Ethiopia
Capital: Addis Ababa · East Africa & Horn
Never colonized, home to Lucy and humanity's origins, the Aksumite Empire, rock-hewn Lalibela, its own script and calendar, and more than 80 peoples.
Ethnic communities
- OromoLargest group; the indigenous democratic Gadaa system (UNESCO)
- AmharaHighland Orthodox civilization; Ge'ez literary heritage
- TigrayAksum's heartland; rock-hewn church builders
- Sidama, Gurage, Somali, AfarDiverse southern and eastern cultures
- Omo Valley peoples (Mursi, Hamar, Karo)Body-art and cattle cultures of the south
More communities of Ethiopia
- Somali · Ogaden camel country (full profile)
- Sidama · Enset-garden nation of the fichee new year (UNESCO)
- Gurage · Enterprise-famed farmers of the enset belt
- Welayta · Densely terraced kingdom of the south
- Afar · Danakil salt nomads of the depression
- Hadiya & Kambata · Southern highland farming nations
- Gamo & Gofa · Weaver highlands of ritual kings
- Kaffa · Coffee's birth-forest kingdom
- Agaw · Pre-Amhara highlanders of Lalibela's roots
- Harari · Walled-city Muslim culture of Harar Jugol
- Anuak & Nuer · Gambela's river peoples
- Mursi & Hamar · Omo valley cattle cultures of body art
- Konso · UNESCO terrace-town engineers
- Dorze · Bamboo-house weavers of Chencha
- Gedeo · Enset-and-coffee terraces (UNESCO landscape)
Languages
Major languages: Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali, Sidama, Ge'ez (liturgical)
Language families: Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic); Nilo-Saharan
Historical kingdoms & states
- • D'mt
- • Kingdom of Aksum
- • Zagwe dynasty
- • Solomonic Ethiopian Empire
- • Sultanate of Adal
- • Kingdom of Kaffa
Heritage sites
- • Lalibela rock-hewn churches
- • Aksum obelisks
- • Gondar castles
- • Harar Jugol
- • Konso landscape
- • Lower Omo Valley
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Ethiopia
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Sport1932–1973
Abebe Bikila
Marathon
Ran barefoot through Rome in 1960 to become the first Black African Olympic champion, then defended the title in Tokyo six weeks after an appendectomy.
- Politics & liberationc. 1851–1918
Empress Taytu Betul
Statecraft and war
Co-ruler with Menelik II, commanded troops at Adwa and founded Addis Ababa. Argued hardest against the Italian treaty clause that triggered the war.
- Sportb. 1973
Haile Gebrselassie
Long-distance running
Two Olympic 10,000m titles and 27 world records across distances, run with a bent left arm from years of carrying schoolbooks.
- Politics & liberation1892–1975
Haile Selassie I
Monarchy and diplomacy
Emperor whose 1936 appeal to the League of Nations against Italian invasion became a landmark anticolonial speech. Deposed in 1974; revered as a messianic figure in Rastafari.
- Politics & liberation1844–1913
Menelik II
Sovereignty
Defeated an Italian invasion at Adwa in 1896, the decisive African victory over a European army in the scramble for the continent, and kept Ethiopia independent.
- Music & the artsb. 1943
Mulatu Astatke
Ethio-jazz
Invented Ethio-jazz by fusing Ethiopian scales with jazz and Latin rhythm, and found a second global audience through film soundtracks.
- Science, business & activismb. 1957
Segenet Kelemu
Plant pathology
First woman from her region to earn a doctorate abroad, she returned to lead insect science for African agriculture and won the L'Oréal-UNESCO award in 2014.
- Science, business & activismb. 1965
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Public health
Malaria researcher and health minister who cut child mortality sharply at home, then became the first African director-general of the World Health Organization.
- Sportb. 1985
Tirunesh Dibaba
Long-distance running
Three Olympic golds and the first woman to win the 5,000m and 10,000m at the same Games, in Beijing in 2008.
- Music & the arts1936–2006
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin
Poetry and drama
Ethiopia's poet laureate, who translated Shakespeare into Amharic and wrote the plays that shaped the modern national theatre.
Deep-dive community profiles
Afar
The salt-caravan nomads of the Danakil — one of the hottest places on earth — whose camel trains, sultanates and clan law have mastered a landscape of volcanoes and salt lakes that few others can even cross.
Open deep profile →Alaba (Halaba)
Muslim enset and pepper farmers of the Rift lakes escarpment, known across Ethiopia for the painted geometry of their houses and for supplying much of the country's berbere chilli.
Open deep profile →Amhara
Highland civilization of the Ethiopian plateau — heirs of Aksum's Ge'ez literacy, builders of Lalibela's rock churches and Gondar's castles, whose Orthodox Christian culture and Amharic language shaped the Ethiopian state for seven centuries.
Open deep profile →Anuak
The river farmers of the Baro and Pibor — a Luo people whose kings and headmen hold power through a system of noble emblems rather than force, and who were massacred at Gambella in 2003 as oil and farmland interests moved into their country.
Open deep profile →Argobba
Muslim traders and weavers of fortified escarpment villages between the Christian highlands and the Afar desert, whose towns were the caravan waypoints of medieval Ifat and Shewa, and whose language is now spoken by a few thousand people.
Open deep profile →Awi (Agaw of Gojjam)
Agaw farmers of western Gojjam, the substrate population of the Ethiopian highlands whose language preceded Amharic there, and in whose territory the Blue Nile rises from the springs at Gish Abay.
Open deep profile →Awrtable
A Darod clan spread across the Somali regions — herders and merchants of Mudug and the Ethiopian borderlands whose name means the camel-loaders, and whose trading networks reach from Galkayo to the Gulf.
Open deep profile →Berta
Muslim gold-washers and sorghum farmers of the Ethiopia-Sudan borderland whose sheikhdoms were tributary to Sennar and then to Ethiopia, and whose waza trumpet ensembles are inscribed by UNESCO.
Open deep profile →Beta Israel
The Jews of Ethiopia — who kept a Torah-observant faith in Ge'ez without the Talmud for centuries in the Semien mountains, whose monks and Kessoch led a community through isolation and persecution, and who were airlifted to Israel in the 1980s and 90s.
Open deep profile →Borana
Guardians of the gadaa — the Oromo generation-grade democracy in its most intact form, whose Gumi Gayo assembly revises the law every eight years, and whose singing wells lift water from the earth by human chain in the Ethiopian-Kenyan borderlands.
Open deep profile →Burji
Terrace farmers of the highlands south of Lake Chamo who became the traders of northern Kenya, running the shops of Marsabit and Moyale, and whose two communities — Ethiopian farmers and Kenyan merchants — have been in continuous exchange for a century.
Open deep profile →Daasanach
Herders and flood-retreat farmers of the Omo delta at the head of Lake Turkana, who take in outsiders as full members through a formal adoption system, and whose entire agricultural cycle depended on a river flood that a dam upstream has now regulated away.
Open deep profile →Dawro
Omotic farmers between the Omo and the Gojeb whose ancestors built a defensive wall system running for hundreds of kilometres across the hills — one of the largest pre-modern fortifications in Africa and almost unknown outside Ethiopia.
Open deep profile →Dorze
Weavers and bamboo-builders of the Gamo highlands — whose towering elephant-shaped houses stand for decades and can be picked up and moved when termites bite, and whose shemma cotton weaving clothes much of Ethiopia.
Open deep profile →Gabbra
Camel nomads of the Chalbi desert and the Ethiopian borderlands, who keep one of the last working generation-grade calendars in Africa, move their houses on camelback five or six times a year, and read a lunar calendar so exact that anthropologists have used it to date events.
Open deep profile →Gadabuursi (Samaroon)
The Dir clan of the north-west borderlands — farmers as much as herders around Borama, hosts of the 1993 conference that gave Somaliland its constitution, and inventors of an indigenous Somali script that briefly rivalled the Latin alphabet.
Open deep profile →Gamo
Highland farmers and weavers of the ridges above Lake Abaya, organised into dozens of small self-governing dere with assemblies rather than kings, and the source of most of the woven cotton Ethiopians wear.
Open deep profile →Gedeo
Agroforesters of the escarpment above Lake Abaya whose enset-and-coffee gardens are a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, and whose hillsides carry the largest concentration of carved standing stelae in Africa.
Open deep profile →Gumuz
Nilo-Saharan shifting cultivators of the hot Blue Nile lowlands between the Ethiopian escarpment and the Sudanese border, historically raided for slaves by highlanders and lowlanders alike, and now living on the land the Renaissance Dam's reservoir has flooded.
Open deep profile →Gurage
The enterprising enset-farmers of Ethiopia's central-south — whose intensive gardens and the yajoka qicha customary constitution ordered a stateless society, whose migrant traders built a proverbial reputation for hard work, and whose kitfo and cuisine spread nationwide.
Open deep profile →Hadiya
Cushitic-speaking farmers of the Ethiopian south whose name once belonged to a medieval Muslim sultanate that fought the Christian empire for three centuries, and whose modern territory is one of the most densely populated rural areas in Africa.
Open deep profile →Hamar (Hamer)
The cattle-and-sorghum people of Ethiopia's lower Omo — whose bull-jumping ukuli bula makes a boy a man, whose women's ochre-and-butter ringlets and iron torcs are famous, and whose age-grades and evangadi night-dances order a proud pastoral world.
Open deep profile →Harari
The people of the walled city of Harar — Islam's fourth holy city, a UNESCO world heritage of 82 mosques within five gates, whose merchants traded the Horn, whose women's dress is famous, and whose hyenas are fed by hand at the walls each night.
Open deep profile →Issa (Ciise)
The Somali clan of Djibouti — pastoralists of the arid triangle where three countries meet, whose Xeer Ciise customary constitution has been recited and applied for centuries, and who form the political core of the Djiboutian state.
Open deep profile →Kafficho (Kaffa)
The people of the Kingdom of Kaffa, whose forests are where Coffea arabica grows wild and from which the word coffee most likely comes, whose kings held out against the Ethiopian empire until 1897, and whose montane forest is a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
Open deep profile →Kambaata
Enset farmers on the slopes of Mount Hambaricho in southern Ethiopia, living at some of the highest rural densities on the continent, whose land shortage has made them a national case study and whose women's rights campaigns have been among Ethiopia's most effective.
Open deep profile →Konso
The stone-terrace builders of Ethiopia's southern rift — whose 400-year-old walled hill-towns, generation-grading and the waka grave-markers of heroes make the Konso Cultural Landscape a UNESCO monument to a stateless agrarian civilisation.
Open deep profile →Kunama
The oldest inhabitants of the Gash-Setit — a Nilo-Saharan-speaking, matrilineal farming people surrounded by Semitic and Cushitic neighbours, who resisted every state that reached them and who have been displaced by the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war.
Open deep profile →Majang (Majangir)
Forest cultivators and beekeepers of south-western Ethiopia, living in scattered households rather than villages, whose forest has been progressively taken for coffee and tea investment and whose 2016 protests were met with force.
Open deep profile →Marehan
Darod herders of the Jubba valley and Gedo, the clan of Siad Barre whose two decades in power made them the most exposed of all Somali clans when the state fell in 1991.
Open deep profile →Murle
The cattle people of the Pibor — an age-set society of eastern South Sudan whose young men's age regiments, cattle raiding and the abduction of children have made them both a byword in the country's conflicts and among its most misrepresented communities.
Open deep profile →Mursi
Cattle-herders of the lower Omo — famed worldwide for the women's clay lip-plates, the men's ceremonial donga stick-fighting, and a fiercely independent life now under pressure from dams and plantations.
Open deep profile →Nuer (Naath)
The pastoral prophets of the Sudd — a fiercely egalitarian Nilotic nation of cattle-keepers whose age-sets, leopard-skin peacemakers and earth-prophets like Ngundeng made them the classic study of order without rulers.
Open deep profile →Nyangatom
Karimojong-cluster herders of the Omo's west bank and the Kibish, the smallest and most heavily raided of the Lower Omo peoples, whose scarification records killings and whose territory the Ethiopian state has been villagising since 2011.
Open deep profile →Ogaden
The largest Darod clan, camel herders of the plateau between the Shabelle and the Ethiopian highlands, whose territory gave two states a war in 1977 and whose name is now attached to a region, an insurgency and a long argument about what the Somali region of Ethiopia should be called.
Open deep profile →Oromo
The largest ethnic nation in the Horn of Africa, whose Gadaa system — an indigenous democracy of generational classes with elected leaders and term limits — is recognized by UNESCO as a masterpiece of human governance.
Open deep profile →Qemant
Agaw farmers of the hills north-west of Gondar who kept a religion of their own — neither Christian nor Jewish nor Muslim but with elements recognisable in all three — into the twentieth century, and whose contested demand for self-administration has since 2015 been one of the most violent disputes in Amhara.
Open deep profile →Saho
The people of the escarpment — Cushitic herders and farmers who move between the Eritrean highlands and the Red Sea coastal plain with the seasons, and whose customary law code was written down and is still cited in court.
Open deep profile →Sheekhaal
A Somali community defined by religious descent rather than by the standard clan genealogy, tracing itself to a thirteenth-century saint, historically providing the judges, teachers and mediators of the Somali interior, and holding a status that placed it outside the ordinary logic of feud.
Open deep profile →Sidama
The enset-farming people of Ethiopia's southern highlands — whose Fichee-Chambalaalla new-year (a UNESCO heritage) counts time by the luwa generation-cycle, whose elders' Songo councils govern by consensus, and who won statehood as Ethiopia's newest region in 2020.
Open deep profile →Silt'e
Muslim enset farmers and traders of the Gurage highlands who won recognition as a distinct nationality in a 2001 referendum — the only community in Ethiopia to have done so by direct vote — and who dominate whole sectors of Addis Ababa's wholesale trade.
Open deep profile →Somali
The 'nation of bards' of the Horn — camel pastoralists and Indian Ocean mariners bound by the Somali language, clan genealogy and the xeer oral constitution, whose poetry duels have carried politics, love and law for centuries.
Open deep profile →Suri (Surma)
Body-painters of the southwestern highlands — cattle-herders whose chalk, ochre and flower body-art has fascinated the world's photographers, whose saginye stick-duels decide reputation, and whose gold-rich land is now heavily contested.
Open deep profile →Tigrayans
The northern highlanders of Ethiopia and Eritrea in whose land the Aksumite empire minted gold, raised granite obelisks and adopted Christianity in the 4th century — keepers of Ge'ez liturgy, rock-hewn churches and the legend of the Ark.
Open deep profile →Toposa
The cattle herders of the Kapoeta plains — Ateker kin of the Turkana and Karamojong, whose age grades, mountain shrines and gold-panning riverbeds sit at the point where South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia meet.
Open deep profile →Wolayta
The enset-farming kingdom of Ethiopia's south — whose Kawo kings ruled until Menelik's conquest, whose densely terraced hills feed one of Africa's most crowded countrysides, and whose Gifata new-year and shoulder-shaking dance are national favourites.
Open deep profile →