March 5 was my last night in Addis… it was a fun night!
Lynda, Gordon, Frederick, and I met Brutawit, one of Richard’s Ethiopian sister-in-law’s, for dinner at this great place called Saba (or Sheeba, like the queen). Besides excellent traditional habesha food and conversation, the place had Wollo dancing with theater mixed in. Gordon was the first to join the dancers.
Habesha is the word Ethiopians use to refer to themselves. It literally means “mixture” as in mixture between white and black.
Almost all of us ended up dancing, forcefed in the traditional way by one of the dancers, and generally having a good time. The dinner ended with a coffee ceremony. On the ride home, Frederick gave Brutawit and I both a bar of Belgian chocolate. I arrived at Richard’s place and he and I chatted a bit more before we slept and all too early the next morning Tamir picked me up to take me to the airport for a flight to Axum.
On March 1, on the way from Melka Kunture to the Adadi Mariam church, we came across some cows threshing teff under the urging of a farmer.
We also drove through a local marketplace.
After paying admission of around US$4, I got to check out the Adadi Mariam rock-hewn church, which is apparently similar to some of the churches at Lallibella which I didn’t have the opportunity to see.
Continuing on from the previous blog entry, the National Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has some other impressive modern pieces, such as this statue called “Hair Style”, the painting “Genital Mutilation” by Abebe Zelelew (2003), and “Fetel” by Marta Mengistu (2004).
“Bedebo Fetel” is by an unknown artist.
On the ground floor of the museum is also a section on other historical periods of Ethiopia (and now Eritrea). Many items I am not able to identify because they were not labeled well, such as these pictures of Ethiopian tribal people.
Some are musical instruments like the secular krar and its liturgical counterpart.
How about an Ethiopian game?
I loved these brilliantly carved artifacts, the latter one being a limestone seat niche decorated with a relief of persons and an ibex from the 5th to 4th century BCE in Haoulti, Tigrai, Ethiopia.
Then, from the second half of the first millenium BCE in Hawlti, Tigrai, Ethiopia, we have two red earthenware female figurines and a group of buff earthenware human figurines.
From the second century BCE to the second century CE in Kuhi, Tigrai, comes a buff earthenware tripod pod with “human legs”.
From the fifth to fourth century BCE in Goboshela or Gobochela, Tigrai, comes a limestone and alabaster altar with an inscription in “South Arabic” about a family’s dedication to their god “for the protection of their life” and a stone incense burner from the sixth to fifth century BCE in the same region with the inscription “Ylbb the stone worker has dedicated to Almaqah”.
From the end of the first millenium BCE in Addi-Galamo, Tigrai, a small alabaster altar and, from the sixth to fifth century BCE in the same region, a limestone statue of a female with the inscription in “South Arabian” (looks like a different language to me) of “For god grants a child to Yamanat.”
Then, we see an bronze oil lamp depicting a dog hunting an ibex from before the first century BCE in Matara, now part of Eritrea.
The collection also holds some exquisite female figurines from Matara that look similar to the really ancient Anatolian mother goddess figures, two in terra cotta and one in white stone, date information unfortunately not listed.
Here’s an exquisite amphora used to import wine and olive oil from the Mediterranean to Axum, Tigrai, in the fourth to seventh century CE.
Photo of unidentified anthropomorphic stela from Southern Ethiopia.
Finally, when I left the museum, I wandered around the grounds and came across this cafe in a traditional building called a tukul.
After that Sunday (February 25) touring Addis Ababa with Paulos, I had an appointment scheduled with Dr. Berhane Asfaw at the Paleo Lab of the National Museum. Dr. Asfaw is one of my heroes because he was on the team that made the discoveries of three human remains at Herto in the Afar area of the Awash region of the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia. In fact, he discovered the skull of a child in hundreds of pieces which he painstakingly cleaned and puzzled back together — a remarkable accomplishment which brought us much light on our early origins as the species Homo sapiens. The interview went very well.
After the interview, I visited the National Museum and saw many interesting exhibits, including an excellent replica of Lucy, who was not Homo sapiens, but still an interesting gal who is back there somewhere in the early story of human origins.
The theory of how human ancestors began walking on two feet (bipedalism) instead of four feet seemed simple, but further discoveries have complicated matters.
For my current research, I’m focusing mainly on Homo sapiens, the species of humans alive today. The earliest Homo sapiens on record so far appear around 200,000 to 160,000 years ago. One example is this skull (replica shown below) found in Lower Omo region of the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia. I tried to go to the excavation site but the location was too remote and the bridge I would have needed to cross to get there has collapsed.
My favorite Homo sapiens remains are those discovered by Dr. Asfaw, Tim White of University of California at Berkeley, and others at Herto in the Afar area of the Awash region of the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia. They believe the remains are different enough from modern Homo sapiens sapiens to merit a separate sub-species which they dubbed Homo sapiens idaltu (replica shown below). Idaltu means “elder” in the language of the local Afar tribe in Herto village where the archaeologists discovered the remains.
The National Museum in Addis also exhibits old Ethiopian Orthodox illustrated manuscripts and modern Ethiopian art like “African Heritage” by Afewerk Tekle (1967), a painting about the Derg period in Ethiopian history, and “Three Faces of Africa” by Daniel Tohafe (1980).
Other notable examples include “How Long?” by TBD and “Ethiopian Symphony No. 5” by Girmay Hiwet (2001)
David and Tommy invited me to the Monet exhibit at the Legion of Honor today. It cost $15 to get in and it was overcrowded. I saw several paintings I really liked: one of a hay stack, one of a obscure winter scene, a quite abstract painting of a wave, and another of a seascape at sunset. In the regular collection, we saw a painting titled “Love and the Maiden” (1877) by John Rodham Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908), that included the words “Cor Cordium” over and over again on the cupid figure’s clothing.
A google search turned up this lovely poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (thanks to David for help with the research on this stuff!):
Cor Cordium
O heart of hearts, the chalice of love's fire,
Hid round with flowers and all the bounty of bloom;
O wonderful and perfect heart, for whom
The lyrist liberty made life a lyre;
O heavenly heart, at whose most dear desire
Dead love, living and singing, cleft his tomb,
And with him risen and regent in death's room
All day thy choral pulses rang full choir;
O heart whose beating blood was running song,
O sole thing sweeter than thine own songs were,
Help us for thy free love's sake to be free,
True for thy truth's sake, for thy strength's sake strong,
Till very liberty make clean and fair
The nursing earth as the sepulchral sea.
We hung out at Cafe Flore afterwards, then I went to a celebration of Mitcho’s retirement from as the director of the city’s queer youth outreach program. I chatted with many of the guys who were at the Covelo camping weekend and of course congratulated Mitcho. The Sisters of Indulgence helped Supervisor Bevan Dufty announce that the City of San Francisco named the day after Mitcho. Mark Leno and other notables were there, but the most poignant speakers were the kids who had come to the youth center. Some described how Mitcho persuaded them not to commit suicide or helped them off of meth. I met two interesting new people: Ariel, a writer and biological female whose crazy doctor father at Harvard reassigned her to be a male in an incident of abusive constructive intersex status, and Aaron, a young fellow who drinks, smokes tobacco, and plays guitar.
After that, the gang walked over to Moby Dick, then walked over and picked up Indian takeout to Johnny and Brian’s place in the Haight. I found out Mark of Mark and Onyx went to Senegal for two years in the Peace Corps and we agreed to meet up again to discuss his experiences there. I got tired before midnight and headed home.
Saturday morning Edgardo and I headed over from his place to the hotel to meet Jim e and wander around the city some more.
We shopped at bookstalls, then walked over to the MALBA Museum and cafe. I really loved both, including the submarino (hot milk and a bar of chocolate you break up and stir into the milk) I drank there.
The art in the museum was fantastic, definitely on a par with the best museums in the U.S. or Europe. Both Jim e and I particularly liked a painter named Xul Solar.
After MALBA, we walked over to the La Flor statue, which is a giant mechanical flower that opens and closes according to the time of day.
Then, we walked by the Law University where we saw the names of those law students disappeared by a former Argentinian government.
We went to the Museo de las Bellas Artes, which was also really great.
Here are some paintings by Xul Solar who painted rainbow flags before they were “invented”:
In the Recoleta neighborhood, we walked past a gigantic baobab tree the size of a city block which was planted around 1800.
We stopped at La Biella Cafe and then for Dulce de Leche ice cream at Freddo’s, an experience not to be missed or forgotten. Finally, we ate a reasonably good restaurant near the giant Abasto shopping mall.
We dropped Jim e off in a taxi on the way to Edgardo’s place. (I probably should have moved out of the hotel by this point, but I wanted the connection with Jim e and I had prepaid the hotel stay.)
