Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south and South Sudan to the northwest. The majority of the population adheres to Christianity and the historical majority of one of the Beta Israel adopt the religion of Islam. It is widely considered as the region from which modern humans first set out for the Middle East and places beyond.
About Ethiopia in brief
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south and South Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia has over 109 million inhabitants and is the 15th most populous country in world, second most on the African continent after Nigeria. The majority of the population adheres to Christianity and the historical majority of one of the Beta Israel adopt the religion of Islam. The country is the site of the Islamic Migration to Africa, primarily the Abyssinia settlement at Negash. It also contains the largest continuous mountain ranges in Africa, the Caves of Omar, the largest cave in the world, and the world’s second-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Site sites. Some of the oldest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans has been found in Ethiopia. It is widely considered as the region from which modern humans first set out for the Middle East and places beyond. Ethiopia is a multilingual nation, with around 80 ethnolinguistic groups, the four largest of which are the Oromo, Amhara, Somali and Tigrayans. Most people in the country speak Afroasiatic languages of the Cushitic or Semitic branches. Nilo-Saharan languages are also spoken by the nation’s Nilotic ethnic minorities. Ethiopia and Eritrea follow the Ethiopian calendar, which is approximately seven years and three months behind the Gregorian, and write with the ancient Ge’ez script, oneof the oldest alphabets still in use in theworld.
The capital city is Addis Ababa, and is also the largest city and lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates. It was occupied by Italy in 1936 and became Italian Ethiopia as part of Italian East Africa, until it was liberated during World War II. During Italian rule, the government abolished the centuries old practice of slavery, and urbanization steadily increased. In 1974, the long standing Ethiopian monarchy under Haile Selassie was overthrown by the Derg, a communist military government backed by the Soviet Union. The Derg established the People’s Democratic Republic, which was overthoken in 1991 by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, who have been the ruling political coalition since. The nation is a geographical contrasts of land, with its forests and numerous rivers, ranging from the vast fertile west, to the vast forests of Dallallol, the hottest settlement of the world in its north. It has a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometres. The country was the first independent African member of the League of Nations and the United Nations. It was also the first African nation to become part of the European Union in 1945, and later of the African Union in 1956, and of the Commonwealth of Nations in 1960. The Ethiopian monarchy was a monarchy for most of its history.
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This page is based on the article Ethiopia published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
