Tigre

Tigre, linguistically related group of about 2 million people living in southern Sudan, Eritrea, and northern Ethiopia (especially the northern province of Tigray). Like the Amhara people, they are descended from Semitic groups from southern Arabia who, between the 6th century bc and the 1st century ad, gradually conquered what are now the Tigrean homelands, intermarried with the indigenous populations, and established the kingdom of Axum, which lasted until the 9th century ad. Historically, the Tigre and Amhara have been collectively known as “Abyssinians”. Unlike the Tigre, however, the Amhara continued to move southward, now occupying the central and western regions of Ethiopia.

The northern Tigre, in Eritrea and the Sudan, speak Tigre; the southern Tigre, in Ethiopia, speak a closely related language, Tigrigna. The northern Tigre are Muslims. Their chief mode of livelihood is nomadic herding of goats, sheep, and cattle. The great majority of southern Tigre are members of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic) Church, which is directly descended from the Byzantine Church of the 5th century. They are agriculturalists, cultivating maize, wheat, barley, millet, and sorghum. Until recently, southern Tigrean society was a feudal aristocracy, with landholding peasants, and landless labourers. Interconnections between these groups were made by strongly hierarchical, personalized ties between patrons and clients, which were often highly exploitative. From the 14th century, these Tigre, like other Ethiopian peoples, were controlled by a series of Amharic dynasties.

In the 20th century, the persistent neglect of their homelands by Ethiopian emperors together with the oppressive land tenure system and a series of famines led to the rise in the 1970s of a Tigrean resistance movement bent on social reform and economic development. In 1991 the Tigre, with other anti-government forces, toppled the regime and took power as the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.