Its age
Ethiopia is old, much more than you can imagine. More than three million years ago the earliest known hominids walked here. In the Afar region of northern Ethiopia is where scientists found the ancient skeleton which they named ‘Lucy’ (discovered in 1974). These remains are now housed in the National Museum located in Addis Abeba, the capital. It was proven to be the oldest human fossil unearthed, until Selam was discovered in the same region of Afar (in 2004). Selam is studied to be an amazing 3.3 million years old. Many other prehistoric discoveries, including Stone Age tools up to 1.7 million years old and vibrant cave paintings, support the claim that this part of the world is indeed the cradle of civilization.

The history
Three thousand years before the birth of Christ the ancient Egyptians sent expeditions down the Red Sea in quest of gold, ivory, incense, and slaves. They called this territory ‘the land of punt’. Although this term was used for lands on both sides of the Red Sea, many of the food came from the Ethiopian region. Today Ethiopia is a rich cultural mosaic, with a flow of eighty different languages and as many dialects if not more. Semitic languages are spoken in the North and much of the central region. Tigrinya, Guraginya, and Ethiopia’s Federal Working language Amharic, are all derived from the ancient Ge’ez, which today mainly serves in church liturgy and literature.

The land
Ethiopia is 1,127,127 square kilometers (435,071 square miles) in size, and is the major portion of the Horn of Africa, which is the eastern-most part of the African landmass.  Bordering Ethiopia is Sudan to the west, Djibouti and Eritrea to the north, Somalia to the east, and Kenya to the south. Within Ethiopia is a massive highland complex of mountains, dissected plateaus and is divided by the Great Rift Valley. The Ethiopian rift valley which runs southwest to northeast is surrounded by lowlands, steppes, & semi-deserts.