HIST 2706 Final: Final Exam notes HIST 2706.doc
4 Mar 2014
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Chapter 8: eastern africa to the sixteenth century. Questions and exercises: assess the importance of christianity in the medieval kingdom of. The zagwe rulers reopened links between the ethiopian church and the holy land of palestine. Even in its centuries of greatest isolation, the ethiopian. Church had maintained contact with the remnants of the egyptian coptic. Throughout the period of the coptic decline with the rise of islam, the. Ethiopian church continued to have an egyptian appointed as its most senior bishop. Ethiopians saw themselves as an outpost of christianity a sort of chosen people of god surrounded by pagans and muslims. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, muslim merchants, probably of arab origin, began penetrating the awash valley towards the highlands of ethiopia. They set up small trading settlements from which they controlled the external trade of the interior. Initially they exercised little direct control over the surrounding non-muslim, cushitic-speaking communities.
