THE ROLE OF FIRE-ARMS IN ET H ЮР AN CULTURE (I6TH ТО 20ТН CENTURIES) PAR RICHARD PANKHURST

Despite the oft postulated isolation and self-sufficiency of Ethiopia in the past, and the assumed static character of the country's economic and political institutions, significant changes nevertheless took place. One of the most interesting of such fields of innovation was related to the utilisation of fire-arms which over the centuries came to play a major, but thus far little investigated rôle in Ethiopian cultural life. The object of the present article is to examine the non-military use of these weapons which, like other imports, tended at first to be the monopoly of rulers with relatively easy access to trade routes, but were later acquired by increasingly wide sections of the population. Fire-arms which first made their appearance in Ethiopia during the reign of Emperor Yeshaq (1414-1429) did not come into their own until the second quarter of the sixteenth century x. First brought into extensive service in the 1530's by the Muslim conqueror Ahmad Ibn Ibrahim El Ghazi, better known as Ahmad Gragn, they were the principal weapon of the Portuguese force led by Dom Christovao de Gama which came to the aid of Emperor Galawdéwos in 1541, and of the Ottoman Turks who established themselves at the Red Sea port of Massawa in 1557 2.