Ethiopia and East Africa were the cradle of mankind. Anthropologists believe that East Africa's Great Rift Valley (which traverses Ethiopia from southwest to northeast) is the site of humankind's origins. From here, human beings spread out and populated the entire planet. The earliest natives of Ethiopia were quite industrious and developed metallurgy at a very early stage, possibly even before other peoples. Around 1400 BC, East Africans began producing steel in carbon furnaces (steel was invented in the west in the eighteenth century). The Iron Age itself came very early to Ethiopia, probably around the sixth century BC.
It was probably the people of Meroe (Nubia) who were the first to be called Aithiopiai ("burnt faces") by the ancient Greeks, thus giving rise to the term Ethiopia that considerably later was used to designate the northern highlands of the Horn of Africa. The Ethiopians developed when Sudanic people migrating from the Sahara and Semitic people from southern Arabia (the Sabaeans) settled in the area known as the Abyssinian Plateau around 500 BC and intermingled into one culture. This was a strategic position in the trade routes between Asia and Kush affording easy access to Arabic trade routes and the Mediterranean via the Red Sea. The area was agriculturally well suited, politically defensible, and allowed the possibility of undisturbed cultural development. They spoke a strongly Semitic language and wrote in Semitic characters.
We have little knowledge about the early Aksumite kingdom. Apparently following a feudal system, they had a single king (the "Negus"), who ruled over princes who paid him tribute. Later, in the first century CE, Roman and Greek sources indicate that a kingdom called Aksum was thriving; the city of Adulis (near present-day Massawa) is frequently mentioned because it had become one of the most important port cities in Africa. Aksum lay dead in the path of the growing commercial trade routes between Africa, Arabia, Rome, Persia and India. As a result, it became fabulously wealthy and its major cities, Adulis, Matara and the capital Aksum, became three of the most important cosmopolitan centers in the ancient world. Although they were off the beaten path as far as European history is concerned, they were just as cosmopolitan and culturally important. Aksum - which at its height ruled over present-day northern Ethiopia, Yemen, soutern Saoudi Arabia, and northeastern Sudan - was listed by the Persian prophet Mani as the third kingdom of the world, after Rome and Persia. The Aksumite rulers carried the title "negusa nagast" (king of kings), symbolic of their rule over numerous tribute-paying principalities and a title used by successive Ethiopian rulers into the mid-twentieth century.
The Aksumite religion was actually derived from Arabic religion. It was a polytheistic religion which believed that the gods controlled the natural forces of the universe. However, in the fourth century CE, King Ezana converted to Christianity, declared Aksum to be a Christian state (thus making it the first Christian state in the history of the world) and began actively converting the population to Christianity. Not many of the people accepted Christianity at first, but Christianity gradually supplanted the old religion. The move was politically and commercially beneficial to Aksum in that Rome was undergoing similar conversion. After the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD, the Aksumites replaced Greek in the liturgy and began using their own native language, Ge'ez.
Aksum remained a strong empire and trading power until the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD. However, because the Aksumites had sheltered Muhammed's first followers, the Muslims never attempted to overthrow Aksum as they spread across the face of Africa. Even though Aksum no longer served as a center or hub of international trade, it nonetheless enjoyed good relations with all of its Muslim neighbors. Aksum remained untouched by the Islamic movements across Africa. Because of this, the Ethiopic (or Abyssinian) Church has lasted until the present day.
In response to Islamic expansion in the Red Sea area and the loss of their seaborne commercial network, the Aksumites turned their attention to the colonizing of the northern Ethiopian highlands, south of Aksum. As early as the mid-seventh century, the old capital at Aksum had been abandoned, although it continued as a religious center and occasional coronation place. By the tenth century a post-Aksumite Christian kingdom (sometimes called Amhara) had emerged that controlled the central northern highlands from modern Eritrea to Shewa (region around Addis Abeba) and the coast from old Adulis to Zeila (in present-day Somalia). About 1137 a new dynasty came to power in the Christian highlands, the Zagwe. Christianity flourished under the Zagwe: many churches were built and Christian literature and art flourished in and around the capital Adefa. In time, Adefa became known as Lalibela, the name of the Zagwe king to whose reign the Adefa churches' construction has been attributed.
About 1270 Yekuno Amlak drove out the last Zagwe ruler and proclaimed himself king. His assumption of power marked yet another stage in the southward march of Amhara and ushered in an era of increased contact with the Levant, the Middle East, and Europe. The new dynasty that Yekuno Amlak founded came to be known as the "Solomonic" dynasty because its scions claimed descent not only from Aksum but also from King Solomon of ancient Israel and Queen Sheba of Saba (as a side note, the Ethiopic Church claims to still have the Ark of the Covenant in possession today). The new king concerned himself with the consolidation of his control over the northern highlands and with the weakening and, where possible, destruction of encircling pagan and Muslim states. He enjoyed some of his greatest success against Ifat, an Islamic sultanate to the southeast of his kingdom that posed a threat to trade routes between Zeila and the central highlands. Yekuno Amlak's grandson, Amda Siyon (reigned 1313-44), also had many military successes: he finished off Ifat and expanded the kingdom in all directions, especially the south.
Zara Yakob (reigned 1434-68) was without a doubt one of the greatest Ethiopian rulers. His substantial military accomplishments included a decisive victory in 1445 over the sultanate of Adal (centered on Harer, east of Ifat) and its Muslim pastoral allies, who for two centuries had been a source of determined opposition to the Christian highlanders. Zara Yakob also reformed the government system, reorganized the Orthodox Church, converted many pagans to Christianity and gave rise to a boom of Ge'ez literature; he even wrote some important religous tracts himself.
From the mid-fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth century, Christian Ethiopians were confronted by the aggressiveness of the Muslim states, the far-reaching migrations of the warlike Oromo, and the efforts of the Portuguese - who had been summoned to aid in the fight against the forces of Islam - to convert them from Monophysite Christianity to Roman Catholicism. The effects of the Muslim (over whom Ethiopia was eventually victorious) and Oromo activities (who eventually settled throughout Ethiopia and mixed with the locals) and of the civil strife engendered by the Portuguese (who were eventually kicked out) left the empire much weakened by the mid-seventeenth century. One result was the emergence of regional lords essentially independent of the throne, although in principle subject to it. During this time (1769-1855), the kingdom (with its capital now at Gonder) no longer existed as a united entity capable of concerted political and military activity. Various principalities were ruled by autonomous nobles, and warfare was constant. After the mid-nineteenth century, the different regions of the Gonder state were gradually reintegrated to form the nucleus of a modern state by strong monarchs such as Tewodros II, Yohannis IV, and Menelik II, who resisted the gradual expansion of European control in the Red Sea area and at the same time staved off a number of other challenges to the integrity of the reunited kingdom.
Menelik II was succeeded by his daughter, Zawditu, who was declared empress. After her death in 1930, Negus Tafari was crowned Haile Selassie I, "Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, and King of Kings of Ethiopia." As emperor, Haile Selassie pushed for reforms aimed at modernizing the country and breaking the nobility's authority. He made Ethiopia into the modern country that it is today. He was forced into exile by the Italians who occupied Ethiopia in 1936. While in exile, his pleas for international support made him a major international figure. In 1941, with help of the British, Ethiopia was liberated and Haile Selassie could return to his throne. He continued his reforms and international diplomatic role until his death in 1974, in spite of ever increasing resistance from various groups in Ethiopia. Since then, Ethiopian events have been dominated by power struggle, various separatist movements and the resulting wars, poverty and famine. The latter was brought to the attention of the international community by Bob Geldorf's "Do They Know It's Christmas" and the subsequent Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia (raising well over $100 million for famine relieve projects in Central and East Africa).
): Ethiopians were a part of a different world then most Europeans know about, an India ocean world. Since this part of the history of the old world has nothing to do with Europeans, you probably would not learn about it in any western school. However, if you are looking for something different and like history, you should read about the India trade routes and the nations that dealt in them. Youll learn about many things, how the Chinese where an industrial powerhouse: Chinese goods were sought after all over the Indian Ocean. I even read they dug up Chinese plates in far off Zimbabwe. About Arabic and Ethiopian merchants and many other things. This is a part of old world history, sadly enough, that is often forgotten in the west. You should read about the India Ocean before the Dutch, nations such as Ethiopia would then not seem so foreign and insignificant in world history.
, that Mali was the biggest African empire ever. That is if we are just talking about "black" African empires. An often-confusing distinction when talking about African civs.
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The race sciences argued that Egypt's culture was a result of its interaction with the European and Asian civilizations, as a way to discredit "black" African civilization.
