Leaena de Judah

The lioness of Zion and the lioness who would not speak

They tortured her for names. She bit out her tongue instead.

Two lionesses meet in this piece, and they meet across an impossible distance — one in the highlands of the Horn of Africa, one on a rock above the city of Athens. They never knew each other's names. They were not meant to be set in the same frame. But the Erased Daughters line keeps finding women the record tried to flatten into a footnote, and these two belong to the same lineage of refusal. So here they stand together: the African queen-line that an empire could not conquer, and the woman an empire could not make talk.

The Lion of Judah is a dynasty. The lionesses are the ones who carried it.

The Lion of Judah is Ethiopia's oldest emblem — older than the flag, older than the throne in any form we'd recognize. It descends from the tribe of Judah in the Hebrew scriptures, but in Ethiopian tradition it is fixed to a specific woman: Makeda, the Queen of Sheba as she is named in the Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth-century national epic whose title means The Glory of Kings. In that telling, Makeda travels to the court of Solomon, and their union produces Menelik I — the founder of the Solomonic dynasty that Ethiopian emperors would claim, by descent, for the next three thousand years.

It matters that the lineage begins with a queen. The Lion of Judah is spoken of as a lion, masculine, sovereign — but the line that carries it into history is matrilineal at its root. Strip away the later kings and you find a woman at the source. That is the whole argument of Erased Daughters compressed into a single emblem.

And the queens did not only found the line. They defended it. Taytu Betul, empress and wife of Menelik II, chose the site of a new capital in the 1880s and gave it its name — Addis Ababa, "new flower." A decade later, when Italy came to make Ethiopia a colony, Taytu did not retreat into the women's quarters to wait out the war. At Adwa, on the first of March in 1896, Ethiopian forces broke the Italian army and preserved the only African nation that would never be colonized in the European scramble. Taytu was there with thousands of troops under her command, credited with the strategy at Mekelle of cutting the Italian garrison off from its water. The empire that came to erase a country went home defeated by, among others, a woman.

So when this piece calls her the lioness of Zion, it is not decoration. The Lion of Judah had lionesses, and they were not symbolic. They built the city and they won the battle.

Leaena: the woman the record could not make speak

Now cross the sea and go back two and a half thousand years, to Athens under the tyrant Hippias.

In 514 BCE, a conspiracy killed Hipparchus, the tyrant's brother. The men who struck the blow — Harmodius and Aristogeiton — would be remembered forever as the Tyrannicides, the slayers of tyranny, cast in bronze in the marketplace. But there was a woman in the circle around them, a hetaira whose name was Leaena — which in Greek simply means lioness.

When the tyrant's men came for the conspirators, they took her too, and they tortured her for the names of everyone involved. The tradition, carried down through Pausanias, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch, says she bit through her own tongue and spat it out rather than let it be used against the people she was protecting. She made herself, by her own act, unable to betray. The instrument the torturers needed — her voice — she destroyed with her own teeth.

Athens honored her with a bronze statue near the entrance to the Acropolis: a lioness without a tongue. A pun on her name and a monument to her silence in the same casting. The city could not honor a courtesan openly, so it honored the animal her name contained — and it left the mouth empty, so that anyone who understood would understand.

This is the part worth sitting with. The famous men got their faces. Leaena got an animal with no tongue. Even in being remembered, she was half-erased — given a beast's body and stripped of the one thing she had used to defy them. And yet the empty mouth says more than the bronze faces of the men ever could. It says: there was a limit to what power could extract from her, and she set it herself.

What the two lionesses say together

Here is the line that ties them, the thing Erased Daughters keeps returning to:

Some daughters were erased. Some erased themselves before they would betray us.

The colonial record erased women by the thousands — wrote them out of genealogies, recorded them only as property, let their names dissolve into a master's surname or a ship's manifest or nothing at all. That is erasure done to a woman, against her will, as an act of conquest.

But Leaena is a different kind of vanishing. Hers was a refusal turned inward. She could not stop them from taking her body, so she destroyed the one thing they actually wanted — the speech that would have made her an instrument against her own. The tongueless lioness is not a victim's monument. It is a monument to a woman who made herself unreadable to power on her own terms. You may have me, but you will not have the names.

And Taytu is the third point of the triangle: the woman who did not have to choose silence, because she had an army. She answered erasure with a victory so total that the empire abandoned the project. Founded the city. Held the line. Kept the Lion of Judah out of European hands.

Three answers to the same threat. Build it (Makeda). Defend it (Taytu). And when you can do neither — when they have your body and want your voice — refuse it with your own teeth (Leaena). All three are lionesses. All three are the line.

Leaena de Judah

The name fuses them on purpose. The lioness of Zion and the lioness who would not speak, set in one figure, because the spirit is the same one wearing two faces across two thousand miles and two thousand years.

We make this with organic cotton and vegan inks because the medium has to match the message: nothing borrowed from the machinery of harm. And we make it because the work of this line is not nostalgia. It is proof we were never gone — proof carried in a bronze mouth left deliberately empty, and in a flower of a city that an empire could not pluck.

Some daughters were erased. These two erased themselves into legend before they'd hand us over.

🦁

A note on sources, in the spirit of the work: Makeda and the Solomonic descent come to us through the Kebra Nagast as sacred tradition rather than archive — and that is its own kind of truth, the kind a people keeps about itself. Taytu Betul, Addis Ababa, and the victory at Adwa in 1896 are firmly documented history. Leaena's tongue is legend, passed through ancient writers centuries after the fact; what is real is the tongueless bronze lioness the Athenians raised, and the story they chose to tell about why her mouth was empty. We hold the difference between record and tradition with both hands. Both are how the daughters survive.

References

On Leaena and the tongueless lioness

• Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.23.1–2 — describes the bronze lioness raised on the Acropolis in Leaena's memory after the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny.
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 34.72 — credits the sculptor Amphicrates with the bronze lioness, made deliberately without a tongue so the honor's meaning would be understood.
• Plutarch, On Talkativeness (De garrulitate), Moralia 505d–e — recounts Leaena's silence under torture and the tongueless statue as an emblem of "her power of silence in keeping a holy secret."
• Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Book 13 — records her as a celebrated courtesan who died under torture without speaking. (The detail that she bit off her own tongue is a later embellishment of the tradition rather than a claim of the earliest sources, which describe the statue as tongueless; the act is attributed to writers including Jerome.)

On Makeda, the Lion of Judah, and the Solomonic line

• Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), ca. 14th century — the Ethiopian national epic naming the Queen of Sheba as Makeda and tracing the Solomonic dynasty through her son Menelik I. (E. A. Wallis Budge, trans., 1922.)
• Hebrew Bible — 1 Kings 10:1–13 and 2 Chronicles 9:1–12 (the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon); Genesis 49:9 (Judah as the lion's whelp).

On Empress Taytu Betul, Addis Ababa, and the Battle of Adwa (1896)

• Chris Prouty, Empress Taytu and Menelik II: Ethiopia 1883–1910 (Red Sea Press, 1986).
• Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (Harvard University Press, 2011).