Dinamiche identitarie nell'Etiopia antica e medievale

Ethiopian literary tradition offers many opportunities to study how political and social identities developed and changed through the centuries, even though reading written documents entails the risk of being influenced by the ideology of the cultural centers that built up the different narratives. Among the possible examples, three case studies are herein presented: the social structure of the first dwellers of the Ethiopian highlands as it emerges from the inscriptions they left, the cultural identity of the kings of Aksum and of the Zagwe dynasty, the enigmatic ethnogenesis of the Amḥara. The analysis of the texts aims at giving interpretations based only upon philological evidence and not influenced by old and modern preconceptions.