The history of Eritrea

Eritrea, on the south-western shore of the Red Sea, has an ancient history as part of the highland civilisation that produced Dʿmt and Aksum, and a long coastal history shaped by Red Sea trade, Islam and the Ottoman Empire. Its present borders were drawn by Italy, which ruled it as a colony from 1890 to 1941 and built its capital, Asmara, into a modernist city. After a decade of British administration, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia in 1952 and annexed ten years later, provoking a thirty-year war of independence that ended in victory in 1991 and formal independence in 1993. Since then it has been ruled by one party and one president, Isaias Afwerki, through border war, conscription, isolation and shifting alliances with its neighbours.

The Danakil Depression and the Red Sea coast preserve important evidence of human evolution. At Buya, in the Danakil, researchers found a hominin skull about a million years old, and near the Bay of Zula, south of Massawa, stone and obsidian tools around 125,000 years old show early modern humans harvesting shellfish on the shore, a way of life that may have accompanied migrations out of Africa. Rock paintings in the highlands and lowlands record later herding communities.

By the second millennium BCE the western lowlands around Agordat were home to the Gash Group, whose pottery links them with cultures of the Nile valley such as the C-Group and Kerma. On the plateau, excavations at Sembel on the edge of Asmara have revealed the Ona culture, a settled farming society dated roughly to 800–400 BCE. Many scholars place the land of Punt, the source of incense and luxuries for ancient Egypt, at least partly in the Eritrean and Ethiopian lowlands, though its location is debated.

In the eighth and seventh centuries BCE the kingdom of Dʿmt spread across the highlands of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, with towns at Qohaito and Matara and a great temple at Yeha just south of the modern border. Its script, architecture and religion show close ties with the Sabaean kingdom of South Arabia. The obelisk known as the Hawulti at Matara bears one of the oldest known inscriptions in the Ge'ez script.

From the first century CE the plateau formed part of the Kingdom of Aksum, whose capital lay in Tigray but whose main outlet to the world was Adulis, on the Gulf of Zula. Through Adulis passed ivory, gold and incense bound for the Roman Mediterranean, Arabia and India, and the port appears in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the Greek guide that also gave the Red Sea its ancient name, the Erythraean Sea, from which Italy later took the colony's name. Aksum adopted Christianity in the fourth century, and Debre Sina and other early monasteries in Eritrea date from the first Christian centuries. Around 615, early Muslims fleeing Mecca crossed the Red Sea to seek the protection of the Aksumite king, and tradition holds that they landed near Massawa, making the coast one of the first places outside Arabia to receive Islam.

As Aksum declined from the seventh century, Beja pastoralists from the north occupied much of the north and west and founded small kingdoms there, while the highlands came under the Christian kingdoms that followed Aksum, the Zagwe and the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia. In the fifteenth century the highland region between the Red Sea and the Mereb river became known as Medri Bahri, the Land of the Sea, governed from Debarwa by the Bahr Negash, a ruler who sometimes paid tribute to the Ethiopian emperors and sometimes acted independently. Its core provinces of Hamasien, Serae and Akele Guzai remain the heart of the Tigrinya-speaking highlands.

On the coast, Islam spread among the peoples of the islands and lowlands. A Muslim dynasty founded the Sultanate of Dahlak on the Dahlak islands in the eleventh century, which controlled Massawa and lasted for almost five hundred years. In the sixteenth century Eritrea was caught up in the wars between the Christian empire and the sultanate of Adal under Ahmad ibn Ibrahim. In 1557 the Ottoman Empire occupied Massawa and the Dahlak archipelago as part of its province of Habesh, and its forces at times pushed inland. Ottoman authority on the coast was usually loose, delegated to local naibs of the Belew. In the south-east the Afar sultanates of Aussa and Raheita held the Danakil coast. In 1865 Massawa passed to the khedive of Egypt, whose troops tried to push into the highlands until the Ethiopian emperor Yohannes IV defeated them at Gundet in 1875 and Gura in 1876.

Italy entered the Scramble for Africa through Assab, where the Rubattino shipping company bought land from the local sultan in 1869 as a coaling station on the route through the new Suez Canal. The Italian state took over Assab in 1882, occupied Massawa with British encouragement in 1885 and, after the death of Yohannes IV in 1889, advanced onto the highlands and took Asmara. In the Treaty of Wuchale of 1889, Menelik II recognised Italian rule over the highlands, and on 1 January 1890 Italy proclaimed the colony of Eritrea. When Italy tried to push deeper into Ethiopia it was routed at Adwa in 1896, but the peace treaty that followed confirmed its hold on Eritrea, and the border along the Mereb was fixed in later agreements.

The colony became Italy's first and most developed possession. A railway from Massawa reached Asmara in 1911, and in 1937 a cableway linked port and capital. Tens of thousands of Eritreans served as askari, colonial soldiers, in Italy's wars in Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia. Under Benito Mussolini racial segregation was formalised and Eritreans were barred from education beyond the fourth grade and from skilled employment, while Italian settlement grew rapidly. In the 1930s Eritrea was the base for the invasion of Ethiopia and was enlarged with Tigrayan territory in the new Italian East Africa. Asmara was rebuilt almost entirely between 1935 and 1941 in modernist, Art Deco and Futurist styles, and by 1939 more than half its 98,000 people were Italian. The city's colonial architecture was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

During the Second World War British and Commonwealth forces broke the Italian defences in the hard-fought Battle of Keren in early 1941 and occupied Eritrea, which the British Empire then ran as a military administration for a decade. The British allowed political parties and a free press, but also dismantled and removed industrial plant and infrastructure. As the victorious powers argued over the former Italian colonies, Eritreans divided into a Unionist Party, mostly highland Christians backed by Ethiopia, which sought union with Ethiopia, and an independence bloc led by the Muslim League and others. Britain proposed partition, with the west going to Sudan. Political violence, including attacks by Unionist-aligned shifta bands and Christian–Muslim clashes in Asmara in 1950, marked the period.

In December 1950 the United Nations General Assembly decided that Eritrea should become an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia under the Ethiopian crown, a compromise shaped by the United States' strategic interest in the Red Sea and in a communications base at Asmara. The federation came into effect in September 1952, with its own elected assembly and a constitution that recognised Tigrinya and Arabic as official languages. Haile Selassie's government steadily eroded Eritrea's autonomy, banning parties and newspapers, replacing the official languages with Amharic and removing the Eritrean flag, and in November 1962 the Eritrean assembly, under heavy pressure, voted to dissolve itself, and Eritrea was annexed as a province.

Resistance had already begun. The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), founded by exiles in Cairo in 1960, drew most of its early support from Muslim lowlanders, and on 1 September 1961 Hamid Idris Awate fired the first shots of the armed struggle in western Eritrea. The imperial army responded with village burnings and massacres that drove recruits to the rebels. Disputes within the ELF over ideology, religion and leadership led to the formation in the early 1970s of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), a disciplined, secular, left-wing movement with many highland Christian leaders, among them Isaias Afwerki. The two fronts fought a civil war against each other in 1972–1974 and again around 1980, when the EPLF drove the ELF into Sudan.

After the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 the war intensified. By 1977 the guerrillas held most of Eritrea outside Asmara and a few garrisons, but the Derg, rearmed by the Soviet Union, launched huge offensives that forced the EPLF back to its mountain base at Nakfa, where it held out through repeated assaults. The war became one of the longest in Africa and drew in the Cold War powers. In March 1988 the EPLF destroyed an Ethiopian army corps at Afabet, in 1990 it took Massawa, and as the Derg collapsed its fighters entered Asmara on 24 May 1991, while their allies in the Ethiopian EPRDF took Addis Ababa days later.

The new Ethiopian government accepted Eritrea's right to decide its future, and in April 1993 a UN-monitored referendum produced a 99.8 per cent vote for independence, which was declared on 24 May 1993. Isaias Afwerki became president and the EPLF became the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), the only legal party. A constitution was ratified in 1997 but has never been put into effect, and no national elections have ever been held. Eritrea fought brief conflicts with Yemen over the Hanish Islands, where international arbitration in 1998 awarded most of the islands to Yemen, and later with Djibouti.

In May 1998 a dispute over the border town of Badme led to a full-scale war with Ethiopia, fought with trenches and massed infantry, that killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides before the Algiers Agreement of December 2000. An independent boundary commission awarded Badme to Eritrea in 2002, but Ethiopia refused to withdraw, and a state of no war, no peace lasted sixteen years. The government used the threat to justify indefinite national service, in which conscripts could be held for many years, and in September 2001 it arrested leading critics within the PFDJ, the so-called G-15, and closed all independent newspapers. Many of those detained, including the journalist Dawit Isaak, have not been heard from since. Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans fled the country, and United Nations sanctions imposed in 2009 over alleged support for armed groups in Somalia isolated it further.

In 2018 Ethiopia's new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, accepted the boundary ruling, and in July Isaias and Abiy declared an end to the state of war; UN sanctions were lifted that November. The rapprochement turned into a military alliance against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, and from November 2020 Eritrean troops fought in Ethiopia's Tigray war, where they were accused of massacres, including the killing of hundreds of civilians at Axum. Eritrea was not a party to the November 2022 peace agreement between Ethiopia and the TPLF, and relations with Addis Ababa cooled, especially as Abiy spoke of Ethiopia's need for sovereign access to the sea, including Eritrea's port of Assab. Eritrea withdrew from the regional bloc IGAD in December 2025. When fighting resumed in Tigray in 2026, Ethiopia accused Eritrea of backing the TPLF and expelled Eritrean diplomats, and on 1 October 2026 Eritrea cut diplomatic ties with Ethiopia. Isaias remains in power after more than three decades, presiding over one of the most closed states in the world.