Embodying Ethiopia’s Global Golden Age on the Muslim-Christian Frontier: The Allure of Glass Beads

Abstract

The period between AD 700 and 1500 has been recently labeled as “Africa’s global Golden Age.” This is particularly true for the Shay communities living on the Muslim-Christian frontier in the ninth to fourteenth century AD. Located in the center of the Ethiopian highlands, the Shay faced the expansion of the Christian kingdoms and the advance of the Muslim polities. In an increasingly violent context of religious conversion and war between the two religious powers, the Shay stressed their independence by burying their deceased in collective structures, contrary to the mortuary practices of both Christians and Muslims, and by including precious local and global grave goods in their tombs. The laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis of 34 glass beads shows how the Shay communities benefited from the Islamic global trade routes at the time, particularly the Middle East, Egypt, and the Indo-Pacific networks. This article examines the crucial role of global glass beads in the construction of a trans-corporeal landscape among the Shay that served the emergence and consolidation of the social self as a collective identity against their Christian and Muslim neighbors.