Ancient Ethiopia
Aksum’s towering granite stelae, Lalibela’s churches carved down into solid rock, and Ge’ez, one of the oldest scripts on the continent still in use. This is the ancient Ethiopia the textbooks rushed past.
Ethiopia has one of the longest continuous histories of any country in the world, and much of it is still visible today.
In the first centuries CE the Kingdom of Aksum, in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, traded from the Red Sea to India, minted its own gold coins and raised enormous granite stelae. In the 4th century its king Ezana adopted Christianity.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, King Lalibela commissioned a group of eleven churches carved downward into solid rock in the town that now bears his name. They are still places of worship and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ethiopia's ancient language, Ge'ez, has its own script, which also gave rise to the alphabet used to write Amharic today.
That long history carried into modern times. In 1896 Ethiopian forces under Emperor Menelik II defeated an Italian invasion at the Battle of Adwa, and Ethiopia kept its independence during the scramble for Africa.
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