Long before anything resembling Eritrea existed, the highlands now shared by Eritrea and northern Ethiopia were the cradle of one of the first organised civilisations in the Horn of Africa. From around the 8th century BC to the 5th century BC, the kingdom of D'mt (or Da'amat) flourished there: an agricultural and trading society that dominated the plateau and kept up close contacts with southern Arabia, across the Red Sea.
D'mt developed irrigation, the plough, millet farming and iron smelting. From that era we still have temples, altars and inscriptions in South Arabian script and in the earliest forms of Ge'ez, the sacred language later used by Aksum and the Orthodox Church. For a long time D'mt was thought to have been little more than a colony of Sabaean merchants from present-day Yemen; today historians see it as an indigenous African kingdom that adopted and transformed Arabian influences, not as a mere branch of them.
After D'mt declined, around the 5th century BC, the region broke up into small kingdoms and city-states for several centuries. Out of that fragmentation, and out of control of the routes linking the interior with the Red Sea, a power would eventually rise that would shape the region's history forever: the Kingdom of Aksum.
Between the 1st and 7th centuries AD, the Kingdom of Aksum became one of the great powers of the ancient world, mentioned by Greek and Roman writers in the same breath as Rome, Persia and China. Although its capital, Aksum, lay in what is now Tigray in Ethiopia, its window on the world was Eritrean: the port of Adulis, on the Gulf of Zula by the Red Sea, was for centuries the great trading gateway of the Horn of Africa.
Out through Adulis went ivory, gold, incense, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros hides and slaves, and in came textiles, wine, oil, glass and metals from the Mediterranean, Egypt, Arabia and India. A 1st-century Greek sailing manual, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes this trade in detail, and centuries later the traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes copied the famous Monumentum Adulitanum there. Aksum minted its own coins in gold, silver and bronze —something exceptional for an African state of the time— and extended its influence across the Red Sea into Yemen.
The turning point came in the 4th century. Around the year 333, King Ezana converted to Christianity under the influence of Frumentius, a young Christian from Tyre who reached the court and would be consecrated the first bishop of Aksum. Ezana made Christianity the religion of the kingdom and was one of the first rulers in the world to put the cross on his coins. Aksum thus became one of the first Christian states in history, alongside Armenia and the Roman Empire, and that faith took root so deeply that the Orthodox Tewahedo Church remains, seventeen centuries later, one of the pillars of Eritrean identity. The spread of Islam across the Red Sea from the 7th century onwards gradually closed off Aksum's trade routes, and the kingdom slipped into slow decline; Adulis fell into ruin and was swallowed by oblivion until modern archaeology brought it back to light.
As Aksum declined, the region's centre of gravity shifted towards the Christian interior, while the Red Sea coast moved into the orbit of Islam. From very early on, Muslim merchants and preachers settled in the ports and on the Dahlak islands, which from the 9th century were home to a prosperous sultanate, famed for its pearl divers and its Arabic funerary stelae, today silent witnesses of that era.
The Eritrean coast thus came to be home to a Muslim, mercantile and cosmopolitan society, in contrast to the Christian highlands inland. The Afar, Saho, Tigre and Rashaida peoples, among others, built a different world along the shore and on the plains, tied to maritime trade, fishing and camel herding.
In the 16th century, the great power of the day came knocking. In 1557, the Ottoman Empire, then at the height of its expansion, took the port of Massawa and nearby Arqiqo under the command of Özdemir Pasha, and set up the province of Habesh, governed from the coast. Ottoman control never reached far inland —it ran up against the resistance of the Christian kingdoms of the highlands and was in practice confined to a coastal strip— but it lasted for centuries. Later, in the 19th century, the Egypt of Khedive Ismail, formally an Ottoman vassal, took over and occupied Massawa in 1865, extending its rule along the coast and even clashing with the Ethiopian Empire. When the Mahdist revolt in Sudan forced Egypt to pull back, it left the door open to a new power that had just joined the scramble for Africa: Italy.
Italy's colonial adventure in Eritrea began almost by chance. In 1869, a Genoese shipping company, Rubattino, bought the bay of Assab from a local sultan; in 1882 the Italian state took over the holding, and in 1885, with British consent, it occupied Massawa after the Egyptian withdrawal. From those ports Italy gradually extended its control inland until, on 1 January 1890, it officially proclaimed the Colonia Eritrea, whose name —from the Greek Erythra Thalassa, "Red Sea"— brought together within a single border, for the first time, peoples and territories that had never formed a political unit. It is the birth certificate of modern Eritrea, paradoxically drawn up by a foreign power.
Italian expansionism soon collided with the Ethiopian Empire. In 1896, the army of Menelik II crushed the invaders at the Battle of Adwa, one of the biggest European colonial defeats in Africa, which halted Italian ambitions to the south but consolidated Italy's hold on Eritrea. In 1897 the capital moved from sweltering Massawa to Asmara, on the plateau more than 2.300 metres up, with a mild climate. To link the two cities, the Italians built a feat of engineering: the Massawa-Asmara railway, which drops more than two kilometres in altitude through bridges, tunnels and impossible bends.
The great transformation came with Fascism. From 1935, with Eritrea turned into a base and springboard for the invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini poured huge resources into Asmara. Italian architects made it a laboratory of modernity: rationalism, art deco, futurism and monumentalism took shape in more than four thousand buildings, among them the Fiat Tagliero service station of 1938, with its thirty-metre concrete wings like an aeroplane about to take off, the Cinema Impero of 1937, and the market, marble cafés and villas. That is why it was called the "piccola Roma", the little Rome of Africa. In 2017, UNESCO inscribed Asmara on the World Heritage List as "a modernist city of Africa", the first modern site of its kind recognised on the continent. But behind the architectural splendour lay a rigidly racist colonial regime, with segregated neighbourhoods and laws that reserved the best of everything for Italians and relegated Eritreans to second-class status.
The Second World War brought Italian rule to an end. In the spring of 1941, after the gruelling Battle of Keren —one of the bloodiest of the East African campaign, fought between February and March among almost vertical mountains— British and Commonwealth troops defeated the Italian army and occupied Eritrea. So began the British Military Administration, which would govern the territory for more than a decade, dismantling part of its industry but also opening up, for the first time, some space for Eritrean political life and press.
When the war ended, Eritrea's fate lay in the hands of the great powers and the newly founded United Nations. The country was divided: some wanted independence, others union with Ethiopia —promoted above all among Christian sectors of the highlands and by the Church— and others partition. Unable to agree on independence, and under pressure from the strategic interests of the United States and Emperor Haile Selassie, in 1950 the UN adopted a compromise: in 1952 Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia as an autonomous unit, with its own parliament, flag and official languages, but under the Ethiopian crown.
The federation was short-lived and troubled. From the start, Haile Selassie hollowed it out: he banned parties, censored the press, imposed Amharic in schools in place of Tigrinya and Arabic, and dismantled the autonomous institutions one by one. The end came in 1962, when the Eritrean parliament —under heavy pressure and, according to many, fraudulently— voted for its own dissolution and Eritrea was annexed as Ethiopia's fourteenth province. For many Eritreans, this was not a union but a forced annexation, a broken promise. The political path had closed; the armed one was opening.
On 1 September 1961, a former outlaw turned national symbol, Hamid Idris Awate, fired the first shots against the Ethiopian police on the western plains. It is the date Eritrea celebrates as the start of its armed struggle. Leading it was the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), whose base was mainly Muslim and from the lowlands, and which spread guerrilla warfare across the whole territory.
Over the years, internal, religious and regional tensions split the movement. Out of those splits emerged, in the early 1970s, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), Marxist and nationalist in outlook, which brought together Christians and Muslims under the banner of unity and in which a young fighter named Isaias Afwerki rose to prominence. After a bloody civil war between the two fronts, the EPLF became the dominant force of the resistance. The fall of the emperor and the rise to power in Ethiopia of the Derg, Mengistu Haile Mariam's Marxist military junta, hardened the conflict even further: armed with Soviet weapons, Ethiopia launched massive offensives and bombing campaigns that came close to wiping out the rebels in the late 1970s.
The EPLF then fell back to the northern mountains around Nakfa, and there it organised one of the most astonishing resistance movements of the 20th century: for a decade it sustained a clandestine state in trenches and caves, with underground hospitals, schools, workshops and even printing presses, and with a remarkable number of women fighters. Nakfa, never retaken, became the symbol of Eritrean tenacity; its name would later be given to the national currency. In the 1980s the tide turned. With the Derg weakened and the EPLF allied with the Ethiopian guerrillas fighting Mengistu, the final offensive was overwhelming: in May 1991, Eritrean fighters entered Asmara and drove out the last Ethiopian soldier. Thirty years of war, with tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands in exile, ended in victory.
After the military victory of 1991, the EPLF set up a provisional government and waited two years to make independence official. In April 1993, under UN supervision, Eritreans voted in a referendum: 99,8 % backed independence. On 24 May 1993, Eritrea declared its sovereignty and was admitted to the United Nations. Isaias Afwerki, leader of the EPLF —refounded as the sole party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice— took over as president. The early years brought hope, reconstruction and fairly cordial relations with the new Ethiopia of Meles Zenawi.
That hope was shattered in 1998. A dispute over the border town of Badme sparked a brutal war between Eritrea and Ethiopia which, between 1998 and 2000, left tens of thousands dead —some estimates put the toll at more than seventy thousand— in trench fighting reminiscent of the First World War. The Algiers Agreement, signed on 12 December 2000, ended the fighting and created a boundary commission which in 2002 ruled in Eritrea's favour on Badme; Ethiopia refused to comply, and the border stayed militarised and closed for almost two decades, in a state of "no war, no peace".
That conflict served as a pretext for shutting the country down from within. The Constitution approved in 1997 was never implemented; there have been no national elections; the independent press was shut down in 2001, and many dissidents, among them the group of senior leaders known as the "G-15", were detained without trial. National service, originally meant to last eighteen months, became in practice open-ended —the Warsai-Yikealo programme, since 2002— forcing men and women into years of poorly paid military and civilian work. These facts are widely documented by the United Nations and by human rights organisations, and they go a long way towards explaining the huge exodus of young Eritreans who set out on extremely dangerous migration routes. They are worth recording with the same factual sobriety as any other chapter of this history, without heroics or caricature.
Eritrea enters its fourth decade of independence as one of the most secretive and least visited countries in the world, sometimes called —with journalistic exaggeration, but not without reason— the "North Korea of Africa". Its economy rests on mining (above all gold and other minerals from the Bisha mine), subsistence farming and remittances from a huge diaspora spread across Europe, North America, Israel and the Persian Gulf. The national currency, the nakfa, introduced in 1997, is named after the town that became the symbol of the resistance.
In 2018 a crack of hope seemed to open: Ethiopia's new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, accepted the 2002 border ruling, and the two countries signed a peace declaration that earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize. The border reopened briefly, families separated for twenty years embraced again, and flights and phone lines were restored. But the opening was short-lived: the border closed again, and between 2020 and 2022 the Eritrean army intervened bloodily in the Tigray war in northern Ethiopia, which pushed the country back into isolation and international condemnation.
And yet, beyond politics, Eritrea holds treasures that very few people get to see. Modernist Asmara, intact and quiet, with cafés that still serve Italian-style macchiato; the steam railway that winds down to the Red Sea; the almost untouched Dahlak islands; the ancient ruins of Adulis, Qohaito and Metera; the camel market in Keren. It is a country of hospitable, proud people, with one of the lowest crime rates on the continent, carrying the weight of its recent history but aware that it is heir to three thousand years of civilisation on the shores of the Red Sea. Its great unfinished business remains the very thing it fought three decades for: a full freedom that has yet to fully arrive.
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Asmara is one of the most surprising cities on the planet: an art deco time capsule 2.300 metres up, in the middle of the Horn of Africa. Its name comes from the Tigrinya Arbate Asmara, "the four (villages) are united", in memory of the four hamlets that merged to form it. But the city we know today is the work of the Italian period: in 1897 it replaced Massawa as the colony's capital, and from 1935, under Fascism, it became a colossal laboratory of modern architecture.
In little more than five years, more than four thousand buildings went up in rationalist, futurist, art deco and monumental styles. The most famous gem is the Fiat Tagliero service station, from 1938, with its two thirty-metre concrete wings spread like those of an aeroplane with no visible support. Around it sprang up cinemas such as the Impero, marble-and-brass cafés, hotels, churches, a mosque, a synagogue and a cathedral, all within an orderly, tree-lined street grid. That is why the Italians called it the "piccola Roma".
The extraordinary thing is that the whole ensemble survived almost intact, frozen by decades of isolation and war. In 2017, UNESCO declared Asmara a World Heritage Site as "a modernist city of Africa", the first site of modern architecture recognised on the continent. Strolling its avenues, having a macchiato in a 1930s café and watching the bicycles go by is a one-of-a-kind experience, though it is worth remembering that this modernity was built on a deeply segregated colonial regime.
One of the greatest feats of colonial engineering in Africa was the railway linking Asmara with the port of Massawa. Built by the Italians between the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, this narrow-gauge line climbs more than two thousand metres between the plateau and the Red Sea along an impossible route of bridges, viaducts and thirty-nine tunnels carved into the rock.
For decades the train was the backbone of the colony, carrying goods, troops and passengers. It was badly damaged during the war of independence, when many of its rails and sleepers were pulled up and reused for fortifications. After independence, Eritrean veterans who had learned the trade in Italian times rebuilt it piece by piece, almost from memory, in a feat of tenacity and love for the machine.
Today it runs mainly as a tourist and heritage attraction: on special occasions, old Italian steam locomotives puff their way down the mountain again, between clouds and cliffs, on one of the most spectacular train journeys in Africa. It is also a perfect symbol of Eritrea's relationship with its past: a colonial legacy the country managed to make its own and preserve.
The central plateau is not just Asmara. On its eastern edge, where the highlands plunge down towards the Red Sea, dizzying landscapes and places of deep spirituality open up. Near the village of Nefasit, perched on the mountain, stands the Orthodox monastery of Debre Bizen, founded at the end of the 14th century by the monk Abuna Filipos. It is one of the country's great religious centres, guardian of ancient manuscripts and a monastic library, and by tradition only men may enter it, after a steep walk of a couple of hours rewarded with immense views.
On that same escarpment a small ecological miracle takes place. While the plateau is dry and the coast is a scorching desert, in the strip in between —where the humidity of the Red Sea meets the height of the mountain— a tropical cloud forest survives: this is the area of Filfil and the so-called Green Belt, the wettest and most lush landscape in Eritrea, a refuge for birds, monkeys and vegetation that reminds us these lands were far more wooded before centuries of logging and grazing.
This edge of the plateau shows the astonishing variety of a small country: in a few dozen kilometres you go from the art deco cafés of Asmara to medieval monasteries, from there to the cloud forest and, further down, to the coastal desert. A whole world compressed into the mountain's fall towards the sea.
South-east of Asmara, the small town of Dekemhare holds another side of the Italian legacy: the agro-industrial project. During the colonial period, and above all in the 1930s, it was conceived as a model production centre, with remarkable rationalist architecture, wineries and factories. The area became famous for its vineyards and its wine, a crop the Italians introduced to take advantage of the plateau's mild climate.
Dekemhare became one of the colony's industrial hubs, with distilleries, tanneries and workshops. Like much of Eritrea's infrastructure, it suffered the ravages of the war of independence, which left it half-empty and damaged, but it keeps a set of period buildings that make it an interesting visit for anyone who wants to understand the ambitious and at the same time oppressive Italian colonial project outside the capital.
This whole region of the central plateau is also the demographic and cultural heart of the Tigrinya people, Orthodox Christians who make up around half of Eritrea's population. Their villages of stone houses, their circular churches and their terraced cereal fields form the most characteristic human landscape of the highlands.
Massawa, built on coral islands joined to the coast by causeways, was for centuries the great port of the northern Horn of Africa and the gateway to the Eritrean plateau. Its architecture tells its history like a book in stone: coral houses with wooden lattice screens, Ottoman- and Arab-style arches and courtyards, 19th-century Egyptian palaces and 20th-century Italian buildings overlap in its old town.
Since the Ottomans took it in 1557, Massawa has passed through many hands: it was an Ottoman base, then an Egyptian possession from 1865 and finally a key piece of the Italian colony from 1885, which modernised it and linked it by rail to Asmara. Its mostly Muslim population and its coastal culture make it very different from the Christian highlands: here the world is that of the Red Sea, of dhows, spices and trade with Arabia.
Massawa also bears the scars of war. During the struggle for independence it saw fierce fighting and, in 1990, Ethiopian bombing that destroyed part of its heritage; many of its coral buildings are still in ruins, their façades riddled with bullet holes. That mix of historic beauty and war wounds gives the city a melancholy, unforgettable atmosphere, that of an ancient port that survived empires and bombs.
Off Massawa lies the Dahlak archipelago, more than two hundred islands of sand and coral —only a few of them inhabited— scattered across the warm waters of the Red Sea. It is one of the least crowded marine spots on the planet: intact reefs, turtles, dugongs, mangroves and lush underwater life make its waters an almost secret paradise for diving and snorkelling.
But Dahlak is not just nature: it has a deep history. In the Middle Ages it was the seat of a prosperous Muslim sultanate, one of the centres of Red Sea trade, famous above all for pearl fishing, which went on for centuries. On the main island, Dahlak Kebir, large ancient cisterns dug to collect rainwater survive, along with a remarkable cemetery holding hundreds of funerary steles in Arabic, some more than a thousand years old, testimony to that island civilisation.
In more recent times the archipelago played a strategic role: during the Cold War, the island of Nokra housed a naval base —used by the Soviets and by the Ethiopian regime— and a notorious prison. Today, with those shadows behind it, Dahlak lives from fishing and a minimal amount of tourism, and represents the brightest and most unspoilt face of Red Sea Eritrea.
On the Gulf of Zula, south of Massawa, lie the ruins of Adulis, one of the most important archaeological sites in the whole Horn of Africa. For centuries, from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, Adulis was the great port of the Kingdom of Aksum, the window through which that Christian empire traded with the Mediterranean, Egypt, Arabia, India and beyond.
Adulis appears in classical sources: the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a 1st-century Greek sailing manual, describes it as a bustling market for ivory, tortoiseshell and slaves; and the Byzantine traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the 6th century, copied there the famous Greek inscriptions known as the Monumentum Adulitanum. Excavations have uncovered temples, early Christian churches, houses and objects imported from all over the ancient world, confirming its role as a great commercial crossroads.
Today Adulis is a site under study, worn down by time and by its location in an arid, hard-to-reach area, but loaded with enormous historical value: it is tangible proof that these Eritrean coasts were, almost two thousand years ago, connected with Rome and India, at the centre of the routes linking Africa, Asia and Europe. Adulis is, in a way, the distant origin of Eritrea's maritime and cosmopolitan calling.
On a spectacular plateau at around 2,700 metres, south of Asmara, lie the ruins of Qohaito, one of the most important and enigmatic archaeological sites in Eritrea. It is thought to be an ancient pre-Aksumite and Aksumite city, possibly the Koloe mentioned in classical sources as a stop on the trade route linking the port of Adulis with the capital, Aksum.
Qohaito preserves impressive remains: the ruins of an ancient stone dam —the so-called Safira dam—, columns and walls of temples, tombs and structures that speak of a prosperous community that knew how to manage water in a high-altitude setting. In the nearby cliffs, rock paintings from far older periods have also been found, with figures of cattle, revealing human settlement of these lands going back thousands of years.
The site, still little excavated and hard to reach, is explored amid landscapes of austere beauty, with baobabs clinging to the rock and views that stretch to the horizon of the highlands. Qohaito is proof that the Eritrean interior, and not just the coast, played an active part in the great commercial and cultural networks of the ancient Red Sea.
Near the town of Senafe, in the deep south, stand the ruins of Metera (also called Belew Kelew or Matara), an important Aksumite and pre-Aksumite city that flourished as an urban and commercial centre in the highlands. Excavations have uncovered the foundations of villas, altars, tombs and objects that confirm its importance within the orbit of the Kingdom of Aksum.
Its most famous symbol is a tall stone stele carved with a disc and a crescent moon —pre-Aksumite religious emblems— and bearing an inscription in Ge'ez, one of the oldest known. Steles of this kind, like the much larger ones in neighbouring Aksum in Ethiopia, marked tombs or commemorated the powerful, and are one of the hallmarks of that civilisation. The Metera stele is an archaeological treasure of the first order.
The whole area of Senafe and Adi Keih forms the historic heart of southern Eritrea. Together with Qohaito and Metera, these highlands were the setting of Aksumite life for centuries and, much later, of fierce fighting during the 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia, when Senafe was temporarily occupied by the Ethiopian army. Ancient history and modern conflict go hand in hand in this corner of the country.
Southern Eritrea, which administratively forms the Debub region, is a land of temperate plateaus, stone villages and ancient churches, home mostly to Tigrinya farmers of the Orthodox faith. Towns like Adi Keih serve as a base and gateway for exploring the area's archaeological heritage, especially the nearby ruins of Qohaito.
Further north, towards Asmara, the town of Segeneiti stands out for its rural surroundings dotted with imposing baobabs, those ancient trees with colossal trunks that punctuate the southern landscape. Its traditional villages, its churches and its unhurried pace offer a window onto peasant life in the Eritrean highlands, essentially little changed over the centuries.
Debub is also a region with a strong historical and political identity: much of the mid-20th-century debate over Eritrea's future —between those who wanted union with Ethiopia and those who dreamed of independence— came from these Christian highlands, and the front lines of the liberation war and the 1998-2000 border war passed through here. Travelling through the south therefore means travelling at once through the most distant past of Aksum and the nation's most recent wounds.
Keren, Eritrea's second city, spreads across a valley ringed by mountains north-west of Asmara, and shows a side of the country very different from the capital. It is a mostly Muslim city, home above all to the Tigre and Bilen peoples, with a relaxed atmosphere, low houses and a strong imprint of caravan trade.
Its emblem is the Monday market, one of the most colourful in East Africa: from dawn, herders and farmers from all over the region arrive to buy and sell camels, livestock, grain, spices and crafts, in an explosion of colour, haggling and dust. Also famous is the silver market of the Bilen women, with their traditional silverwork. Near the city stands the shrine of Mariam Dearit, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin built inside the hollow trunk of a giant, centuries-old baobab, a place of pilgrimage that draws Christians and Muslims alike.
Keren also has a place in military history. In its mountains, between February and March 1941, the Battle of Keren was fought, one of the hardest and most decisive clashes of the British campaign against the Italians in East Africa. The British and Italian war cemeteries on the outskirts of the city recall that slaughter among almost vertical crags, which opened the way to Asmara for the Allies.
In the mountains of the far north, in a harsh and remote landscape, lies Nakfa, a small town with enormous symbolic weight in Eritrea's history. During the war of independence, and above all from the late 1970s, Nakfa became the stronghold and impregnable bastion of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF).
Under pressure from Ethiopian army offensives and bombing, Eritrean fighters organised a genuine underground state here. In trenches, caves and tunnels dug into the rock there were hospitals, schools, repair workshops, pharmacies and printing presses, safe from air attack. Despite years of sieges and massive assaults, Nakfa was never retaken by Ethiopia: it became the living symbol of the tenacity and self-reliance of the Eritrean resistance.
Its symbolic value was so great that when Eritrea created its national currency in 1997, it named it the nakfa in its honour. Today the town, still marked by the scars of war, is almost a place of patriotic pilgrimage, a living monument to the thirty years of struggle that gave birth to the country.
Between Asmara and Keren, in a surprisingly green corner of a largely arid country, lies Elabered, a former agricultural estate of colonial origin. Using springs and water from the mountains, the Italians created a large model farm here with vegetable gardens, citrus groves, orchards and dairies, which kept running after independence as a state enterprise.
Elabered shows another side of Eritrea: the agricultural potential of its valleys when there is water. Amid dry hillsides, its orange groves and its cattle sheds form an oasis of fertility that supplies the region with fruit, dairy products and vegetables. It is an example of the effort, not always successful, to rebuild and modernise the Eritrean countryside after decades of war and drought.
This whole northern region —the Anseba area and the northern highlands— combines the aridity of the mountains with these farming valleys and with a population of great ethnic and religious diversity. It is a rural, traditional Eritrea, less known than Asmara or the coast, but essential for understanding the country's human and natural variety.
Hardly anything that happened to Eritrea happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
