unshaken, and her belief afforded, throughout the protracted struggle, the most vigorous motives to her patriotism. Yet there is reason to apprehend that she must have sunk under the pressure of repeated invasions, had not the Portuguese arrived at a seasonable moment to aid her endeavors against the Moslem chiefs.

About the year A. D. 1000, there occurred an important revolution, in which the line of the ancient royal race was broken, by Judith, who restored the Jewish religion. This beautiful and talented woman was of a Hebrew family, whose ancestor had retired into the fastnesses of the mountains of Samen when Abyssinia was converted to Christianity. Inflamed with zeal for the religion of her fathers, she aimed to subvert the doctrine of Christ, and extirpate the apostate race of Solomon. She began by the massacre of the young princes who were confined, according to custom, on the high hill of Damo. One of them, however, an infant, escaped, and was carried into the loyal province of Shoa. Judith ascended the throne, and fixed her seat of government at Lasta. Here she reigned forty years, and transmitted her vigorous scep

EUROPEAN INTERCOURSE WITH ABYSSINIA.

tre to a long line of descendants, who ruled over most of Abyssinia for three centuries.

611

| them into communion with Rome, the only true church' But the king rebutted his arguments, with acuteness, The ancient royal family continued to rule in Shoa, from the Christian fathers-whom he quoted, as likeand about the year 1255 the whole kingdom was re-wise the decrees of councils, in defence of the marriage stored to its representative. This bloodless change of of priests, &c. He likewise perplexed the Romish dynasty and religion was effected by the able manage- priest by questioning him whether, if the pope were ment of a monk, Tecla Haimanout. He prevailed to order any thing contrary to Scripture, the faithful upon the reigning sovereign of the Judith dynasty to were bound to obey him. But, after many years inabdicate his throne in favor of Icon Amlac. By the tercourse with Portugal, this reluctance to embrace conditions of the act, a portion of land was given to Romanism was overcome; insomuch that, in 1535, the retiring prince; one third of the kingdom was ap- the place of abuna, or primate, was given to Berpropriated for the maintenance of the church; and mudez, a Romish priest, then resident in the country. the abuna, or head of the body of ecclesiastics, was The empire being hard pressed by the Arabs of Adel, to be always named by the patriarch of Egypt, and the Portuguese assisted the Abyssinians very effectumust never be an Abyssinian. ally against them. But, when they were subdued, the Catholic zeal of the king seemed to flag, and hostilities even ensued between him and his allies. About the

had brought the Abyssinian government back into the papal fold; but to the mass of the people Romanism was odious, and the Romish priests were finally betrayed and sold to the Turks. In 1638, all the Catholic monks remaining in the country were barbarously put to death, and the Roman religion finally rooted out of Abyssinia.

A succession of thirty-four reigns is given from A. D. 1255 to 1753. During three of these reigns, the crown was worn by three kings at once, and dur-year 1620, the policy of the Catholic emissary Paez ing three others by two kings at once; so that, in all, about forty-three kings are named, the last of whom was Ayto Yoas, who was murdered the year the famous traveller Bruce entered Abyssinia. The most interesting portion of this period is that before alluded to, when the Christians of Europe interfered in defence of the kingdom against the Moslems. The vague accounts of a certain "Prester John,” a Christian priest-prince, who ruled in great wealth and state over an extensive empire in the East, had influenced the imaginations of the Portuguese, who sought him in vain along the western coast of Africa. But, pushing their discoveries along the eastern coast, they heard of the Christian king of Abyssinia, and at once imagined he might be the royal priest, Prester John, himself.

In 1487, De Payva, sent out by Portugal, after making the circuit of the Indian Ocean, visited Alexander, king of Abyssinia. He was cordially received at the royal residence at Shoa, and treated with the highest honors: he was either persuaded or compelled to remain, as he never returned to Europe. In 1510, Helena, then queen of Abyssinia, sent an ambassador to the court of Lisbon, to ask assistance against the Turks. He arrived, by way of India, in 1513, and, in 1515, went back with a fleet, under the command of a successor of Alboquerque, with an embassy. After various mishaps, the embassy was welcomed on the coast by the " king of the sea," a tributary of the Abyssinian king, and forwarded to his sovereign. He was found in the midst of an almost endless range of tents and pavilions overspreading an immense plain. This was the grand array or regal camp of the king, who, being constantly at war, had at this time no other capital. The mission advanced between two rows of about forty thousand persons, among whom a hundred bore whips, with which they maintained order. At first, the envoys were only allowed to converse with the king through the rich curtains of silk which concealed him, as he sat on a kind of bed, beneath a canopy. But, after some days, they were admitted to a more formal audience; and, a series of curtains being raised, each richer than the last," Prester John" appeared. He was a ruddy young man, of about twenty-three years of age, of a low stature, and habited in a splendid dress of silk and gold, holding in his hand a silver cross.

The priestly ambassador endeavored to persuade the king that he ought to submit the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of his people to the pope, and thus bring

The more modern history is but a record of petty wars of rival chiefs, among themselves and against the general government. Bruce found the authority in the hands of a remarkable chief, named Ras Michael, the governor of Tigre, who, under a nominal subjection, held the real power of the state. Our space will not permit us to copy the interesting narrative of Bruce. When he left the kingdom, in 1771, it was a prey to anarchy, and much of it subject to the savage chieftains of the Gallas, who had even obtained the ascendency at Gondar, the capital. Since then, the country has been in a state of great disorder. Tigre has a tyranical governor; Amharn is divided among petty Galla chiefs; and, since 1820, there has not been even a nominal king of the whole country.

In 1842-3, the English government sent an embassy to Abyssinia. It found Sahela Selasse reigning at the independent capital of Shoa, as "Negoos of Shoa, Efat, and the Galla." He rules a population of a million of Christians, and a million and a half of Mahometans and Pagans. The annual expenses of the state are ten thousand dollars; its yearly revenue is eighty or ninety thousand German crowns, beside the tribute in kind. Of his government the English envoy says, "The essence of despotism pervades the land to its very core."

While the embassy was at the Abyssinian court, the annual fanatic foray against Pagans took place, and "four thousand five hundred Gentiles were butchered by the soldiers of Christ”—most of them being shot from the trees they had climbed to escape. The king shot three with his own hand. Four thousand three hundred head of cattle were driven off to replenish the royal pastures. Yet, says the envoy, though possessed of detestable faults, inseparable from the barbarian, the king has been found mild, just, clement, and almost patriarchal in his government; he is a monarch whom experience has proved worthy to reign over a better people, and to be possessed of an understanding and of latent virtues requiring nought save cultivation to place him, in a moral and intellectual point of view, immeasurably in advance of other African potentates.

Carthage, Numidia, Mauritania, Libya: Che Barhary States.

View of Algiers.