Hamasien

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Hamasien (Tigrinya: ሓማሴን) was the name of a province including and surrounding Asmara, now part of modern Eritrea. The region has been divided and distributed amongst the modern Maekel, Debub, Northern Red Sea, Gash-Barka and Anseba regions.

Hamasien's population are predominantly followers of Oriental Orthodox Christianity and members of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahdo Church with a considerable minority of Sunni Muslim, Roman Catholic and Lutheran communities. Traditionally being the center of the Kebessa (i.e. the Eritrean Highlands), it was the locality of the old palace town of Debarwa (the capital of Bahr negus Yeshaq). The border was changed further to place Debarwa in the province of Seraye before it's present status of being the capital of Tselema district in the Debub region.

[edit] History

The former province was the political and economic center of Eritrea, and judging from excavations in the Sembel area outside Asmara it has been so since at least 800 BC. The earliest surviving appearance of the name "Hamasien" is believed to have been the region ḤMS²M, i.e. ḤMŠ, mentioned in a Sabaic inscription of the Axumite king Ezana.[1][2] The region may have been mentioned as early as Puntite times by Ancient Egyptian records as 'MSW (i.e. "Amasu"), a region of Punt.[2]

During the early medieval centuries, it was ruled by the Bahr negus from Debarwa. According to Francisco Alvares, writing in the early 16th century, the Bahr negus's authority extended almost as far as Suakin in modern Sudan. Despite the Emperor of Ethiopia's allegations and grants of control of the country of the Bahr negus during the Zagwe and Solomonic dynasties, the 1984 "Proceedings of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples," declares that "There was no administration that connected Hamasin and Serae to the centre of the Ethiopian Kingdom[3] With the decline of the importance of the Bahr negus in the 17th to 19th centuries, the province enjoyed a period of communal rule under councils of village elders, the so called shimagile who enforced traditional laws which had prevailed uniquely in the region alongside feudal authority since ancient times.[4] The region appeared in European maps as 'The Republic of Hamasien'. In the late 19th century, Hamasien was briefly invaded and occupied by the Ethiopian Emperor Yohannes IV who granted control of the region to a certain Ras Alula. Ethiopian forces wrestled for control over the region with Ottomans initially and later with Italian colonialists. Following the death of Emperor Yohannes at the Battle of Gallabat, Hamasien was occupied by the Italians, who incorporated it into their colony of Eritrea and making one of its villages, Asmara, the capital of the colony, a status it retains today as the capital of the sovereign country of Eritrea.[5]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Borderlands (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1997), p. 21.
  2. ^ a b Wolbert Smidt: "Ḥamasen," in Siegbert Uhlig, ed., Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005).
  3. ^ (1984) "Proceedings of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples". Session on Eritrea, Rome, Italy: Research and Information Centre on Eritrea. 
  4. ^ With further detailed references see Wolbert Smidt: "Law: Traditional Law Books", in: ebd., 516-18. See also the article on the law of Ḥamasen: Wolbert Smidt: "Ḥəggi Habsəllus Gäräkəstos", in: Siegbert Uhlig (ed.): Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2007, vol. 3 (He-N), p. 10f.
  5. ^ Erlich, Haggai (1996). Ras Alula and the Scramble for Africa. Lawrenceville: Red Sea. ISBN 1-56902-029-9. 
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