On 24 November 1974, at the Hadar site in the Afar Depression, palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson and student Tom Gray found hundreds of fragments that made up about 40% of the skeleton of a female hominin. They named her Lucy, after the Beatles song that was playing in the camp; in Amharic she is known as Dinkinesh, "you are wonderful". She lived about 3.2 million years ago, and in 1978 she was declared a founding member of a new species, Australopithecus afarensis.
Lucy showed that walking on two legs came before the great growth of the brain: she walked upright with a skull that was still small. She was not an isolated find. The lower Awash Valley and the lower Omo Valley, both in Ethiopia, are two of the richest fossil archives in the world and are inscribed as World Heritage Sites. These lands have also yielded remains of Ardipithecus and of the oldest known Homo sapiens. That is why Ethiopia is rightly called one of the cradles of humankind.
Before the great empires, in the first millennium BC, the kingdom of D'mt existed in the north of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, probably with its capital at Yeha, where a stone temple from the 7th century BC, with clear South Arabian influence, still stands. Its culture blended local traditions with those from across the Red Sea and laid the foundations for what came next.
Around the 1st century AD, Aksum emerged, a trading kingdom that spread from the mountains of Tigray across much of northern Ethiopia, Eritrea, part of Sudan and the western coast of Arabia. It controlled trade between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean world and the African interior: ivory, gold, incense and slaves passed through its port of Adulis. Aksum minted its own coins in gold, silver and bronze —something exceptional for an African state of the time— and for more than six hundred years it rivalled Rome, Persia and India. The prophet Mani, in the 3rd century, listed it among the four great kingdoms of the world.
Around the middle of the 4th century, King Ezana of Aksum converted to Christianity under the influence of Frumentius, a young Syrian who had arrived as a captive and ended up as tutor and adviser to the court. Frumentius was consecrated in Alexandria as the first bishop of Ethiopia, and from that relationship came the bond, which would last for centuries, between the Ethiopian Church and the Coptic Church of Egypt. Under Ezana, Aksum became one of the first major states in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion, decades before the Roman Empire did, and the first to put the cross on its coins.
From that conversion arose the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the oldest and most distinctive forms of Christianity on the planet. It keeps its liturgy in Ge'ez, the old liturgical language; it observes the Sabbath as well as Sunday; it practises circumcision and certain dietary rules of Hebrew origin, and it upholds the belief that the Ark of the Covenant is kept in Aksum. With the spread of Islam across the Red Sea from the 7th century onwards, Aksum lost its trade routes and went into decline, but the Christianity that took root then never left.
No legend weighs as heavily on Ethiopian identity as that of the Queen of Sheba. According to the account recorded in the 14th century in the Kebra Nagast ("The Glory of the Kings"), the queen —whom Ethiopian tradition calls Makeda— travelled to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon, and from that meeting a son was born, Menelik I. As an adult, Menelik is said to have travelled to see his father and returned to Ethiopia carrying the Ark of the Covenant, which, according to the belief, has rested ever since in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, in Aksum.
Beyond its historical value —disputed and largely legendary— the myth carried enormous political weight: it served to legitimise the so-called Solomonic dynasty, which proclaimed itself a direct descendant of Solomon and Sheba. That claim even made it into the imperial Constitution of 1955, which reserved the throne for the "line of Solomon". It is best treated as what it is: a founding story, full of meaning for millions of people, which should not be confused with the documented record of events.
After the fall of Aksum, the centre of power shifted south, to the mountains of Lasta, where the Zagwe dynasty ruled from the 12th century. Its most famous king, Gebre Meskel Lalibela, reigned from roughly 1181 to 1221 and gave his name to his masterpiece: the eleven churches carved into the living rock of the town formerly called Roha.
The project had a concrete motive. After Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187, pilgrimage to the Holy Land became dangerous for Ethiopian Christians, and Lalibela decided to build a "New Jerusalem" in his own mountains. The temples were not built with stones: they were carved downwards, sculpting entire blocks of volcanic tuff and hollowing them out, linked by tunnels and trenches. The cross-shaped Church of St George is the most famous. They are still a living centre of Orthodox pilgrimage today and a World Heritage Site. The Zagwe dynasty fell in 1270, when Yekuno Amlak overthrew it, claiming Solomonic blood.
In 1270, Yekuno Amlak overthrew the Zagwe and founded the Solomonic dynasty, which —with interruptions— would reign until 1974. The monk Iyasus Mo'a and, above all, the clergy were key to legitimising the new order with the story of descent from Solomon. It was an itinerant monarchy: the court moved with enormous camps, with no fixed capital, and its strength depended on the loyalty of the regional lords and the support of the Church.
Between the 14th and 15th centuries, emperors such as Amda Seyon I and Zara Yaqob consolidated and expanded the Christian kingdom, clashed with the Muslim sultanates to the east and south, and developed an intense literary life in Ge'ez, including the writing of the Kebra Nagast. It was also the time when Europe began to dream of Ethiopia: it identified the country with the mythical kingdom of Prester John, a Christian ruler in distant lands, and sought an alliance against Islam that would finally materialise, with enormous consequences, in the 16th century.
Islam reached the Horn of Africa very early: tradition says that, around the year 615, the first followers of Muhammad crossed the Red Sea fleeing persecution and found refuge in the Christian kingdom of Aksum. Over the centuries, prosperous Muslim sultanates flourished in the east and south, such as Ifat and its successor Adal, whose heart eventually became the city of Harar.
The clash came in 1529. Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known as Gragn ("the left-handed"), launched from Adal a war that devastated much of the Christian empire: he conquered the highlands, burned churches and monasteries and reached as far as Lake Tana. Emperor Lebna Dengel asked Portugal for help, and in 1541 an expedition landed under the command of Cristóvão da Gama, son of the navigator Vasco. Ahmad died in battle in 1543 and the Christian kingdom survived, but it was left exhausted. Into that vacuum, over the course of the 16th century, came the great migrations of the Oromo people from the south towards the centre of the country, a movement that transformed Ethiopia's ethnic and political make-up forever.
After a century of wars, the empire regained stability when Emperor Fasilides founded a permanent capital in 1636: Gondar. For the first time in centuries, the court stopped being itinerant. Fasilides and his successors built a royal enclosure of stone castles, the Fasil Ghebbi, with six palaces, gardens, baths and a nine-hundred-metre wall. The mix of local traditions and Portuguese and Indian influence gave rise to the so-called "Gondar style", now a World Heritage Site. In this period, tensions with Catholic Jesuit missionaries, who even briefly converted an emperor, ended with their expulsion and a long-lasting distrust of Europe.
From the mid-18th century, imperial power crumbled. The Zemene Mesafint began, the "Era of the Princes" (1769-1855): the emperors in Gondar were reduced to figureheads while the great regional lords fought one another for supremacy. For almost a century Ethiopia functioned in practice as a patchwork of rival fiefdoms, until an ambitious warrior put an end to the disorder.
The end of the chaos began with Tewodros II, crowned in 1855, who tried to unify the country by force and modernise the army; cornered by a British expedition, he took his own life in 1868. After him, Yohannes IV and then Menelik II, king of Shewa, took up the task. Menelik, crowned emperor in 1889, expanded the empire to the south and east and moved the centre of power to a new city, Addis Ababa.
His real test came with Italy. In 1889 Menelik signed the Treaty of Wuchale, whose Italian version —unlike the Amharic one— turned Ethiopia into a protectorate. When he discovered the deception, Menelik repudiated it, and the dispute led to war. On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa, in Tigray, an Ethiopian army of some 100,000 to 120,000 men, led by Menelik and Empress Taytu, crushed General Baratieri's Italian columns. It was one of the most resounding colonial defeats in European history. Under the Treaty of Addis Ababa, in October 1896, Italy recognised Ethiopia's full independence, and the country became the symbol of African resistance to colonialism.
In 1930 Haile Selassie I, previously known as Ras Tafari, was crowned emperor —the name from which the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, which reveres him as a messianic figure, would later derive. Selassie pushed a cautious modernisation: he gave Ethiopia its first written Constitution in 1931 and sought to bring it into the international community by joining the League of Nations.
That membership did not save it. In 1935 Mussolini's Italy invaded the country, this time with aircraft and chemical weapons: it used mustard gas against troops and civilians, in violation of every law. In 1936 the Italians took Addis Ababa and Selassie went into exile, from where he delivered a famous speech to the League of Nations warning that indifference to aggression would end up reaching everyone. The occupation was short but brutal —including the Yekatit 12 massacre, in February 1937, in reprisal for an assassination attempt, with thousands killed in the capital. In 1941, with British support, Selassie returned and regained the throne. Ethiopia never became a consolidated colony: the occupation lasted barely five years and met armed resistance from the very first day.
The ancient monarchy came to an end in 1974. A combination of famine, inflation, corruption and military discontent brought about its fall: on 12 September 1974, a committee of officers, the Derg, deposed Haile Selassie, who died the following year in circumstances that were never cleared up. The Derg abolished the monarchy, proclaimed Marxism-Leninism and unleashed the "Red Terror", a wave of political violence that left tens of thousands dead. Its strongman, Mengistu Haile Mariam, ruled with an iron fist from 1977 to 1991.
Under the Derg came the great famine of 1984-1985, made worse by the war and by the regime's restrictions on moving aid to rebel areas; hundreds of thousands of people died, and the tragedy gave rise to the international Live Aid concert. In 1991 a coalition of guerrilla groups, the EPRDF led by Meles Zenawi, overthrew Mengistu, who fled to Zimbabwe. Eritrea became independent in 1993. In 1995 a Constitution based on ethnic federalism was adopted, dividing the country into regions with the right, in principle, to self-determination. Zenawi governed until his death in 2012; in 2018 Abiy Ahmed took office, the first prime minister of Oromo origin, who made peace with Eritrea and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. Shortly afterwards, between 2020 and 2022, a devastating war in the Tigray region left hundreds of thousands dead, showing how fragile the balance of federal Ethiopia still is.
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Central Ethiopia corresponds to the historic province of Shewa (or Shoa), the base from which the Solomonic dynasty projected its power in the Middle Ages and, above all, the land of Menelik II. King of Shewa before becoming emperor, Menelik turned this region into the engine of the country's unification at the end of the 19th century. From these plateaus, more than 2,000 metres high, came the armies that marched to Adwa and the policies that shaped contemporary Ethiopia.
The central highlands are also Oromo and Amhara country par excellence, an area of high-altitude farming where teff is grown —the tiny grain used to make injera— and where the landscape alternates between fields, round churches and eucalyptus trees. Its strategic location, equidistant from the Christian north, the Muslim east and the Oromo south, explains why it ended up holding the balance of national politics.
Addis Ababa —"new flower" in Amharic— was born in 1886, when Empress Taytu Betul chose to settle beside the Filwoha hot springs, on the slopes of Mount Entoto, where the court had previously had a camp. Menelik II made the site the permanent capital, and within a few years the city grew at the pace of the empire. One problem threatened its early survival: a shortage of firewood nearly forced the capital to move. The solution came at the end of the 19th century with the large-scale import of Australian eucalyptus, which still tints the city's hills a greyish green today.
At more than 2,300 metres above sea level, Addis Ababa is the highest capital in Africa and one of the highest in the world. Its market, the Merkato, is one of the largest on the continent. The city holds the nation's memory: the National Museum displays Lucy's skeleton, and the cityscape mixes Orthodox churches, buildings from the Italian period and modern architecture.
The independence Ethiopia defended at Adwa gave it, in the 20th century, a unique prestige among African countries: it was the symbol that European colonisation could be defeated. That symbolic capital translated into a leading diplomatic role. In 1963, Haile Selassie was one of the driving forces behind the Organisation of African Unity, which set up its headquarters in Addis Ababa.
Since then the city has been the continent's political capital. It hosts the headquarters of the African Union —successor to the OAU since 2002— and the UN Economic Commission for Africa, as well as dozens of embassies and international organisations. It is no coincidence that the headquarters of African unity sits in the only country that was never colonised for any lasting period: it is a recognition of a history of resistance.
East of the capital, the Awash River descends from the highlands towards the Afar Depression and crosses an acacia savannah before vanishing into a series of landlocked lakes. This valley holds one of the most important fossil archives on the planet. The lower Awash Valley, in the Afar region, is where Lucy was found in 1974, and the site is inscribed as a World Heritage Site for its wealth of hominid remains spanning millions of years of evolution.
Closer to Addis Ababa, Awash National Park —the first to be declared in Ethiopia— protects a stretch of the river with its waterfalls, hot springs and savannah wildlife that includes oryx, Grevy's zebras, kudus and many birds. The combination of volcanic landscape, hot water bubbling up from the ground and a horizon of acacias neatly sums up the restless geology of this part of the country, right where three tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart.
The centre of the country lived through the harshest episodes of the 20th century at close range. During the Italian occupation, Addis Ababa was the scene, in February 1937, of the Yekatit 12 massacre: after an assassination attempt on Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, Italian troops and Blackshirts unleashed three days of indiscriminate killing in the capital, with thousands of victims. A monument in the city honours the dead.
Addis Ababa was also the epicentre of the 1974 revolution and of the Derg's "Red Terror", whose memory is preserved today in a museum dedicated to the victims. Having left those decades behind, the city transformed itself: in 2015 it opened the first light rail system in sub-Saharan Africa, filled up with construction sites and grew at a dizzying pace. It remains the place where, just a few blocks apart, the oldest history of humankind, the memory of resistance and an Ethiopia looking to the future all live side by side.
North of Gondar rise the Simien Mountains, a range of jagged peaks and dizzying cliffs carved by erosion from ancient volcanoes. Here stands Ras Dashen, at about 4,550 metres the highest summit in Ethiopia and one of the highest in Africa. Simien National Park was one of the first places listed as a World Heritage Site, in 1978, and it protects a unique Afro-alpine landscape.
These heights are a refuge for endemic wildlife. The gelada lives here, a primate with a mane and a red chest that grazes in large troops along the cliff edges. The walia ibex, a wild mountain goat found nowhere else on Earth, survives here too, as does the rare Ethiopian wolf. The Ethiopian highlands are true "islands" of cold climate in the middle of the tropics. Their isolation explains why so many species found nowhere else are concentrated here.
At the opposite end of the landscape is the Danakil Depression, in the Afar region, one of the hottest, lowest and harshest places on the planet. Parts of it lie below sea level, and its average temperatures make it one of the hottest inhabited places on Earth. It is young, active ground where three tectonic plates are pulling apart. The Erta Ale volcano holds one of the world's few permanent lava lakes, and the Dallol flats are covered in salt and sulphur in unreal greens, yellows and oranges.
This very harsh land is home to the Afar people, nomadic herders used to an extreme environment. For centuries, Afar caravans mined salt from the Danakil flats. They cut it into blocks called amole and carried them by camel up to the highlands. In many regions of Ethiopia, these salt blocks served as currency. Long caravans can still be seen crossing the desert today, keeping alive one of the oldest forms of trade in the world.
Lake Tana is Ethiopia's largest lake and a key piece of African geography. It is the source of the Blue Nile, which provides most of the Nile's water when the Ethiopian monsoon rains arrive. For centuries this gave Ethiopia unspoken power over Egypt and Sudan. Sharing the water is still a source of regional tension today, especially since the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam was built on the Blue Nile.
The lake is dotted with islands and peninsulas where Orthodox monasteries have stood since the Middle Ages. Many still have round churches with vivid wall paintings. They also hold treasures, such as crosses, crowns and illuminated manuscripts in Ge'ez, that were hidden there during times of war. Some monasteries still follow the old rule of not admitting women. The lake is both a source of life and a sanctuary of the north's religious memory.
On the shores of Lake Tana lies Bahir Dar, a city with a mild climate, tree-lined avenues and a relaxed feel that makes a good base for exploring the region. Boats leave its port for the island monasteries. A few kilometres away, the Blue Nile plunges over the Tis Issat falls, the "smoking water". When the river is in flood, they are among the most impressive waterfalls in Africa.
In the 20th century Bahir Dar was a centre of modernisation in the north, and today it is the capital of the Amhara region. Its university, its markets and its lakeside promenade have made it one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. It pairs the historical weight of the Tana basin with a young urban energy, in one of the most fertile and densely populated parts of the Ethiopian highlands.
For centuries, the northwestern mountains between Gondar and Lake Tana were home to the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community also known as the Falasha. They practised a very ancient form of Judaism that predates much of rabbinic tradition and has its own liturgy and calendar. They lived through long periods of exclusion and conflict with the neighbouring Christian kingdoms.
Their story took a dramatic turn in the 20th century. Israel's religious authorities recognised them as Jews, and tens of thousands were flown out in dramatic airlifts. Operation Moses in 1984-1985 went through Sudan in the middle of a famine. Operation Solomon in 1991 evacuated more than 14,000 people in just 36 hours while the Derg regime was collapsing. Today the great majority of the Beta Israel live in Israel, and their exodus emptied many of the villages they had lived in for generations in this part of Ethiopia.
Axum was the capital of the kingdom that, between the 1st and 7th centuries, controlled trade on the Red Sea and became one of the great powers of the ancient world. Its most spectacular legacy is the monolithic obelisks, which are really funerary stelae. Each was carved from a single block of granite and raised to mark a royal tomb. The tallest one ever successfully raised stood over 20 metres high. Another, now fallen, measured about 33 metres and may have been the largest block of stone humans ever tried to stand upright.
One of these obelisks has a modern story. Italian troops looted it in 1937 and took it to Rome as a trophy. After decades of demands, Italy returned it, and between 2005 and 2008 the Obelisk of Axum was put back in its original place. The stelae field, with its granite giants, is a World Heritage Site and remains the symbol of Aksumite greatness.
Axum is the spiritual centre of Ethiopian Christianity. According to tradition, the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion holds the Ark of the Covenant, said to have been brought from Jerusalem by Menelik I. No one may see it except a single guardian monk, chosen for life, who never leaves the compound. He alone upholds a belief on which much of the country's religious identity rests. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church also keeps a replica of the Ark, called a tabot, which is carried in procession during the Timkat festival.
This region, together with Tigray, is home to some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Its monasteries are carved into almost inaccessible cliffs, and their liturgy in Ge'ez has barely changed in centuries. Here faith is not a thing of the past: it shapes the calendar, the food, the rituals and the daily life of millions of people.
In the Lasta mountains, in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, King Gebre Meskel Lalibela ordered eleven churches to be carved out of the volcanic rock. His aim was to recreate Jerusalem after the holy city fell to Saladin in 1187. The churches were not built but sculpted from the top down: workers hollowed out entire blocks of tuff and linked them with tunnels, chambers and drainage channels.
The Church of Beta Ghiorgis, dedicated to Saint George and laid out as a perfect Greek cross, is Ethiopia's most recognisable image. Even the names of local landmarks copy the geography of the Holy Land: there is a River Jordan, a Golgotha and a Tomb of Adam. Eight centuries later, Lalibela is still a living pilgrimage centre. This is especially true at Orthodox Christmas (Genna, on 7 January), when thousands of white-clad worshippers fill the stone courtyards.
When Emperor Fasilides founded Gondar in 1636, he ended centuries of a travelling royal court and gave Ethiopia its first permanent capital in a long time. For more than two centuries, the city was the political and cultural centre of the empire. Its royal enclosure, Fasil Ghebbi, holds six stone palaces along with halls, baths and gardens, all inside a wall. Their style is unique, blending local traditions with Portuguese and Indian influences. Its medieval feel has earned Gondar the nickname "the Camelot of Africa".
On the outskirts of town, the Fasilides Bath is still filled with water once a year for Timkat, the Orthodox Epiphany, when worshippers plunge in to renew their baptism. Nearby, the Debre Berhan Selassie church, whose ceiling is covered with the faces of winged angels, is one of the gems of Ethiopian religious painting. Within just a few kilometres, Gondar captures the splendour of the imperial era that followed Aksum.
The historic route crosses the lands of two of the core peoples of Christian Ethiopia. In the far north live the Tigrinya, direct heirs of Aksum. Then come the Amhara, whose language is the official language of the state. For centuries, these lands produced emperors, patriarchs and armies. Their shared history, however, also carries rivalries that broke out tragically in the 21st century.
Between November 2020 and November 2022, Tigray was the scene of a devastating war. On one side were the federal government and its allies, on the other the forces of the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Hundreds of thousands died from fighting, hunger and lack of medical care, all sides were accused of atrocities, and the war also reached parts of Amhara and Afar. The Pretoria Agreement ended the fighting in late 2022, but rebuilding and reconciliation are still under way. It is a recent wound that is worth naming accurately and without taking sides.
The lower valley of the Omo River, in the southwest, is one of the most culturally diverse areas in Africa. Peoples such as the Mursi live side by side with the Hamer, Karo, Surma and Dassanech. The Mursi are famous for the lip plates worn by their women. Each people has its own language, social structure and rituals. Ceremonies such as the Hamer bull jumping, a rite of passage into adulthood, and the body painting of the Karo are part of living traditions, not a museum.
This diversity is also the most vulnerable in the country. The large Gibe III dam on the Omo and new sugar cane and cotton plantations changed the river's flood cycle. These peoples depended on that cycle to farm along the riverbanks, and the changes have driven people from their land and raised tensions. In the starkest terms, the valley shows the clash between models of development and the survival of age-old cultures. It deserves to be seen with respect and without exoticism: these are communities with rights, not a postcard.
The Omo Valley is not only a cultural treasure but also one of the great sites of human evolution. In the 1960s, in the Omo Kibish Formation, Richard Leakey's team found the remains known as Omo I and Omo II, which belong to our own species, Homo sapiens.
Later dating puts these fossils at around 230,000 to 233,000 years old. That makes them some of the oldest remains of anatomically modern humans ever found. Together with the Lower Awash in the north, this makes Ethiopia exceptional: its soil holds both early hominins from millions of years ago and the dawn of our own species. The Lower Valley of the Omo is a World Heritage Site precisely because of its importance for palaeontology.
In the east, Harar is the great historic centre of Ethiopian Islam. It is a walled city of narrow lanes and colourful houses, with more than eighty mosques and many shrines, and many Muslims consider it the fourth holiest city in Islam. It was the capital of the Adal Sultanate in the 16th century. It was also the base from which Imam Ahmad Gragn waged war on the Christian empire. For centuries it was a hub for trade in coffee, ivory and textiles between the interior and the coast.
Harar developed its own language, Harari, and a refined urban culture. In the 19th century the French poet Arthur Rimbaud lived here, having given up literature to become a trader. One unusual tradition survives to this day: the "hyena men", who hand-feed wild hyenas at the city gates every night, in a rare coexistence between humans and predators. The historic town, Harar Jugol, is a World Heritage Site.
To the southeast of the highlands stretch the Bale Mountains, an Afro-alpine massif topped by the Sanetti Plateau. The plateau rises above 4,000 metres and is one of the largest areas of this ecosystem in Africa. Bale Mountains National Park protects high-altitude moorland, giant heather forests and the Harenna Forest, one of the country's last cloud forests.
Bale is the best place in the world to see the Ethiopian wolf, the planet's most endangered canid. Only a few hundred remain, spread across a handful of high plateaus. The park is also home to the mountain nyala and dozens of endemic birds. The region is also Oromo land, and the Harenna forests are one of the places where wild Arabica coffee first grew. Its mix of unique wildlife and high-altitude scenery makes it a first-rate nature sanctuary.
The south is crossed by the Rift Valley, the great geological fracture that splits Africa from north to south and, in Ethiopia, fills with lakes. Lake Chamo, together with nearby Lake Abaya and Nechisar National Park, is famous for its "Crocodile Market". On this stretch of shore, huge Nile crocodiles gather alongside hippos and plenty of birdlife. For thousands of years, these lakes were corridors for wildlife and for people.
Above all, the south and the east are the great Oromo homeland. The Oromo are Ethiopia's largest ethnic group and spread across these lands from the 16th century. They have given national politics key figures, including the current prime minister. Tradition also holds that the Arabica coffee plant was discovered in the southwest, in the Kaffa region, which gave coffee its name. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, and from north to south the coffee ceremony is still one of the country's best-loved social rituals.
Hardly anything that happened to Ethiopia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
