Ethiopia

A cradle of humankind and one of the world's oldest states, never colonised, from Aksum to the modern federal republic.

Ethiopia is among the oldest independent nations on earth and the only African country never to be brought under sustained colonial rule. Its highlands yielded 'Lucy', the 3.2-million-year-old hominin that helped define human origins, and the early kingdom of D'mt before the rise of Aksum, a Red Sea trading empire that adopted Christianity in the fourth century under King Ezana. A continuous Christian state endured through the Zagwe kings—who carved the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela—and the Solomonic dynasty restored in 1270, which traced its line to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. After the splendour of seventeenth-century Gondar came the fragmenting 'Era of the Princes', ended by Tewodros II's reunification from 1855. Under Menelik II, Ethiopia crushed an invading Italian army at Adwa in 1896, securing its sovereignty and becoming a symbol of African independence. Haile Selassie modernised the empire and survived Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941, but was overthrown in the 1974 revolution that brought the Marxist Derg, the Red Terror, the catastrophic 1983–85 famine and a long civil war. Since 1991 Ethiopia has been a federal republic, more recently scarred by the 2020–22 war in Tigray.