Angabo

Also Known As: also Za Besi Angabo; Za Beesi Angaba in Henry Salt’s 1814 transcription of the royal chronicle; Agabos in popular northern Ethiopian tellings; Ge’ez Angäbo
Region/Culture: East Africa
Mythos: Ethiopian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A stranger who ended the four-hundred-year reign of the serpent-king Arwe, called Wainaba at Aksum, by magic and cunning rather than by strength of arm.
Role in Mythos: He stands at the head of the human kings in the Ethiopian royal lists, the first man to rule after the serpent and the father, or in one telling the husband, of Makeda, the Queen of Sheba.
Relation to Humans: The people of Aksum had fed the serpent their eldest daughters and their milk for four centuries, and Angabo freed them on the condition that they make him king. The chronicles give him a reign of two hundred years and pass the throne through his line to Makeda, who went to Jerusalem.

In the 1920s, visitors to Aksum could still be shown a grave at a place called May Wayno. It did not belong to a king or a saint. It belonged to a serpent. According to the story that goes with it, the creature came up the road from Tamben, the district to the south, throwing fire out of its body to the right and to the left, walked on between its own flames into Aksum, and died there. The man who arranged that death was called Angabo, and the kingdom he was paid with is the one the Queen of Sheba would later rule.

The Ethiopian king lists do not begin with a man. They begin with a beast. The royal chronicle Henry Salt reported in 1814, which he calls the Tareek Negushti, opens with Arwé, “the serpent,” who reigned four hundred years. The Ge’ez word arwe means serpent, but also wild beast or noxious beast, and the chroniclers did not hesitate to give it a body: one hundred and seventy cubits long and four wide, teeth a cubit long, a horn of three cubits, a hide like iron and lead, eyes like flames under jet-black brows. The version Enno Littmann took down at Aksum for the German Aksum Expedition, published in 1913, calls the monster Wainaba and names its tribute. At regular intervals the people brought it the eldest daughter of some household and about fifty quarts of milk.

A painting on cotton now in the Horniman Museum in London sets the arrangement at the water. There, the serpent had to be appeased with a sacrifice every time the people wanted to draw water. Tribute of that kind is not a war. It is a routine, and the story’s horror is the routine: a girl walked out at the appointed time, the jars of milk carried after her, the smell of it thick in the heat, the rest of the town waiting to see the level in the wells rise again.

Angabo enters as an outsider with an offer. In the Aksum telling that the Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge summarised in 1928, word reached the town that Wainaba was coming from Tamben, and Angabo told the Aksumites he would kill it if they agreed to make him king. They agreed. He asked for the crown first.

What he did next was not swordplay. He worked magic on the road the serpent would take, and under its surface he buried a magical object in the form of an iron instrument or weapon. The picture is small and quiet: a man kneeling in the dust of the Tamben road, pressing cold iron into packed earth, smoothing the surface over it with his palm, and walking away before anything arrives. Then Wainaba came. It burned its way north with fire pouring off both flanks, reached Aksum between the flames, and died, and the town buried it at May Wayno. Budge noted, a little stiffly, that the legend never actually says the iron did it, though it may be assumed. The storytellers evidently felt the point did not need making.

A second telling swaps the magic for chemistry. The Horniman painting’s captions have Angabo collect poison, mix it with grain and feed it to the sacrificial goat, so that the serpent swallowed its own death with its dinner; Angabo then killed it and was proclaimed King of Ethiopia. This is the version sold as street paintings in Addis Ababa, where Chris Prouty Rosenfeld, writing for the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, noted that the dragon-serpent killed by Agabos comes from a northern Ethiopian telling and is not in the Kebra Negast, the national epic of Makeda and Solomon. In both versions the weapon is patience and preparation, and the hero never has to stand in front of the thing he kills.

The story is old in the written record, too. In the seventeenth century an Ethiopian scholar, Abba Gregorius, told the German orientalist Hiob Ludolf, who printed it in his Historia Aethiopica of 1681, that the most ancient Ethiopians had worshipped a serpent as a god, that some counted Arwe as their first king, and that he was killed by one Angabo, who was made king for that bold deed and was followed by Sabanutum and Gedurum. Salt’s chronicle, more than a century later, lists the same succession with its own spellings: Za Beesi Angaba for two hundred years, Zagdur for one hundred, Zazebass Besedo for fifty, Zakawasya b’Axum for one, and then Za Makeda for fifty, who in her fourth year went to Jerusalem.

The sources do not agree on what Makeda was to him. Salt’s list and Budge make Angabo her predecessor and father, and the Horniman painting has his daughter take the throne after his death. The Aksum telling Littmann recorded instead marries him to the “Queen of the South.” Either way, the line that runs from the serpent-slayer reaches Solomon’s court, and through Makeda’s son Menelik the whole of the Solomonic royal claim hangs from it.

His body is a blank. No telling says whether he was young or old when he came, where he came from, or what he carried besides the iron. Two hundred years on the throne is the only physical fact the chronicles attach to him, and it tells more about the list-makers than about the man.

Christian retellings had other plans for the serpent. In the Tigre legend Littmann published in 1904, the girl chosen for the dragon is Etiye Azeb, the Queen of the South herself, tied to a tree for it, and it is seven saints who fall on it and beat it to death with the cross. Angabo is nowhere. Littmann judged the version that places the serpent-king at the very beginning of Ethiopian history to be the older one, and read the saints as later hands moving the deliverance onto Christian heroes. The chronicles do something stranger still, according to Budge: they have Arwe killed again roughly two thousand years later by the Nine Saints, which suggests Angabo’s kill did not take. The archaeologist Andrea Manzo, writing in Aethiopica in 2014, argued that finds of snake veneration and ritual killing at Betä Giyorgis and Aksum from the Proto-Aksumite and early Aksumite periods may be what the Arwe tradition remembers.

Angabo’s strength lies in foresight. He wins by knowing the road before the enemy does, by working magic into the ground or poison into a meal, and by striking the bargain before he strikes the blow. That is also the shape of his limits. He is a mortal king whose throne is a contract with the people he saved, and whose one great deed the Church later gave away to saints. The serpent kept its grave at May Wayno. Angabo kept a single line in the list: two hundred years, and then a daughter who went to Jerusalem.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Angabo in Ethiopian legend?

Angabo is the legendary Ethiopian king who killed the serpent-king Arwe, called Wainaba in the Aksum tradition, and took the throne as his reward. The Ethiopian royal lists place him first among the human kings after the serpent. The lists credit him with a reign of two hundred years.

How did Angabo kill the serpent Arwe?

In the Aksum telling summarised by E. A. Wallis Budge, Angabo worked magic on the road from Tamben and buried an iron instrument beneath it, and the serpent died after reaching Aksum between its own flames. In a second version, shown on a painting in the Horniman Museum, Angabo mixed poison with grain and fed it to the sacrificial goat that the serpent then ate. Neither version has him fight the serpent face to face.

Was Angabo the father of the Queen of Sheba?

In most sources Angabo is the father and predecessor of Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. Henry Salt’s 1814 transcription of the royal chronicle and the Horniman painting both pass the throne from his line to her. The Aksum tradition recorded by Enno Littmann instead makes Angabo her husband.

Where is the serpent Wainaba buried?

According to the Aksum tradition, the serpent Wainaba is buried at May Wayno, near Aksum. Budge wrote in 1928 that its grave was still pointed out there.

Is Angabo in the Kebra Nagast?

No. Chris Prouty Rosenfeld notes that the story of Agabos killing the dragon-serpent comes from a northern Ethiopian telling that is not in the Kebra Negast. The earliest European record of Angabo is Hiob Ludolf’s Historia Aethiopica of 1681, based on what the Ethiopian scholar Abba Gregorius told him.