The history of Ethiopia

Ethiopia has one of the longest continuous political histories in the world. In its highlands rose the kingdom of Aksum, one of the great trading powers of late antiquity and one of the first states to adopt Christianity, and from Aksum descended a line of Christian kingdoms that survived medieval wars with Muslim neighbours, the great Oromo migrations and two centuries of fragmentation. In the late nineteenth century emperors from Tewodros II to Menelik II rebuilt a centralised empire, conquered the south and defeated Italy at Adwa, making Ethiopia, apart from the five years of Italian occupation from 1936, the only African state to keep its independence through the colonial era. The twentieth century brought the long reign of Haile Selassie, a Marxist military dictatorship marked by terror and famine, and from 1991 a federal system built on ethnicity, whose tensions erupted in the Tigray war of 2020 to 2022 and continue to shape the country in 2026.

The Ethiopian section of the Great Rift Valley holds one of the richest records of human evolution anywhere. In 1974 palaeontologists working at Hadar in the Afar region found the partial skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis, about 3.2 million years old, that became famous as Lucy. Older still is Ardipithecus ramidus, about 4.4 million years old, from the Middle Awash. Fossils from the Omo valley at Kibish and from Herto belong to some of the earliest known anatomically modern humans, more than 150,000 years old, and the region lay on the probable routes by which people left Africa.

Later prehistory saw the domestication of plants that are still distinctive of the country: the tiny grain teff, the false banana ensete, which is the staple of much of the south, and finger millet. The wild coffee plant is native to the south-western forests. Cattle-keeping and farming spread across the highlands over thousands of years, and the peoples of the region came to speak languages of the Cushitic, Omotic, Semitic and Nilo-Saharan families, a diversity that remains one of Ethiopia's defining features.

Egyptian records from the third and second millennia BCE describe voyages to a land called Punt, source of incense, ebony, gold and exotic animals; the best known is the expedition sent by Queen Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BCE, depicted at Deir el-Bahari. Punt has been located by different scholars in the Ethiopian and Eritrean lowlands, the Somali coast or southern Arabia, and the question remains open. Its trade nonetheless shows that the Horn of Africa was linked to ancient Egypt very early.

The first state that can be clearly identified is Dʿmt, which flourished in the northern highlands of what is now Tigray and Eritrea around the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Its inscriptions, temple architecture and gods show strong connections with the Sabaean kingdom of South Arabia across the Red Sea, most strikingly in the great stone temple at Yeha. Historians once saw Dʿmt as a colony of Arabian settlers, but most now stress the local roots of the culture, with Sabaean influence absorbed by a highland society. Dʿmt used iron tools and ploughs and grew cereals. After its decline around the fifth century BCE, smaller polities shared the plateau until one of them, centred on Aksum, rose to dominance.

From the first century CE the Kingdom of Aksum grew into a major power whose capital lay in the Tigray highlands and whose port at Adulis on the Red Sea connected the African interior with Egypt, Arabia and India. A Greek merchant's guide, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes its king Zoskales and the ivory trade through Adulis. Aksum exported ivory, gold, incense and animals, minted its own gold, silver and bronze coins from the late third century, and developed the Ge'ez script, which is still used for the liturgy of the Ethiopian church and, in adapted form, for Amharic and Tigrinya. In the third century the Persian prophet Mani counted Aksum among the four great kingdoms of the world, alongside the Roman Empire, Persia and China. Its kings raised enormous carved granite stelae over royal tombs, the largest of which, now fallen, was some 33 metres long.

The conversion of King Ezana in the 330s, through the influence of Frumentius, a Christian from Tyre who was consecrated bishop by Athanasius of Alexandria, made Aksum one of the first states to adopt Christianity. Ezana's coins changed from the disc and crescent of the old gods to the cross, and his inscriptions record campaigns that took him to the Nile, where his armies helped bring an end to the declining Kingdom of Kush. The church developed in close dependence on the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria, who appointed its head, the abun, until 1959. In the late fifth century monks remembered as the Nine Saints spread monasticism, and monasteries such as Debre Damo date from this era.

Aksum also intervened repeatedly in Arabia. Around 525 King Kaleb crossed the Red Sea to overthrow Dhu Nuwas, the Jewish ruler of the Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen, who had persecuted Christians at Najran, with the encouragement of the Byzantine Empire. An Aksumite general, Abraha, then ruled Yemen as an independent king. A century later, around 615, early followers of Muhammad fleeing persecution in Mecca found refuge with the Aksumite king, an episode that Muslim tradition remembers as the first hijra and that gave the Christian kingdom a respected place in Islam.

The rise of the caliphates shifted Red Sea trade away from Aksum. Adulis declined, coinage ended in the seventh century and the centre of the kingdom moved south, while Aksum itself survived as a sacred city and place of coronation. Ethiopian tradition tells of a destructive queen, Gudit, who devastated the kingdom in the tenth century, though the story's details are uncertain.

Around the twelfth century (the exact date is debated, with some placing it earlier) a dynasty from the Agaw people of Lasta, the Zagwe, took power over the Christian highlands. The most famous Zagwe king, Gebre Meskel Lalibela, who reigned in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, is credited with the churches carved downward into the red volcanic rock at his capital, Roha, later renamed Lalibela. Eleven churches, some cut as free-standing monoliths, are linked by trenches and tunnels, and the complex was planned as a New Jerusalem at a time when pilgrimage to the Holy Land had become difficult. Some of the churches may predate or postdate his reign.

In 1270 Yekuno Amlak, a noble from Amhara, overthrew the last Zagwe king and founded a dynasty that claimed descent from the kings of Aksum and, through them, from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The claim was given its classic form in the Kebra Nagast, the Glory of the Kings, compiled in the fourteenth century, which tells how Menelik, son of Solomon and Sheba, brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. The Solomonic line, with interruptions, would rule until 1974. To limit succession wars, male relatives of the emperor were confined on a mountain prison, Amba Geshen.

The medieval emperors governed from moving royal camps rather than a fixed capital. Amda Seyon (1314–1344) expanded the empire and defeated the Muslim sultanate of Ifat, and Zara Yaqob (1434–1468) reformed the church, persecuted dissenters and sent envoys to the Council of Florence in 1441. Europe, which had long imagined a powerful Christian king called Prester John somewhere in the East, came to identify him with the Ethiopian emperor, and in 1520 a Portuguese embassy reached the court. Ethiopian Christianity had absorbed elements from Judaism, including observance of the Saturday Sabbath and dietary laws, and the Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews, lived in the north-west, sometimes in conflict with the emperors.

To the east and south-east lay Muslim states that controlled trade routes to the port of Zeila, above all the sultanate of Adal. In 1529 its imam, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known to Christians as Gragn, the Left-Handed, routed Emperor Lebna Dengel at Shimbra Kure and spent over a decade overrunning the highlands, burning churches and monasteries and forcing conversions. Adal received firearms and troops from the Ottoman Empire, and the Christians turned to the Portuguese Empire, which sent about 400 musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama in 1541. Da Gama was captured and killed, but in 1543 the combined forces of Emperor Galawdewos and the surviving Portuguese killed Ahmad at Wayna Daga, and Adal's power collapsed.

Both the Christian empire and Adal were exhausted by the war, and in the following decades Oromo groups, pastoralists and farmers from the south, moved north into the highlands in large numbers. Organised by the gada system, a structure of generation grades that rotated leadership every eight years, they settled across a vast area from Shewa to Harar and the Gibe region, where Oromo kingdoms later formed. Over time many Oromo became Christian or Muslim, intermarried with Amhara nobility and became central to imperial politics.

Jesuit missionaries won over Emperor Susenyos, who made Roman Catholicism the state religion in 1622. The decision provoked rebellions and bloodshed, and in 1632 Susenyos abdicated in favour of his son Fasilides, who restored the Orthodox church and expelled the Jesuits. Fasilides established a permanent capital at Gondar in 1636, where he and his successors built the castles of the royal enclosure, Fasil Ghebbi, together with churches, bridges and libraries. Under emperors such as Iyasu I (1682–1706) Gondar was the centre of a flourishing culture of painting, manuscript illumination and church scholarship. In the eighteenth century the Empress Mentewab dominated the court as regent and co-ruler, but royal authority weakened as provincial lords grew stronger.

In 1769 the powerful Tigrayan lord Ras Mikael Sehul had the young Emperor Iyoas killed, opening the period known as the Zemene Mesafint, the Era of the Princes. For almost ninety years the emperors in Gondar were puppets, raised and deposed by regional warlords. The Yejju dynasty of Oromo origin, culminating in Ras Ali II, controlled the court for much of the period, while Tigray, Gojjam, Shewa and other provinces were effectively independent. The Scottish traveller James Bruce, who reached Gondar in 1769, described a land of warfare and intrigue. Yet the idea of a single Ethiopian monarchy survived, and the provinces remained part of a shared Christian culture.

The era ended with Kassa Hailu, a minor noble from Qwara on the Sudanese border who rose as a soldier and bandit. After defeating Ras Ali and the lord of Tigray, he was crowned Tewodros II in 1855. He tried to build a disciplined national army, curb the power of the nobles and the church, and acquire modern weapons, but his rule became increasingly violent. When a letter he sent to Queen Victoria went unanswered, he imprisoned the British consul and other Europeans, and Britain sent an expedition under Sir Robert Napier from India. On 13 April 1868, with his army defeated, Tewodros shot himself at his fortress of Magdala, and the British looted the treasury and library before withdrawing.

His successor after a brief struggle, Yohannes IV of Tigray (1872–1889), defeated Egyptian invasions at Gundet in 1875 and Gura in 1876, and his general Ras Alula destroyed an Italian column at Dogali in 1887. Yohannes was killed in 1889 fighting the Mahdist state of Sudan at Metemma. Power passed to Menelik II, king of Shewa, who had spent the previous decades expanding southwards. In the 1880s and 1890s Menelik's armies, armed with imported rifles and often led by Oromo generals such as Ras Gobana Dacche, conquered the Oromo lands, the Sidama states, Harar (1887), Wolayta (1894) and the kingdom of Kaffa (1897), roughly doubling the empire's size. The conquests were violent, with heavy loss of life in some regions, and the conquered peoples were subjected to northern settlers and landlords under the gebbar system of tribute and labour. These events are remembered very differently today: as national unification by some, and as colonial conquest by many in the south. In 1886 Menelik and his wife Taytu founded a new capital, Addis Ababa.

Meanwhile Italy, a latecomer to the Scramble for Africa after the unification of Italy, had established a colony on the coast in what became Eritrea. The Treaty of Wuchale of 1889 was written in two versions: the Italian text of Article 17 made Ethiopia a protectorate, the Amharic text did not. Menelik repudiated the treaty, and when Italian forces advanced into Tigray he assembled an army of around 100,000. On 1 March 1896 it crushed the Italian army at Adwa, killing several thousand Italians and their Eritrean troops. The Treaty of Addis Ababa that October recognised Ethiopia's full independence, while Italy kept Eritrea. Adwa became a symbol of African resistance across the continent and the diaspora. The country had just survived the Great Famine of 1888–1892, when rinderpest killed most of the cattle and perhaps a third of the population died. Menelik introduced the telephone, the first modern schools and banks, and a French-built railway from Djibouti, which reached Addis Ababa in 1917.

After a stroke incapacitated Menelik, his grandson Lij Iyasu succeeded him but was deposed in 1916, accused of leaning towards Islam. Menelik's daughter Zewditu became empress, with her cousin Ras Tafari Makonnen as regent and heir. Tafari brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations in 1923, and took measures against the slave trade. After Zewditu's death he was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I on 2 November 1930, and in 1931 he granted a constitution that strengthened the throne at the expense of the nobility.

Benito Mussolini wanted revenge for Adwa and a new empire. Using a clash at Walwal in the Ogaden in December 1934 as a pretext, Italy invaded in October 1935 without a declaration of war. The League of Nations imposed limited sanctions that did not include oil. Italian forces used aircraft, tanks and mustard gas, sprayed on soldiers and civilians in violation of the Geneva Protocol, and after the defeat at Maychew in March 1936 the emperor went into exile. Italian troops entered Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936, and Ethiopia was joined with Eritrea and Somalia as Italian East Africa. In June the emperor appealed in person to the League in Geneva, to little effect.

The occupation was brutal. After an assassination attempt on Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani on 19 February 1937, known in the Ethiopian calendar as Yekatit 12, Italian soldiers and settlers killed thousands of people in Addis Ababa over three days, with estimates ranging up to 30,000 and more; in May hundreds of monks and pilgrims were executed at the monastery of Debre Libanos. Educated Ethiopians were systematically targeted. Patriot resistance fighters, the arbegnoch, held out in much of the countryside throughout. When Italy entered the Second World War in 1940, Britain backed the emperor, and British, Commonwealth, Belgian colonial and Ethiopian forces, including Orde Wingate's Gideon Force, defeated the Italians. Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941, five years to the day after the Italian occupation of the city.

The restored emperor centralised power further, built a modern army and bureaucracy, expanded education, and aligned with the United States, which kept a communications base at Asmara; Ethiopian troops served in the Korean War. In 1952 a United Nations decision federated Eritrea with Ethiopia, and in 1962 the emperor dissolved the federation and annexed it, provoking a thirty-year war of independence. A revised constitution in 1955 created an elected chamber but left power with the throne. In December 1960 a coup attempt led by the brothers Germame and Mengistu Neway, with the imperial guard, was crushed by the army. Haile Selassie's international stature was immense: Addis Ababa became the seat of the Organisation of African Unity, founded there in 1963, and in Jamaica the Rastafari movement revered him as divine.

At home, however, landlessness and tenancy in the south, the dominance of a Shewan Amhara elite, students demanding land reform and rights for the nationalities, and regional revolts in Eritrea, Tigray, Bale and the Ogaden undermined the monarchy. The famine of 1972–1974 in Wollo and Tigray, which killed tens of thousands while the government tried to hide it, destroyed its remaining legitimacy.

In early 1974 army mutinies, strikes and student protests forced the government to resign. A committee of junior officers, the Derg, gradually took control and on 12 September 1974 deposed the emperor. On 23 November, known as Bloody Saturday, it executed 59 former officials. Haile Selassie died in custody in August 1975, almost certainly murdered. The Derg declared Ethiopia a socialist state, nationalised land, banks and industry, and in 1975 abolished landlordism, a reform that freed southern tenants but placed land in the hands of the state. Major Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged as its leader, and in February 1977 he killed his rivals and became head of state.

The new regime faced revolts on every side. In 1977 Somalia invaded the Ogaden to unite the Somali-inhabited region with Somalia; the Soviet Union switched sides in the Cold War contest for the Horn, and a massive Soviet airlift of arms and many thousands of Cuban troops helped Ethiopia drive the Somalis out by March 1978. In the cities the Derg fought the Marxist Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party in the Red Terror of 1977–1978, in which tens of thousands of young people were imprisoned, tortured and killed, with some estimates running far higher; bodies were left in the streets as warnings. In 1984 a Workers' Party of Ethiopia was founded, and in 1987 a Soviet-style constitution created the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.

The famine of 1983–1985, caused by drought but made far worse by war, forced grain requisitions and the regime's refusal to admit the crisis, struck around eight million people; estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to around a million. Television images from Korem in 1984 led to Live Aid and a vast international relief effort, while forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of northerners to the south-west caused further deaths. Thousands of Beta Israel reached Israel through Sudan, and in May 1991 more than 14,000 were airlifted from Addis Ababa in a single operation.

Guerrilla movements meanwhile grew stronger, above all the Eritrean People's Liberation Front and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which formed the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) with other groups. As Soviet support ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union approaching, the Derg's armies collapsed. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in May 1991, and the EPRDF entered Addis Ababa on 28 May.

The EPRDF, led by the TPLF's Meles Zenawi, accepted Eritrea's independence, confirmed by referendum in 1993, which left Ethiopia landlocked. The 1995 constitution created the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, made up of regions defined largely by ethnicity and language, each with a constitutional right to secede. Meles governed as prime minister until his death in 2012. A border dispute centred on the town of Badme led to a war with Eritrea from 1998 to 2000 that killed tens of thousands of soldiers, followed by a long armed standoff. In 2006 Ethiopian troops intervened in Somalia against the Islamic Courts Union.

Under Meles and his successor Hailemariam Desalegn the economy grew faster than almost any in Africa, driven by state-led investment in roads, dams, industrial parks and Ethiopian Airlines, and poverty fell. Politics, however, remained tightly controlled: after disputed elections in 2005 security forces killed nearly 200 protesters, and later elections returned near-total EPRDF majorities. From 2015 protests among the Oromo and then the Amhara, against land seizures around Addis Ababa and Tigrayan dominance of the security state, spread across the country, and in 2018 Hailemariam resigned.

The EPRDF chose Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo former intelligence officer, as prime minister in April 2018. He freed political prisoners, welcomed back exiled opposition groups and made peace with Eritrea, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. In late 2019 he merged the ruling coalition into a new Prosperity Party, which the TPLF refused to join. When the federal government postponed national elections because of COVID-19, Tigray held its own regional election in September 2020. On 4 November 2020, after Tigrayan forces attacked federal army bases in the region, Abiy launched an offensive into Tigray, supported by Amhara regional forces and by troops from Eritrea.

The war that followed was one of the deadliest of the century. Massacres were committed by several parties, including at Mai Kadra in November 2020 and by Eritrean troops at Axum later that month; sexual violence was widespread; and a siege cut Tigray off from food, medicine, banking and communications. Tigrayan forces pushed south into Amhara and Afar in 2021 before being driven back. Estimates of the dead from fighting, famine and lack of health care vary widely, from around 160,000 to as many as 600,000. On 2 November 2022 the federal government and the TPLF signed a cessation of hostilities in Pretoria, and an interim administration was set up in Tigray, though Eritrean troops were not party to the deal.

Violence did not end. From 2023 the federal army fought the Fano militias in the Amhara region, and an insurgency by the Oromo Liberation Army continued in Oromia. Ethiopia joined the BRICS group in 2024, and in September 2025 Abiy inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, Africa's largest hydroelectric project, which Egypt and Sudan had long opposed. In 2026 the TPLF reasserted control over the Tigray regional government. A general election on 1 June 2026 gave the Prosperity Party 438 seats in parliament, but no voting took place in Tigray or in parts of Amhara and Oromia. In September 2026 fighting resumed between federal forces and the TPLF, and seven armed opposition groups, including Fano, the TPLF and the Oromo Liberation Army, announced an alliance aimed at overthrowing the federal government. Ethiopia accused Eritrea of supporting the TPLF, and on 1 October Eritrea broke off diplomatic relations. The TPLF withdrew from Mekelle in early October, and government-allied forces entered the regional capital, while TPLF leaders vowed to keep fighting. Ethiopia, with around 138 million people, enters the late 2020s as Africa's second most populous country, with a fast-growing economy and deep, unresolved conflicts over the shape of its federation.