Ask Habesha History

Questions this library answers well

Name a person, a place, a period or a comparison. Narrow questions get the sharpest answers, because the passages that bear on them are easier to find.

• What changed in Aksum when Ezana adopted Christianity?
• How did the Zagwe kings justify their right to rule?
• What did seventeenth-century travellers describe of Gondar?
• How was land held and taxed under the gult system?

Citations and source cards

Every factual sentence carries a numbered mark. The number is a position in the list of passages beside the answer, fixed from the first draft to the published page, so mark three is always the third card and never drifts onto another book. Claims that cannot be tied back to a retrieved passage are removed before the answer is shown, and the answer says how many were removed.

Where the sources disagree

Historians of the Horn disagree about chronology, about titles, and about which traditions to read as record. An answer says so and cites both sides rather than choosing quietly. Where the passages are thin, the answer says what they do establish and stops there; where a page number could not be read from a scan, the card says the page is approximate.