CHAP. XI.
Various Customs in Abyssinia similar to those in Persia, &c.—A bloody Banquet described, &c.
For the sake of regularity, I shall here notice what might clearly be inferred from what is gone before. The crown of Abyssinia is hereditary, and has always been so, in one particular family, supposed to be that of Solomon by the queen of Saba, Negesta Azab, or queen of the south. It is nevertheless elective in this line; and there is no law of the land, nor custom, which gives the eldest son an exclusive title to succeed to his father.
The practice has indeed been quite the contrary: when, at the death of a king, his sons are old enough to govern, and, by some accident, not yet sent prisoners to the mountain, then the eldest, or he that is next, and not confined, generally takes possession of the throne by the strength of his father’s friends; but if no heir is then in the low country, the choice of the king is always according to the will of the minister, which passes for that of the people; and, his inclination and interest being to govern, he never fails to choose an infant whom thereafter he directs, ruling the kingdom absolutely during the minority, which generally exhausts, or is equal to the term of his life.
From this flow all the misfortunes of this unhappy country. This very defect arises from a desire to institute a more than ordinary perfect form of government; for the Abyssinians first position was, “Woe be to the kingdom whose king is a child;” and this they know must often happen when succession is left to the course of nature. But when there was a choice to be made out of two hundred persons all of the same family, all capable of reigning, it was their own fault, they thought, if they had not always a prince of proper age and qualification to rule the kingdom, according to the necessities of the times, and to preserve the succession of the family in the house of Solomon, agreeable to the laws of the land. And indeed it has been this manner of reasoning, good at first view, though found afterwards but too fallacious, which has ruined their kingdom in part, and often brought the whole into the utmost hazard and jeopardy.
The king is anointed with plain oil of olives, which, being poured upon the crown of his head, he rubs into his long hair indecently enough with both his hands, pretty much as his soldiers do with theirs when they get access to plenty of butter.
The crown is made in the shape of a priest’s mitre, or head-piece; it is a kind of helmet, covering the king’s forehead, cheeks, and neck. It is lined with blue taffety; the outside is half gold and half silver, of the most beautiful filligrane work.
The crown, in Joas’s time, was burnt, with part of the palace, on that day when Ras Michael’s dwarf was shot in his own house before him. The present was since made by the Greeks from Smyrna, who have large appointments here, and work with very great taste and elegance, though they have not near so much encouragement as formerly.
Upon the top of the crown was a ball of red glass, or chrystal, with several bells of different colours within it. It seems to me to have formerly been no better than part of the stopper of a glass-decanter. Be that as it may, it was lost in Yasous’s time at the defeat of Sennaar; It was found, however, by a Mahometan, and brought by Guangoul, chief of the Bertuma Galla, to the frontiers of Tigrè, where Michael, governor of that province, went with an army in great ceremony to receive it, and, returning with it, gave it to king Yasous, making thereby a great advance towards the king’s favour.
Some people[19], among the other unwarranted things they have advanced, have said, That, at the king’s coronation, a gold ear-ring is put into his ears, and a drawn sword into his hand, and that all the people fall down and worship him; but there is no such ceremony in use, and exhibitions of this kind, made by the king in public, at no period seem to have suited the genius of this people. Formerly his face was never seen, nor any part of him, excepting sometimes his foot. He sits in a kind of balcony, with lattice-windows and curtains before him. Even yet he covers his face on audiences or public occasions, and when in judgment. On cases of treason, he sits within his balcony, and speaks through a hole in the side of it, to an officer called Kal-Hatzè, the “voice or word of the king,” by whom he sends his questions, or any thing else that occurs, to the judges who are seated at the council-table.
