Queen Gudit and the fall of Aksum (tradition)

Ethiopian tradition, recorded in chronicles and folklore much later, tells of a queen called Gudit — a form associated with the biblical Judith — or Yodit, also Isato, ‘fire’. In one version she was the daughter of a Jewish king of Semien who succeeded her father after he fell fighting Aksum and then defeated the Aksumites; in another, a banished Aksumite princess who married a Syrian prince, Zenobis, adopted Judaism and returned with an army. She is said to have killed the king, seized the throne and reigned for forty years, destroying Aksum and burning its churches; according to a tradition reported by James Bruce she slaughtered some four hundred princes of the royal house held on the mountain of Debre Damo. Stories of her misdeeds are still told in northern Ethiopia: in 1970 a priest of the rock church of Abreha and Atsbeha in Tigray told the historian Paul Henze that its soot-blackened ceiling was her work. Tradition dates her to about 960; the Dictionary of Ethiopian Biography places her attacks on the Aksumite dynasty about 970.

Two Arabic sources show that the legend has a historical core. The geographer Ibn Hawqal, writing some years before 977, reports that the country of the Habasha had for many years been ruled by a woman who had killed its king, the haḍani, and that she ruled independently in the south of the country. The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria records that under Patriarch Philotheos (979–1003) George, king of Nubia, forwarded to the patriarch an appeal from an unnamed Ethiopian king: a queen of the ‘Bani al-Hamwiya’ was laying waste his country and harrying him from place to place, and he saw in this God's punishment for the expulsion of the metropolitan Petros decades earlier; Philotheos responded by consecrating a new metropolitan, Daniel. An Arabic report also has the king of Yemen send to the ruler of Iraq, in 969/970, a zebra he had received from the queen of the Habasha.

Who the queen was remains disputed. Some late Ethiopian traditions make her a Jewess, usually a convert; the image owes its spread mainly to the 18th-century account of James Bruce and is rejected by many historians. Carlo Conti Rossini read the name of her people as Bani al-Damuta and took her for a ruler of the pagan kingdom of Damot, south of the Abbay, connected with the Sidama peoples; Steven Kaplan likewise sees in her a pagan queen from the south, while Tekeste Negash places her near Lake Hayq. What is clear is that the old Aksumite kingdom, long weakened by the loss of its Red Sea trade, collapsed in these decades; Christian Ethiopia later revived under the Zagwe kings of Lasta.