Dr. Richard Pankhurst
May 14, 1999

1 Ethiopian-Indian Relations in Ancient and Early Medieval Times

Contacts between the lands which became to be known as Ethiopia and India date back to the dawn of history. The two countries, though geographically remote from one another, had largely complimentary economies. Ethiopia was a source of gold, ivory and slaves, all three of them in great demand in India. India by contrast produced cotton and silk, pepper and other spices, all in great demand in Ethiopia, as well as some manufactured articles consumed by the elite.

1.1 Trade Winds

Communications between the two countries, or regions, were facilitated by the Trade Winds. These blew, in the summer months, from north to south in the Red Sea, and then, across the Indian Ocean, from south-west to north-east. Winds, in the winter months, blew in the opposite direction. Such winds were important throughout the age of sailing boats, for they thrust vessels from the Ethiopian coast to that of India in the summer, and brought them back in the winter.

Commerce between Ethiopia and India also owed much to the fact that the seas between them formed part of a major international trade route, which linked the Mediterranean – and Roman – world with that of the East, including China.

1.2 Ancient Times

Indian contacts with the Red Sea coast of Africa are poorly documented for very early times, but probably date back long before the Christian era. In the first century AD the record, however, gains clarity. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Graeco-Egyptian trade manual, states that Indian trade with the Red Sea area was largely based on Ariaké, i.e. north-western India, as well as the Gulf of Cambay, Barugaza, or modern Broach, and, to a lesser extent, Limuraké, or country of the Tamils.

Indian commerce, according to the Periplus, extended to many localities situated to the west of the sub-continent. At the mouth of the Red Sea the island of Sokotra, then known as Dioskouridou, was thus frequented by some Indian traders. This island, most of whose inhabitants spoke a tongue akin to Ethiopia’s classical language Ge‘ez, traded, the Periplus states, with both Limuraké and Barugaza, and was permanently settled by a number of Indians.

Further west, on the Horn of African coast, the great port of Malao, today’s Berbera, likewise apparently dealt in a large quantity of cloth, almost certainly imported from India.

1.3 Adulis

Adule, or Adulis, the main port of the Aksumite empire, which was situated further west again, within the confines of the Red Sea, also traded extensively with India. The Periplus, discussing this ancient Ethiopian commerce, explains that “from the inner parts of Ariaké” were imported:

* Indian iron and steel
* The broader Indian cloth called monakhé
* Cloth called sagmatogénai.
* Belts
* Garments called gaunakai
* Mallow cloth
* A little muslin
* Coloured lac”

1.4 Archaeological Evidence

The importance of such trade is confirmed by archaeological evidence. Aksumite coins have been discovered, over the years, in several parts of south-west India, while a hoard of Indian Kushana money was found in the vicinity of the northern Ethiopian monastery of Dabra Damo.

1.5 The Coming of Christianity, and Changing Alphabets

On-going contacts across the Indian Ocean had an incidental, but crucially important, consequence in the religious and cultural field. Frumentius, a Christian youth from Syria bound for India, was shipwrecked off the Ethiopian coast, around 330AD, and was subsequently instrumental in converting the Aksumite realm to Christianity.

The period immediately following the coming of Christianity witnessed interesting cultural developments, which took place at roughly the same time on both sides of the Indian Ocean. The writing of the Ethiopian language, Ge‘ez, and of the Indian, Brahmi and Kharoshi, evolved in an almost identical manner, by the addition of small signs, or other modifications, to the basic consonantal letters, to express vowel sounds. The Ethiopian and Indian alphabets were thus both transformed into syllabaries. How these changes took place, and whether they were related to each other – as one may suspect, cannot, however, be established.

Contacts across the Indian Ocean, which were clearly important throughout this entire period, found expression, a century or so later, in the visit to India of a Bishop of Adulis, by name Moses. He travelled to the sub-continent in the company of a Coptic bishop from Egypt, to examine Brahmin philosophy.

1.6 Kosmos Indikopleustes

Continued commerce between Ethiopia and India was later documented, in the early sixth century, by an Egyptian trader-cum-monk, Kosmos Indikopleustes. He records that the Horn of Africa, which he calls Barbaria, produced frankincense, as well as “many other articles of merchandise”, which were exported to India. He adds that Taprobane, i.e. Ceylon, was visited by merchants from Adulis.

Further evidence of the significance of Aksumite trading with India is embodied in a Greek text, written by another Egyptian writer of the time. It states that the early sixth century Aksumite emperor Kaleb, when carrying out an expedition to South Arabia, in retaliation for the massacre of Christians at Nagran, made use of a number of vessels from India, as well as from several other countries.

1.7 Shared Culture

Such ancient contacts across the Indian Ocean seem to have found material expression in certain elements of a shared culture. These include the cultivation, on either side of the ocean, of both cotton and sugar; the presence in the two regions of zebu, or humped, cattle; the existence of “African” lions in the Gujarat area of north-west India; the erection of fairly similar megalithic stones, in for example Ethiopian Gurageland and the Indian Naga hills; the use, by weavers, of almost identical looms in both countries; similar dress (the Ethiopian shamma and the Indian sari); and highly spiced food (Ethiopian barbaré and Indian curry).

1.8 Medieval Times

Trade between the Ethiopian region and India in the medieval period is relatively well documented. The Portuguese traveller, Tome Pires, writing of Cambay in the early sixteenth century, tells of the arrival there of “Abyssinians”, as well as Arabs, and describes the area’s trade with the main Gulf of Aden ports of Africa: Zayla and Berbera. His Bolognese contemporary, Ludovico di Varthema, likewise reports that Calicut was visited by merchants from Ethiopia, besides others from Arabia, Persia, Syria and Turkey.

1.9 Aden

Much of this trade centred at this time on the notable Arab commercial city of Aden. Varthema described it as “the great rendez-vous” for “all ships” coming from “India Major and Minor,” Ethiopia and Persia. The Venetian merchant Andrea Corsali likewise called Aden “the principal port of Arabia and Ethiopia”,while Barbosa reported that “many ships” arrived there from both Zayla and Berbera. Aden’s importance was also recognised by Brother Thomas, an Ethiopian visitor to Venice, who spoke of it as “the emporium of India” and “the gateway for all the spice and cloth and other things” brought by land to the then temporary Ethiopian capital, Barara. (Don’t, dear reader, ask where this was!)

Some Indian trade with Africa seem also to have passed by way of the Maldive islands, These were described by the fourteenth century Arab writer Dimashki as a stopping place for ships going to “Abyssinia”, besides Hormuz, Yaman, Mogadishu, and Zanj.

1.10 Massawa, Zayla, and Berbera

The three principal ports handling Ethiopian and Horn of African imports from India were then, as for centuries to come, Massawa, on the Red Sea, and Zayla and Berbera, as we have seen, on the Gulf of Aden coast.

Massawa, by this time already the main port of the Ethiopian highlands, was a place of sizable Indian trade, an was mentioned by the Portuguese, who report seeing “two Gujarat ships” there in 1520. Articles from India imported through the port were on sale, according to the Portuguese traveller Francisco Alvares, at the great market of Manadeley, in southern Tegray, where he saw “merchants of all nations”, among them “Moors [i.e. Muslims] of India”.

Zayla, according to Varthema, was likewise a place of “immense traffic”, especially in gold and ivory, which were exported to India, as well as to Persia, Arabia and Egypt. Indian goods imported through the port were taken, by camel caravan, to the “great mercantile city” of Gendebelu, where the Ethiopian monk Brother Antonio states that commodities were “brought from the whole of India”.

Berbera was visited, according to the Portuguese, Duarte Barbosa, by “many ships”, which carried “much merchandise” from Aden and Cambay, and returned with large quantities of African gold and ivory. Indian articles imported at the port were transported inland by camel, Corsali notes, to Ethiopia, which he termed “the country of churches”. The importance of this trade route was confirmed by Brother Thomas, who states that merchandise taken from Berbera to Shawa came from “Aden, Persia, Combaia [i.e. Cambay], and India”.

Some imports from India sometimes also reached the Ethiopian highlands by way of the Indian Ocean coast. Brother Thomas claims that “much merchandise” was brought there on ships of Cambay, and were later carried by caravan to Barara.

1.11 Penetrating the Ethiopian Interior

Indian imports, through one port or another, penetrated far into the Ethiopian interior. The chronicle of Emperor Zar’a Ya‘qob (1434-1468) tells of that monarch presenting silken vestments to the great monastery of Dabra Libanos, while Tome Pires observed that “the most prized things” in Abyssinia included coarse cloth from Cambay, as well as silks, also from India.

Emperor Galawdéwos (1540-1559) later declared that the people of Damot, in the far south-west of the country, gave gold “in exchange for inferior and coarse Indian cloth”. Textiles then, as in Aksumite times, in fact constituted Ethiopia’s principal on-going import from India.

Indian silks throughout Ethiopia were highly regarded by all who could afford them, Emperor Lebnä Dengel (1508-1540) for example was described, by Alvares, as “dressed in a rich mantle of (gold) brocade, and silk shirts of wide sleeves”. His consort, Queen Sabla Wangel, according to the Portuguese warrior Miguel de Castanhoso, was “all covered to the ground with silk, with a large flowing cloak… she was clothed in a very thin white Indian cloth”. The Abun, or head of the church, was likewise often dressed, Alvares says, in “a white cotton robe of fine thin stuff”, called casha, in India, “whence it came”.

2 Ethio-Indian Trade, and Slaves, in Medieval Times (1)

Jewels were another costly import from India, destined largely for the richest Ethiopian churches. Emperor Galawdewos’s chronicle states that several places of worship destroyed by the soldiers of the Adal conqueror Ahmad Gragn had been thus decorated with “precious Indian stones”.

Pearl-encrusted thrones from India were yet another costly import. They were imported for several monarchs, among them Emperor Dawit (1314-1411) and Emperor Na’od (1404-1508), who are known to have presented them to the churches of Tadbaba Maryam, in Gaynt, and Zemedu Maryam in Lasta, respectively.

2.1 Art

Evidence of Ethiopian interest in India is apparent in medieval Ethiopian art, and literature. A painting in the church of Yemrahanna Krestos, in Lasta, depicts an elephant with an Indian-style mahout, or driver, and a howdah, or seat, with two passengers. A similar motif is found in the church of Dabra Salam, near Atsbi in Tegray.Both scenes probably illustrated the travels in India of St Thomas, which were well known to Ethiopian Christians versed in the history of their faith. The holy man, his teaching and martyrdom, are featured in both the Gadla Hawaryat, or Contendings of the Apostles, and the Ethiopian synaxarium.

2.2 The “Kebra Nagast”

Medieval Ethiopian awareness of India is similarly apparent in the country’s national epic, the Kebra Nagast. It contains sundry, possibly apocryphal, references to ancient Ethiopian and other relations with the sub-continent at the time of the Queen of Sheba, and later.

2.3 The Hapshis (Ethiopian Slaves) of India

The long-standing trade between Ethiopia and India was accompanied by a considerable export of Ethiopian slaves. Such men, women, and children came to be known in India as Hapshis, a corruption of the Arabic word Habash, or Abyssinian. The word was, however, used loosely, apparently for any slaves from Africa, or their descendants. Denison Ross, a British scholar of Indian affairs, less familiar with Africa, observes that Habshi was “a term indicating Abyssinian, but no doubt includes other negroid races from Africa”. Though the word was, as he says, nodoubt applied to non-Ethiopians from East Africa, it is, however, highly unlikely that negroid people, i.e. West Africans from the Niger area, were ever taken to India.

Hapshis played a major role in Indian history, for, as Ross declares, “like the Turks who founded dynasties throughout the Muhammedan world these Hapshis usually began as slaves, and seem to have shown the same wonderful capacity, as did the Turks, for rising from slavery to the highest positions”.Several indeed established ruling dynasties, the history of which lies outside the scope of this, and the ensuing, article.

Hapshis are known to have arrived in India as early as the thirteenth century. The first Hapshi of whom we have record was a slave called Jamal ad-Din Yaqut, who is reported to have won the favour of Queen Radiyya (1236-1240), in the kingdom of Delhi.

Hapshis subsequently arrived in many parts of the sub-continent. The largest concentrations were, as to be expected, in the areas with which there was the most considerable trade with the Ethiopian region, i.e. in the north-west, especially Gujarat and the Gulf of Cambay. Hapshis were also established to the east of the sub-continent, in Bengal which was also engaged in extensive Red Sea trade. The local ruler, Sultan Rukn ad-Din (1459-1474), was reported to have no less than 8,000 Hapshi slaves, some of whom rose to high positions.The Deccan, on the west coast of India facing Africa, likewise had a sizable Hapshi population, who were first reported in the area at the time of Bahmani Sultan Firuz (1397-1422). He employed some of them as his personal assistants, and others in his harem.

2.4 Alvares, He Said

The importance of the Ethiopian slave export trade, which constitutes the background to Hapshi history, was duly recognised by Alvares. He noted, of the 1520s, that Ethiopian slaves from Damot in particular were “much esteemed by the Moors”, i.e. Muslims, and that “all the country of Arabia, Persia, India, Egypt, and Greece” was “full of slaves from this country”. Such slaves, he says, “made very good Moors [i.e. Muslims] and great warriors”.

2.5 Ethio-Indian Contacts of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Ethiopian-Indian contacts, which dated back, as we have seen, to ancient times, were enhanced, in the late fifteenth century, by the coming to the sub-continent, and to Red Sea waters, of the Portuguese. The latter were perceived by Ethiopian rulers as fellow Christians, and potential allies, from whom military assistance could be obtained. Ethio-Portuguese contacts took place thereafter almost entirely by way of India, the sub-continent’s western coast becoming to all intents and purposes a stop-over on the route between Ethiopia and Europe. The first Portuguese traveller to Ethiopia, Pero da Covilha, who arrived there during the reign of Emperor Eskender (1478-1494), and the subsequent Portuguese diplomatic mission described by Alvares, likewise travelled by way of India.

2.6 Mathew, the Armenian, and Empress Eleni

Ethiopians and others making their way to Europe in this period also usually travelled via India. Mathew, the Armenian merchant despatched by Empress Eléni to seek Portuguese assistance in view of impending Adal/Muslim pressure, thus went to Goa, whence he sailed to Portugal.

2.7 Ethiopian Travellers to India

The first Ethiopian of whom we have record to undertake the trans-continental journey to India and Europe was Brother Anthony of Lalibala, who later proceeded to Venice, where he was interviewed by the Italian scholar Alessandro Zorzi in 1523.

Only a few years later Emperor Lebnä Dengel despatched six young Ethiopians to study in India. Four of them apparently arrived in Goa, “two to be taught to be painters, and two others to be trumpeters”. Whether they in fact ever returned to their country or not is unrecorded.

2.8 Christavao da Gama

A generation or so later, at the height of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim’s invasion of the Christian highlands, a Portuguese military force, led by Christovao da Gama, intervened, in 1541, on the Emperor’s behalf. It was reportedly accompanied by “over seventy persons trained in all trades, namely cross-bow makers, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, and other handicraftsmen”. Their impact, if any, on sixteenth century Ethiopian technology has still to be analysed.

Subsequent contacts across the Indian Ocean led, during the reign of the Mogul Emperor Akbar (1556-1605), to the arrival in India of what his chronicle described as a “sea elephant”, i.e. an elephant from overseas. It came to him from the ruler of Gujarat, which, as we have seen, was one of the areas of India in closest relation with Ethiopia.This leads us to suppose that the animal was probably of Ethiopian, or at least East African, origin.

2.9 The Jesuits

The growth of Jesuit influence during the reign of Emperor Susneyos (1607-1632), and his adoption of the Roman Catholic faith, witnessed a rapid expansion in Ethiopian contacts with Portuguese India. The monarch was reportedly much interested in the sub-continent, about which he asked the Jesuit missionary Pero Pais numerous questions. Susneyos likewise took an apparently even greater interest than previous Ethiopian rulers in Ethiopian rulers in Indian imports. He is thus described, by the Jesuit Manoel de Almeida, as wearing “a white Indian bofeta”, and elegant Indian slippers, one pair of which was given to him by the Jesuit Manoel Barradas, who presented similar footwear also to the Emperor’s son Fasilädäs, and brother, Ras Se’elä Krestos. Susneyos likewise had a bed, or couch, decorated with “coverlets and blankets” from Diu, Cambay, and Bengal, and a silk umbrella, which also came to him from India.

2.10 A Crucifix and Chain

Susneyos also had a crucifix and chain, made by an Indian goldsmith, which reportedly filled him with joy, and sent for “seed pearls from India” which he subsequently wore in his crown. The country was apparently recognised as a source of jewels, as suggested by Hiob Ludolf’s Ge‘ez lexicon of 1681 which contains a reference to an a’enaqwe hendake, or Indian jewel.

Other acquisitions from the sub-continent reported at this time included a copper or bronze bell, which was hung at the Emperor’s great church at Gorgora, by Lake Tana,papaya trees, which, according to Pero Pais, “yielded very good fruit”, and Indian figs, which were likewise said to be “very good’.

2.11 Highly Prized Animals: elephants, zebras, and a parrot

Several highly prized animals also travelled between Ethiopia and India in this period. The voyage of “a small elephant from Abyssinia” is reported in the Memoirs of the Mogul emperor Jahanger. They recall that the beast, was “brought by sea in a ship”, in 1616. Its ears were reportedly larger than those of Indian elephants, and its trunk and tail longer.

At least one Ethiopian zebra was also taken to India. Susneyos is reported to have sent it as a present to the Basha of the Red Sea port of Suakin, whence “a Moor from India”, purchased it for two thousand sequins to take to Mogul Emperor. This, or another such animal, is described by Jahanger himself. He recalls that it arrived at his court, in 1621, and, though an ass, was “exceedingly strange in appearance, exactingly like a lion” – by which he probably meant a tiger; and had an “exceedingly fine line” round its eyes. The creature seemed so strange that some people thought that it had been coloured by hand, but the monarch rejected this view, stating that it was in fact “the painter of fate”, who had “left it on the page of the world”. The animal was so remarkable, and highly regarded at the Indian court, that at least two paintings of it were drawn by the Mogul artist Ustad Mansur.

The reign of Susneyos witnessed the arrival at the Ethiopian court of a parrot. It was called dura, apparently a corruption of duri, the Gujarati name for this type of bird. The Ethiopian royal chronicle states that it came from Hend, i.e. India, spoke “hend”, presumably Hindustani, or some other language of India, and several other tongues, but was, unfortunately, subsequently eaten by a cat. God bless its soul!

3 Ethio-Indian Trade, and Slaves, in Medieval Times (2)

3.1 Susneyus, Fasiladas,Yohannes, and Iyasu

Emperor Susneyos’s attempts to convert Ethiopia to Roman Catholicism, which had led to much bloodshed over the years, duly collapsed, after which he abdicated, in 1632. He was succeeded by his son Fasiladas, who expelled the Jesuits, and restored the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This resulted in a major switch in the country’s foreign policy. Ties with the Catholic West were severed, and efforts made to establish new ones with the East. Contacts with India, which owed much, as we have seen, to the Portuguese, nevertheless continued – but took on a new, anti-Catholic, form. Fasiladas, seeking to gain the friendship of the Mogul empire, accordingly despatched his Armenian agent Murad to India, to congratulate Emperor Aurangeb on his accession in 1658.

Fasiladas’s son Emperor Yohannes I (1667-1682) attempted to continue his father’s pro-Eastern policy. He accordingly despatched a further expedition to India, which reached Delhi in 1671, with presents, it was reported, to a value of 10,000 rupees.

Contact with India was also pursued by Fasilädäs’s grandson Emperor Iyasu I (1681-1706). He despatched at least two missions there. One was led by his Turkish trade agent Haji Ali; the other by a Greek, who around 1700 travelled to Surat, and Bombay.

These pro-Eastern, and anti-Western, initiatives by Fasilädäs and his descendants, though important, failed to overcome the Christian-Muslim divide, or to generate anything like the interest in Ethiopia earlier displayed by the Jesuits.

3.2 Indian Building Activities

This period of Portuguese hegemony, and its aftermath, witnessed considerable building work by Indian craftsmen in Ethiopia, most notably in the erection of palaces, churches and bridges. Almeida reports that, early in the seventeenth century, “an intelligent person from India discovered a kind of fine, light and as it were worm-eaten stone”, similar to what he had seen used in the Baroche district of Gujarat to make into lime. Susneyos and his chiefs are said to have “valued it highly”. The emperor, with the help of his brother Se’elä Krestos, accordingly had “many beautiful churches built of stone and lime”.

A few years later, “some stone-masons came from India, whence they had been brought by the Jesuits”. They were employed by the Emperor at his then capital, Dänqäz, where he “built a palace of stone and lime”, which Almeida describes as “a structure that was a wonder in that country and something which had never been seen nor yet imagined, and it was such as would have value and be reckoned a handsome building anywhere”.

Indian masons at this time were also involved in bridge-building. Almeida recalls that, shortly after the discovery of “stone for making lime”, the Emperor gave orders for the erection of a bridge over the Blue Nile at Alata, which was put up by “a craftsman who had come from India”. An almost identical account was given by another Jesuit author, Jerónimo Lobo, who states that Susneyos had a bridge erected over the river, by “stone workers who had come to him from India”. The identity of the craftsman, one of very few foreigners ever to be mentioned by name in an Ethiopian royal chronicle, is revealed in that of Susneyos, which refers to him as a Banyan called Abd el Kerim.

3.3 Ludolf, He Said

The significance of the Indian builders of this period was later endorsed by Ludolf. He observes that the Jesuits “carry’d an Architect with them out of India, and having found out Lime, unknown to the Habessines for so many Ages, built their Churches and their Colledges of Stone and Mortar, and encampass’d them with High-walls, to the amazement and dread of the Habessines, lest they should in time be made so many Impregnable Forts and Castles”.

3.4 Remained in the Country

After the expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1632-3, many of the Indians they had brought with them to Ethiopia probably remained in the country. They doubtless continued their building work, and thus came to be employed in and around the city of Gondär, which Emperor Fasilädäs established as his capital in 1636. A Yamani ambassador, Hasan ibn Ahmad al Haymi, who visited it a decade or so later, in 1648, reported that the “master-builder” of the principal palace, known to this day as the Fasil gemb, was a great house of stone and mortar, and “one of the most marvelous of buildings, worthy of admiration, and the most outstanding of wonders”. It had been erected, he says, by “an Indian”. This statement was long afterwards corroborated, quite independently, by the eighteenth century Scottish traveller James Bruce. He observes that “the palace was built by masons from India”, and by “such Abyssinians as had been instructed in architecture by the Jesuits”.

3.5 The Banyans of Massawa

By the seventeenth century there is evidence of a substantial presence, at the Red Sea port of Massawa, of a substantial number of Indian merchants, and craftsmen. Many of these traders, generally referred to Ethiopia as Banyans, were people of substance, as indicated by the Jesuit missionary Baltazar Telles. He recalls that his colleagues, in 1634, borrowed no less than 800 “pieces of eight” from them.

Much of the trade between Ethiopia and India at this time was based on the port of Surat. It was a common sight, at the close of the seventeenth century, according to the French traveller Charles Poncet, to see vessels from that port at Massawa.

The number of Banyans at Massawa, if we can believe Bruce, later declined. He states that, though “once the principal merchants” at the port, they had, by his day, been “reduced to six”. They were, he adds, silver-smiths and “assayers of gold”. They also made earrings, and other ornaments, for the people of the interior, but gained only “a poor livelihood”.

3.6 Ethiopian-Indian Trade in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Ethiopian trade with India, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was still considerable. An Armenian who visited the court of Emperor Susneyos in 1612 reported that no less than ten caravans, eight of them large, arrived there every year with “all sorts of Indian clothing”. The Jesuit missionary Almeida noted shortly afterwards that much of Ethiopia’s gold was exported to the sub-continent to purchase “clothing from India”.

Almeida also emphasises similarities between Indian and Ethiopian clothing of the period, which, it should be emphasised, doubtless owed much to the fact that they were both of Indian origin.

Ethiopian nobles, he states, were “something like Banian cabayas”, which consisted of “a surcoat, or long muslin tunic, not open all the way but only to the waist and held in by tiny buttons”. This dress was made up of “small collars and very long sleeves so that they lie on the arm as if they had been folded. They call them camizas. They usually make them of Cambay bofetas”. The term camiz could well have been borrowed from the Hindustani/Tamil word cameeze, itself a loan-word from the Arabic and Portuguese. Noblewomen, according to Barradas, were likewise dressed in “silk or other fine material from India”, over which they placed “ample mantles of silk bordered with various colours”, also from India.

Massawa’s principal imports were later also described by Bruce, who emphasised that they included many articles from India. These comprised “blue cotton, Surat cloths, and cochineal ditto, called Kermis”, as well as “fine cloths from different markets in India”.

3.7 Indian Influences on Indian Art

Contacts with India, in this period, seem to have had interesting, though by no means extensive, influences on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Ethiopian Christian art, a detailed discussion of which lies outside the scope of this study. The Virgin Mary is thus occasionally depicted in an unmistakably Indian posture; Guardian archangels in the interior of churches are often seen wearing Mogul-type clothes; some manuscript illustrations of buildings seem of Indian inspiration.

3.8 Conclusions

Ethiopia’s contact’s with India, and the East, though less well documented than those with the West, were important, and long-enduring. The economies of the two regions, were to a significant extent complimentary, and commerce between them was facilitated by the trade winds. The sub-continent was thus a major source of cotton, silks, and spices, and various luxury items, among them pearls. Ethiopia, by way of return, supplied India with such exports as gold, ivory, and slaves. This commercial pattern, first evident in ancient times, continued substantially unchanged, into the medieval period. Contacts across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, though largely based on trade, also had a much wider dimension, and found expression in many cultural similarities between the two countries, not merely, as often noticed, in that of food and dress.

The advent of a European power, Portugal, in the fifteenth century, and the subsequent Jesuit-inspired introduction of Roman Catholicism, led, paradoxically, to the forging of closer contacts between the areas of Africa and Asia under discussion. The period which followed witnessed in particular the coming to Ethiopia of numerous Indian craftsmen, among them builders and masons. Indian building activity, though at first largely fostered by the Jesuits, continued after their expulsion in the early sixteen thirties, and found final expression in the founding of the first of the great Gondar castles.

The expulsion of the Jesuits was followed by Ethiopian efforts to continue, and revamp, the county’s Indian connections, through the opening up of diplomatic relations with the Mogul empire. The initiative was not successful, but age-old commercial contacts between the two countries continued throughout the period under review.