The Amhara people have a very well-articulated and elaborated oral history. According to their oral history, they can trace their lineage to Saba the son of Joktan. Joktan was the grandson of Eber, who was the great-grandson of Shem, who was the eldest son of Noah. Since this is a research paper we will focus on the written and documented history of the Semitic people of Ethiopia.
The Amhara people’s written history started 3000 years ago with a direct link with the Sabaean kingdom of Southwestern Arabia. The Sabaean kingdom flourished in South Arabia around 1000 BC. Archeological findings show that the Sabaeans had a writing system and were very advanced in agriculture, trade, and metallurgy. The written history of the Amharas shows that trade relations between the Sabaeans and the Cushitic people across the Red Sea were established during that time. After many generations of trade and intermarriage with the indigenous population they founded a colony in D’amt, current day Eritrea (“People of Ethiopia – Alchetron, the Free Social Encyclopedia”).
According to David Buxton’s book The Abyssinians the Semitic migrants with their advanced knowledge of trade, writing system, agriculture, and government structure were able to assimilate the local population peacefully. “Their impact probably took the form of gradual infiltration rather than armed conquest. In any case, there is ample evidence of the enormous political and cultural influence they exerted in their new home” (Buxton 35). In time as their number grew, they founded the Axum empire. At its peak, it was compared to Rome and Persia in its own accord.
The majority of Amharas are followers of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The church has served as a historian of these people, keeping records of major events. According to the church’s chronicles during the reign of King Solomon of Judea, the Queen of Sabaeans Queen Sheba (Makeda) went to Jerusalem to learn from the famously wise King Solomon. It is written in the Kibre Negest (Glory of Kings) that when Queen Sheba returned to her kingdom, she was pregnant from King Solomon. Her son emperor Minilk I established the Solomonic dynasty that lasted 3000 years until the last monarchy Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by a military coup in 1974 (Libretexts).
A DNA study result published in a BBC article explains that 3000 years ago, there was a gene flow from South Arabia to current-day Ethiopia, affirming the Amhara’s oral and written history. Professor Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, a researcher on the study, told BBC News: “Genetics can tell us about historical events. By analyzing the genetics of Ethiopia and several other regions we can see that there was gene flow into Ethiopia, probably from the Levant, around 3,000 years ago, and this fits perfectly with the story of the Queen of Sheba” (Briggs).
Ever since the dawn of Ethnic politics in Ethiopia, there have been debates about whether Amhara is an ethnic identity or a national consciousness. Since 1991 the existence of the Amhara ethnicity has been accepted but it has been minimized and undermined in many ways. There have been attempts to divide the ethnic Amharas into rural Amharas and urban Amharas. Describing the situation back in the early 1990s Ethiopia, author Siegfried Pausewang writes that the TPLF leaders Meles Zenawi and Andreas Eshete claim that the Amhara is a nation with its territory and culture as any other Ethnicity in Ethiopia and should take its proper place — which is true for the rural Amhara in some regions in Ethiopia. On the other side of the argument, Professor Mesfin Wolde Mariam and Getachew Haile describe the characteristics of the urban assimilated cultural Amhara and claim that they are the beginning of a truly Ethiopian nation and must have the right to live anywhere in Ethiopia (Pausewang 275).
In addition to dividing the Amharas, the most frequently used argument by these political elites is the statement that the Amharas don’t share a common lineage but are created by a shared common language. Siegfried Pausewang quotes Takkele Taddese’s work in his paper “The Two-Faced Amhara Identity”. The author states, that at the 12th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in Michigan in 1994, Takkele Taddese presented a paper entitled “Do the Amhara exist as a distinct ethnic group?” He came very close to distinguishing the two groups, describing the history of the Amhara language and consciousness. But his conclusion describes the Amhara as being a fused stock, a supra ethnically conscious ethnic Ethiopian serving as the pot in which all the other ethnic groups are supposed to melt (Pausewang 275). Making the Amhara a supra ethnicity that cannot be shaped into a single ethnicity.
After the establishment of Ethnic Federalism in Ethiopia over 80 ethnicities have claimed their existence just based on shared language and culture. The Amharas have over 3000 years of written and oral history with shared language, culture, and values. Historical writings, geological findings, and DNA results have proved that the Amhara people do exist and have existed at least for three millenniums with their distinct DNA markings. In a recent DNA study researchers wrote “It is important to add here that Y-chromosomal haplogroup J1-M267, which is widespread throughout Arab-speaking countries and encompasses a third of Amharan Y chromosomes, has hardly penetrated the Cushitic-speaking Oromo population” (Kivisild et al.). This research result shows that the Amhara have a shared Y-chromosomal haplogroup J which is present in two-thirds of the Amhara population.
The Amhara genetic marker was explained further by this study, debunking the theory that the Amharas do not have shared DNA lineage. In the conclusion of the study, the researchers wrote, that Ethiopians may have been recipients of the southern Arabian J1-M267 chromosomes but have not been efficient donors of the E3b1-M78 chromosomes to southern Arabia, although East Africans may have carried the latter to Egypt and, farther, to Europe via the Levantine corridor. Furthermore, as already mentioned above, there is a profound difference in J1-M267 frequencies between the Semitic-speaking Amharas, who probably arrived relatively recently from Arabia, and the Cushitic-speaking Oromos, among whom the frequency of J1-M267 chromosomes does not exceed 3% (Cruciani et al. Cruciani et al., 2004). (Kivisild et al.). Confirming the Amhara people’s argument of shared lineage.
The Semitic Amhara people are the ancient Axumites who came to be known as Abyssinians and Ethiopians. David Buxton stated that the Amharas were the ones that carried the traditions of the Axum empire further to the southwest and south of current-day Ethiopia. “It was they who eventually became the dominant as well as the most numerous. Therefore, their language is the lingua franca of the whole country. Amharas and Tigreans together constitute the Abyssinians proper, a term which distinguishes them from many other people inhabiting the modern Ethiopian” (Buxton 31). Though they were not identified as Amharas until the 12th century they were known in history as Sabaeans, Axumites, and Abyssinians by the empires and kingdoms they have founded.