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The word Ethiopian covers far more ground in old books than the country does on a modern map. For the Greeks it could mean almost all of Africa, for the Bible it is the land of Cush around the second river of Eden, and for the nineteenth century writers on Atlantis it was the name of one of the oldest peoples on earth. Then there are the Ethiopians of history, who kept a Bible larger than anyone else’s and built churches on the edges of cliffs. This page brings those threads together.
The land of the Gihon
The Ethiopians appear in the second chapter of the Bible. On Genesis 2 – Enclosed gardens, the second river that flows out of Eden is named:
And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
Genesis 2:13 (KJV)
The Hebrew behind that Ethiopia is Cush. On Genesis 10 – Noah’s offspring, Cush is a son of Ham and the ancestor of the Ethiopians, beside Mizraim for the Egyptians and Put for the Libyans.
Aithiopia of the Greeks
On War Against the Atlantioi, Diodorus Siculus is read in Oldfather’s translation, and his histories of sub-Saharan Africa, Libya and the Atlas region all come under one Greek name, because Aithiopia is the ancient Greek term for the whole of Africa, not just the land of Ethiopia. The same wide Aethiopia is the kingdom of Cepheus on Andromeda was chained to a rock by the sea as an offering to Cetus. For Herodotus the Ethiopians were neighbours who could take Egypt: on Ancient Egypt – 11,800 BCE a blind king named Anysis flees from an Ethiopian invasion, and Sabacos the Ethiopian rules in his place.
The Cush of the Bible was also a real kingdom on the Nile, south of Egypt. On Kushite pyramids and Timbuktu’s books the pyramids of Meroe, a capital of Kush, are steep and narrow, unlike the broad Egyptian forms. Kush, Cuniform and the Medu Neter goes further and argues that the Cushite writing system came before the hieroglyphs of Kemet.
An old people in the Atlantis books
On Researches into the Lost Histories of America (1884), W. S. Blacket quotes Lucian that astronomy came originally from Ethiopia, and counts the Ethiopians of Africa among five races that all descend from Atlantis. Lettres américaines (1788) settles the Atlantes in Ethiopia on the authority of Diodorus. On The Origin of Our Alphabet Donnelly calls archaic Ethiopian a language as old as the Egyptian, representing the Cushite branch of the Atlantean stock.
The Ethiopian Bible
The Ethiopian church kept books that other churches dropped. On WLA on why the Ethiopian Bible was banned, WLA describes the canon as one that
comprises 81 books spanning both the Old and New Testaments
WLA, WLA on why the Ethiopian Bible was banned, at 1:05
The same video tells how the Queen of Sheba came home from Solomon:
Queen Sheba returned to Ethiopia with menelik who later became the Kingdom's first emperor
WLA, WLA on why the Ethiopian Bible was banned, at 8:52
One of the books that survived there is Enoch. On Who Were the Nephilim? the Book of Enoch is extra-biblical for most Jewish and Protestant readers, while Ethiopian Orthodox tradition includes it. On The sons of Dan the Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, trace their own descent to the tribe of Dan.
Churches on the cliffs
On Abuna Yemata Guh pilgrims climb barefoot to a 1,600-year-old church cut into a cliff in the Ethiopian highlands. Ethiopia accepted Christianity peacefully in the 4th century, so hiding is no explanation for the height, and the video tests instead whether these churches sit on ley lines, as the cliff temples of China do.
Related pages
- Genesis 2 – Enclosed gardens
- Genesis 10 – Noah’s offspring
- WLA on why the Ethiopian Bible was banned
- Abuna Yemata Guh
- War Against the Atlantioi
- The sons of Dan
- Who Were the Nephilim?
- Researches into the Lost Histories of America (1884)
- Kushite pyramids and Timbuktu’s books
For every page I tagged with ethiopians, see the ethiopians tag archive.
