Home > History of Ethiopia
Ethiopia is the oldest independent country in Africa and one of the oldest in the world. It has long been an intersection between the civilizations of North Africa, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.1 Earliest History
Ethiopia has seen human habitation for longer than almost anywhere else in the world, with modern homo sapiens perhaps evolving there.
The first records of Ethiopia come from Egyptian traders from about 3000 BC. Today it is unknown how advanced Ethiopia was at the time. There are many, probably apocryphal, descriptions of Ethiopia being a large centralized state comparable to Egypt, with an Ethiopian pharaoh, but so far archeological evidence have failed to bear this out.
The state of Sheba mentioned in the Old Testament is sometimes believed to have been in Ethiopia, but more often is placed in Yemen. Others believe it covered parts of both the Yemen and present-day Ethiopia. According to legend, Menelik I, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, founded the Ethiopian Empire.
The connection between Egypt and Ethiopia from at least as early as the Twenty-second dynasty of Egypt was very intimate. Beginning with Piye, a ruler of the Twenty-fifth dynastyThe Twenty-fifth dynasty of Ancient Egypt originated in Kush at the city-state of Napata, from whence they invaded and took control of Egypt under Piye (spelled Pinakhi in older works). Manetho does not mention either the first king Piankhi, or the last k, occasionally the two countries were under the same ruler, so that the arts and civilization of the one travelled between each other.
Under the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt the arts as well as the enterprise of the GreeksGreece formally called the Hellenic Republic (in Greek: ) Hellenike Demokratia , is a country in the southeast of Europe on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula. It is bounded on land by Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Albania entered Ethiopia, and led to the establishment of Greek colonies. A Greek inscription at Adulis, no longer extant, but copied by Cosmas of Alexandria , and preserved in his Topographia Christiana, records that Ptolemy Euergetes, the third of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, invaded the countries on both sides of the Red SeaSudan The Red Sea ( Arabic Bar al-Amar al-Baru l-’Amar Hebrew Yam Suf Latin Mare Erythraeum is a gulf or basin of the Indian Ocean between Africa and Asia. The connection to the ocean is in the south through the Bab el Mandeb sound and the Gulf of Aden., and having reduced most of the provinces of TigreThis page is about the South American river; for the language spoken in the Horn of Africa see Tigre language. The Tigre is a tributary to the Amazon River west of the Nanay, and is navigable for 125 miles from its confluence with the Amazon. Like the Nan to subjection, returned to the port of Adulis , and there offered sacrifices to Jupiter, Mars and Neptune. Another inscription, not so ancient, found at AxumAksum is a city in northern Ethiopia, located at the base of the Adoua mountains. It was the center of the Axumite Kingdom, which emerged around the time of the birth of Jesus Christ and declined in the 12th century due to the shift of the power center of, states that Aizanas , king of the Axumites, the Himyarites , etc., conquered the nation of the Bogos, and returned thanks to his father, the god Mars, for his victory.
The first verifiable kingdom of great power to rise in Ehtiopia was that of Axum in the first century CE. Axum flourished from the 1st to the 7th centuries and was at one time nearly coextensive with modern Ethiopia. The capital Axum and the seaport Adulis were then the chief centres of trade with the interior of Africa in gold dust, ivory, leather, aromatics, etc. At Axum, the site of the ancient capital, many vestiges of its former greatness still exist; and the ruins of Adulis, which was once a seaport on the bay of Annesley, are now about 4 miles from the shore.
