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A history of Ethiopia

Nine periods, from the oldest skeletons ever found to the dam on the Blue Nile. Every date here was checked against published scholarship; where the record is disputed, the entry says so rather than choosing a side.

English

አማርኛ

Kind

Landmarks only

82 events

4.4 million BCE – 1000 BCE

Before writing

The Afar depression is one of the few places on earth where the ground gives up a continuous record of our own ancestry. Volcanic ash layers above and below the fossils can be dated precisely, which is why so much of what the world knows about human origins was dug out of Ethiopian rock.

Human origins
The Afar rift
Stone tools
The Red Sea trade

c. 800 BCE – 100 CE

The first kingdoms

Monumental stone building, a written script and a state with a named king all appear in the northern highlands within a few generations. How much of this was carried across the Red Sea from Saba and how much grew where it stands is the oldest live argument in Ethiopian archaeology.

Dʿmt
Yeha
South Arabian contact
The Ge'ez script
Adulis and the sea

c. 100 – 960 CE

Aksum

For six centuries Aksum minted its own gold, fielded armies across the Red Sea, and was counted by a Persian prophet as one of the four great kingdoms of the world. It gave Ethiopia its church, its script's vowels, and a claim to continuity that every later dynasty would reach back for.

Coinage
Christianity
The stelae
Red Sea power
Monasticism

c. 960 – 1527

Zagwe and the Solomonic restoration

Out of the silence after Aksum come two dynasties and one book. The Zagwe cut churches out of living rock; the Solomonids who displaced them commissioned the Kebra Nagast to prove that they, not their predecessors, were the rightful heirs of Solomon. The forged claim outlasted every king who made it.

Rock-hewn churches
The Kebra Nagast
Dynastic legitimacy
Monastic expansion
The Muslim sultanates

1527 – 1632

The wars and the migrations

A century that nearly ended the Christian kingdom twice: first by the armies of Imam Ahmad, then by the Jesuit mission that persuaded an emperor to change his church. Ethiopia survived both, but came out of it with a different population map and a lasting suspicion of foreign priests.

The Imam's conquest
Portuguese muskets
Oromo migrations
The Jesuit century

1632 – 1769

Gondar

For the first time since Aksum the court stopped moving. A permanent capital meant permanent buildings, a school of painting, a guild of masons, and forty-four churches — and, in the end, a court rich enough to be worth capturing and weak enough to be captured.

Fasil Ghebbi
Gondarine painting
Ecclesiastical learning
Timkat

1769 – 1855

Zemene Mesafint

Eighty-six years in which Ethiopia had emperors but no empire. The crown stayed in Gondar as a formality while real power sat with regional lords — above all the Yejju rases at Debre Tabor, who made and unmade emperors without ever claiming the throne themselves.

Regional lords
The Yejju regents
Figurehead emperors
Kassa Hailu's rise

1855 – 1974

The modern empire

Four rulers in a hundred and twenty years dragged a fragmented kingdom into the age of telegraphs, treaties and standing armies. They kept the country independent through the scramble for Africa — the only one in Africa to do so by force of arms — and then could not keep it modern fast enough to survive the century.

Reunification
Adwa and independence
Italian occupation
Pan-Africanism
Slow reform

1974 – present

Revolution and republic

In fifty years Ethiopia has been an empire, a military socialist state and a federal republic. This is the most contested stretch of the whole timeline: the events are recent enough that the people who lived them disagree about what happened, and casualty figures in particular vary widely between sources.

The Derg
Famine and relief
Ethnic federalism
Eritrea
The Nile

Who held power

Who actually held power, and from where. Dates before 1270 are approximate and in several cases disputed; the seats listed are the principal ones, since most of these courts moved.

Kingdom of Dʿmt
c. 800 – 400 BCE
Seat: Yeha
The earliest named state in the highlands, with South Arabian religious and architectural forms alongside local ones.
- Monumental stone temples
- Ox-drawn ploughing
- Irrigation and terracing
- Writing in a South Arabian script
Kingdom of Aksum
c. 100 BCE – 960 CE
Seat: Aksum, with its port at Adulis
A trading empire spanning the Red Sea, and the first state anywhere south of the Sahara to mint its own coinage.
- Gold, silver and bronze coinage
- The stelae of Aksum
- State adoption of Christianity, c. 330
- Vowel notation added to Ge'ez
- Naval expeditions to Himyar
Zagwe dynasty
c. 1137 – 1270
Seat: Adefa, later called Lalibela
An Agaw dynasty, later written out of the royal line by its successors. Its start date is disputed by as much as two centuries.
- The eleven rock-hewn churches of Lalibela
- A new pilgrimage centre modelled on Jerusalem
- Continued relations with Egypt and Jerusalem
Solomonic dynasty
1270 – 1974
Seat: Moving court; then Gondar, then Addis Ababa
Claimed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through Menelik I. Held the throne for seven centuries, with long stretches in which it held little else.
- The Kebra Nagast
- Territorial expansion under Amda Seyon
- Church reform under Zara Yaqob
- Victory at Adwa
- The constitutions of 1931 and 1955
Gondarine period
1632 – 1769
Seat: Gondar
A phase of the Solomonic dynasty rather than a separate house: the century and a half in which the court stopped moving.
- Fasil Ghebbi and the Gondar castles
- The Gondarine school of painting
- Debre Berhan Selassie church
- Fasilides' Bath, still used at Timkat
Zemene Mesafint
1769 – 1855
Seat: Debre Tabor, with the emperor kept at Gondar
Not a dynasty but an interregnum: the Yejju rases governed as regents while Solomonic emperors reigned without ruling.
- Regional courts in Tigray, Semien, Gojjam and Shewa
- Oromo Muslim lineages at the centre of imperial politics
- Ended by Kassa Hailu at Deresge, 1855
The Derg
1974 – 1991
Seat: Addis Ababa
A committee of junior officers that became a Marxist-Leninist state, renamed the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1987.
- Abolition of the monarchy
- Land nationalisation, 1975
- The National Literacy Campaign
- The Red Terror
- Seventeen years of continuous civil war
Federal Democratic Republic
1995 – present
Seat: Addis Ababa
A federation of regional states defined largely on ethno-linguistic lines, with a prime minister as head of government and a largely ceremonial president.
- The 1995 constitution
- Two decades of rapid, state-led economic growth
- The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
- Recurrent internal armed conflict

Did you know

Things about Ethiopia that are true, specific, and usually told wrong. Where a claim is commonly repeated but shaky, it is flagged here rather than quietly passed along.

Never colonised — with one asterisk
Ethiopia is the only African country that was never brought under European colonial rule. Italy tried twice: in 1896 it was destroyed at Adwa, and in 1935 it invaded again and occupied the country for five years. That occupation was brutal, but it was never a recognised colony, it never produced a colonial administration in the ordinary sense, resistance never stopped, and it ended in 1941 — making Ethiopia the first Axis-occupied country anywhere to be liberated. Liberia is often named alongside it; Liberia's situation, founded as a settlement for freed American slaves, was different in kind.
Thirteen months, and seven years behind
The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth, Pagumē, of five days — six in a leap year. It runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar because it follows the Alexandrian computation of the date of the Annunciation rather than the one Western Christianity adopted. New Year, Enkutatash, falls on 11 September, or 12 September in the year before a leap year.
Convert a date
The clock starts at sunrise
Ethiopian time counts twelve hours from dawn and twelve from dusk, which near the equator are close to 6am and 6pm year-round. Seven in the morning is one o'clock; noon is six. An hour number on its own is ambiguous, so it is said with the part of the day: 3 ጠዋት is nine in the morning, 3 ማታ is nine at night. This is not a curiosity — it is how time is told in ordinary speech, and mixing the two systems up is a routine way to miss an appointment.
See the Ethiopian clock
A script with seven forms per letter
Ge'ez is an abugida: each character stands for a consonant plus a vowel, and the vowel is marked by modifying the consonant's shape rather than adding a separate letter. Thirty-odd base characters each take seven forms, which is where 'fidel' gets its size. The vowel marks were added in the fourth century, several centuries before Hebrew or Arabic developed theirs, and the system is still in daily use for Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre — one of very few scripts invented in Africa and never abandoned.
Type in Amharic
Coffee, and what is actually known about it
Coffea arabica is native to the forests of south-western Ethiopia, and the genetic evidence is unambiguous: every arabica plant grown anywhere in the world descends from a very small founding population taken out of this region. That much is settled science. The story of Kaldi the goatherd noticing his goats dancing after eating the berries is a later legend, first written down in Europe in 1671, and should not be presented as history. The buna ceremony — roasting, grinding and brewing in front of guests, served in three rounds — is a genuine and living tradition.
Churches cut downward, not built upward
The eleven churches at Lalibela were made by removing rock, not by assembling it. Masons cut trenches into the volcanic tuff to free a block, then hollowed that block out from inside, leaving columns, vaults, windows and a roof that are continuous with the bedrock. There are no joints because there are no pieces. Bete Giyorgis, the best known, is a cross-shaped church standing in a pit roughly fifteen metres deep, and the whole site drains through channels cut at the same time. UNESCO inscribed it in 1978, and all eleven remain in use.
Twelve World Heritage sites
Ethiopia has twelve sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list: ten cultural and two natural. The cultural ones are the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela (1978), Fasil Ghebbi at Gondar (1979), Aksum, Tiya's carved stelae, and the Lower Awash and Lower Omo valleys where Lucy and Omo I were found (all 1980), Harar Jugol (2006), the Konso cultural landscape of dry-stone terraces (2011), the Gedeo landscape of sacred forests and enset terraces (2023), and the Palaeolithic site of Melka Kunture and Balchit (2024). The natural ones are Simien Mountains National Park (1978) and Bale Mountains National Park (2023). Six further properties sit on the tentative list, including Yeha and the Lake Tana monasteries — these are proposed, not inscribed, and are the usual reason online counts run high.
The Roof of Africa
Ethiopia holds around eighty per cent of Africa's land above 3,000 metres. Ras Dashen in the Simien reaches 4,550 m. The altitude has made the highlands a biological island: the gelada, the walia ibex and the Ethiopian wolf — the world's rarest canid, with a few hundred left — exist nowhere else. It also explains the country's long-distance running: generations of athletes have grown up training at altitudes most national teams have to travel to reach.
More than eighty languages
Ethiopia has over eighty living languages from four different families — Cushitic, Semitic, Omotic and Nilo-Saharan. Afaan Oromo has the most first-language speakers; Amharic is the federal working language and the one most widely used as a second language. Several regions now use their own languages in administration and schooling, and since 2020 Afaan Oromo, Somali, Afar and Tigrinya have been designated additional federal working languages alongside Amharic.
Translate Amharic
The oldest illuminated gospels in the world
The Abba Garima Gospels, kept at a monastery near Adwa, were long assumed to be medieval. Radiocarbon dating of the goatskin pages placed them between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, making them the earliest surviving complete illuminated Christian manuscripts anywhere. They were written in Ge'ez, bound in wooden boards, and have never left the monastery. Ethiopia's manuscript tradition is continuous from that period to the present — scribes still copy on parchment today.
The obelisk that came home
Italian troops cut up a 24-metre, 160-tonne Aksumite stela in 1937 and shipped it to Rome, where it stood near the Circus Maximus for sixty-eight years. Italy agreed to return it under a UN agreement in 1947 and then did not, for decades. It finally went home in three pieces on three flights between 19 and 25 April 2005, and was re-erected at Aksum on 4 September 2008. Most of the Magdala collection taken by Britain in 1868 has still not been returned.

Dates follow the Gregorian calendar unless marked otherwise, and are drawn from published scholarship rather than from a single source. Where historians disagree — the start of the Zagwe, the story of Gudit, the death tolls of the last fifty years — the entry says so instead of picking a figure. Corrections are welcome.

Before writing

›4.4 million years agoLandmarkDiscoveryArdi, the oldest skeleton of her kindA partial Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton from Aramis — 1.2 million years older than Lucy, and evidence that upright walking did not begin on open grassland.

›3.3 million years agoDiscoverySelam, the Dikika childThe most complete skeleton of a hominin child ever found, of a three-year-old girl — older than Lucy, and named for peace.

›3.2 million years agoLandmarkDiscoveryLucy — ድንቅነሽForty per cent of a single Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, found at Hadar in 1974. Her knee and pelvis settled the argument: walking came before the big brain.

›2.6 million years agoDiscoveryThe oldest stone tools on earthThousands of deliberately struck flakes from Gona in the Afar — the earliest securely dated technology made by any creature, anywhere.

›233,000 years agoLandmarkDiscoveryOmo I, the oldest Homo sapiensSkull fragments from the lower Omo, redated in 2022 against a volcanic eruption — the earliest known member of our own species.

›160,000 years agoDiscoveryThe Herto skullsThree skulls from the Middle Awash, named Homo sapiens idaltu — 'elder' in Afar — and bearing cut marks that look like a funeral rite.

›c. 1500 BCETradeThe land the Egyptians called PuntHatshepsut's fleet sailed south for incense, ebony and live myrrh trees, and carved the voyage onto a temple wall. Where Punt stood is still argued over.

The first kingdoms

›c. 800 BCELandmarkStateThe kingdom of DʿmtThe first state we can name in the Ethiopian highlands, with kings who used both the title mlk and the Sabaean priestly title mukarrib.

›c. 700 BCELandmarkBuildingThe Great Temple of YehaA sanctuary to the moon god Almaqah, built of dressed sandstone without mortar. Its walls still stand nearly twelve metres high after twenty-seven centuries.

›c. 400 BCEStateDʿmt breaks apartThe kingdom dissolves into smaller polities. Four centuries of near-silence follow before a new power gathers at Aksum.

›c. 50 CELandmarkTradeAdulis enters the recordA Greek merchant's handbook, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes the port of Adulis, its ivory trade, and a king named Zoskales who reads Greek.

›1st century CELandmarkStateAksum gathers the highlandsA hill town inland from the Red Sea takes command of the routes between the African interior, Arabia and the Roman world — and starts raising stelae over its dead.

Aksum

›c. 200–230 CEWarAksum crosses into ArabiaKing GDRT holds territory in western Yemen — the first of several Aksumite interventions across the sea, recorded in South Arabian inscriptions rather than Ethiopian ones.

›c. 270–310 CELandmarkTradeAksum mints its own coinsUnder King Endybis, Aksum begins striking gold, silver and bronze — one of only a handful of ancient states to do so. Its coins turn up in Caesarea and southern India.

›late 3rd century CEStateOne of the four great powersThe Persian prophet Mani lists the kingdoms of the world as Rome, Persia, Aksum and Silis — China. It is the clearest outside measure of how Aksum was seen.

›c. 330 CELandmarkFaithEzana turns to ChristianityKing Ezana adopts the new faith and puts a cross where the disc and crescent had been on his coins — one of the earliest state conversions anywhere, and it stuck.

›4th century CELandmarkCultureGe'ez learns to write its vowelsEthiopian scribes add vowel marks to a consonant-only script, turning it into the abugida still used for Amharic and Tigrinya today.

›c. 450–500 CEFaithThe Nine SaintsNine monks arrive from the Roman east, found monasteries such as Debre Damo on its sheer-sided mountain, and translate the scriptures into Ge'ez.

›525 CEWarKaleb sails against HimyarAksum invades Yemen after the Jewish king Dhu Nuwas massacres the Christians of Najran. It is the high-water mark of Aksumite power abroad.

›c. 615 CELandmarkFaithThe first hijrahMuhammad sends his persecuted followers to the Christian king of Aksum, who refuses to hand them back. Ethiopia enters Islamic memory as the land of the righteous king.

›7th–10th century CEStateThe coins stopCut off from the Red Sea trade it lived on, Aksum stops minting, abandons Adulis, and moves its centre of gravity inland and south.

Zagwe and the Solomonic restoration

›c. 960StateGudit and the end of the Aksumite lineA queen remembered as Yodit or Gudit is said to have burned the churches and ended the dynasty. How much is history and how much is later propaganda is unresolved.

›c. 1137StateThe Zagwe take the throneAn Agaw dynasty rules from Adefa in Lasta. Even the number of its kings is disputed — the chronicles were written by the people who overthrew them.

›early 13th centuryLandmarkBuildingThe churches of LalibelaEleven churches quarried downward out of solid volcanic rock, with drains, windows and colonnades cut from the inside out. Still in daily use eight centuries later.

›1270LandmarkStateYekuno Amlak restores the Solomonic lineThe last Zagwe king falls at Ansata and his name is struck from the record. The dynasty that replaces him will hold the throne, on and off, until 1974.

›1314–1344WarAmda Seyon doubles the empireCampaigns into Gojjam, Hadiya, Damot and the Muslim lowlands more than double the territory under the crown and set the shape of the empire for centuries.

›14th centuryLandmarkCultureThe Kebra Nagast is compiledThe book that makes Menelik I the son of Solomon and Sheba, and Ethiopia the new home of the Ark. It became the constitutional charter of the monarchy.

›1434–1468FaithZara Yaqob rebuilds church and stateHe replaced hereditary lords with appointed governors, wrote theological treatises himself, and enforced a single doctrine with a heavy hand.

›1441FaithEthiopian monks at the Council of FlorenceDelegates from the Jerusalem community appear before the Latin church in Italy — an early moment in Europe's long confusion of Ethiopia with Prester John.

›1520–1526TradeThe Portuguese embassy arrivesFather Francisco Álvares spends six years at the court of Lebna Dengel and writes the first detailed European description of the country — including Lalibela.

The wars and the migrations

›9 March 1529LandmarkWarShimbra Kure: the war beginsImam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, called Gragn, breaks a far larger imperial army. Within a decade most of the highlands are under his control.

›1530sWarThe churches burnAtronsa Maryam, Debre Libanos and Mary of Zion at Aksum are sacked. Centuries of manuscripts, gold work and royal burials are lost in a few seasons.

›February 1541WarCristóvão da Gama lands at MassawaFour hundred Portuguese musketeers come ashore in answer to an appeal sent years earlier. Their firearms change the balance of the war.

›August 1542WarWofla: da Gama is killedOttoman reinforcements from Zabid turn the tide. Half the Portuguese force dies; da Gama is captured and beheaded.

›21 February 1543LandmarkWarWayna Daga: the Imam fallsGelawdewos and the Portuguese survivors destroy the Imam's army near Lake Tana. Ahmad is shot and killed, and the conquest collapses with him.

›1550s onwardsLandmarkCultureThe Oromo migrationsWith both belligerents exhausted, Oromo confederations move north and east under the gadaa age-grade system, permanently redrawing the map of who lives where.

›1622FaithSusenyos converts to CatholicismPersuaded by the Jesuit Pedro Páez, the emperor declares for Rome and then imposes it. Rebellion follows in Lasta, Agawmeder and Begemder.

›14 June 1632LandmarkFaithThe edict that ended itAfter years of civil war Susenyos restores the faith of his fathers, then abdicates. His son Fasilides expels the Jesuits and closes the country to European missionaries.

Gondar

›1636LandmarkBuildingFasilides founds GondarA royal camp north of Lake Tana, where the caravan roads from Sudan and the Red Sea met, becomes the first permanent capital in seven hundred years.

›1636–1755LandmarkBuildingThe castles of Fasil GhebbiSix emperors and an empress each added a palace inside one walled compound, in a style borrowing from Aksumite, Portuguese and Indian building at once.

›1630s–1640sFaithThe country closesFasilides expels the remaining Jesuits and forbids Europeans entry — an isolation that held, with few exceptions, for well over a century.

›1682–1706StateIyasu the GreatThe high point of the Gondarine state: tax reform, a palace a visitor thought finer than Solomon's, and the painting of Debre Berhan Selassie.

›1730–1769StateEmpress Mentewab rulesRegent for a son and then a grandson, she built the Qusquam complex and held the throne together for four decades — and outlived her own power.

Zemene Mesafint

›7 May 1769LandmarkStateRas Mikael Sehul deposes an emperorThe killing of Iyoas I by his own regent proved the throne could be taken by anyone strong enough. Nothing in Gondar recovered from it.

›1800–1853StateThe Yejju rases at Debre TaborRas Gugsa and his successors ruled as enderase — regents — keeping a Solomonic emperor on the throne in Gondar as a legitimating fiction.

›29 June 1853WarAyshal: the regency brokenKassa Hailu, a provincial soldier with a claim to nothing, destroys Ras Ali II and with him the Yejju ascendancy.

›11 February 1855LandmarkStateKassa is crowned Tewodros IIAt Derasge Maryam the Era of the Princes ends. A man with no royal blood takes a throne-name meant to announce the end of the age of division.

The modern empire

›1855–1868LandmarkStateTewodros II rebuilds a stateHe tried to salary his soldiers, tax the church, and cast his own artillery. Almost every reform failed, and almost every one was attempted again later by someone else.

›13 April 1868LandmarkWarMagdalaA British expedition of 13,000 marched 600 km to free a handful of hostages. Tewodros shot himself; the army left with hundreds of manuscripts and a crown still held in London.

›1871–1889StateYohannes IV and a federal crownWhere Tewodros centralised, Yohannes let his great lords keep their thrones under his own — including a king of Shewa named Menelik.

›1875–1876WarGundet and GuraTwo Egyptian invasions from the Red Sea coast are annihilated in narrow ground by Yohannes and Ras Alula. Egypt never came back.

›1886LandmarkBuildingAddis Ababa is foundedEmpress Taytu chose the hot springs below Entoto and gave the new town its name. Within three years it was the capital, and it never moved again.

›9–10 March 1889WarYohannes dies at MetemmaWinning the battle against the Mahdists, the emperor was shot. His death left the throne open at the exact moment Italy was moving inland from Massawa.

›2 May 1889StateThe Treaty of WuchaleArticle XVII said one thing in Amharic and another in Italian: optional help with foreign affairs, or a protectorate. The discrepancy became a war.

›1 March 1896LandmarkWarAdwaAround 100,000 Ethiopians destroyed an Italian colonial army in a single morning. It is the only decisive African victory over a European power in the age of partition.

›7 June 1917TradeThe railway reaches Addis AbabaTwenty years of work put 784 km of metre-gauge track between the capital and the sea at Djibouti, and made Dire Dawa out of nothing.

›2 November 1930LandmarkStateHaile Selassie is crownedA coronation staged for the world's newsreels, followed within a year by Ethiopia's first written constitution — which granted the emperor everything.

›3 October 1935LandmarkWarItaly invadesMussolini's armies crossed the Mareb without a declaration of war and used mustard gas from aircraft against soldiers, villages and Red Cross stations alike.

›5 May 1936WarAddis Ababa falls — and Geneva listensSeven weeks later the emperor stood before the League of Nations and told it that collective security was being tested on Ethiopia. The League voted him down.

›19 February 1937LandmarkWarYekatit 12After a grenade attack on the viceroy Graziani, Italian forces killed Ethiopians in Addis Ababa for three days. It remains the worst massacre in the country's history.

›5 May 1941LandmarkWarThe emperor returnsFive years to the day after the Italians marched in, Haile Selassie rode back into Addis Ababa with the Arbegnoch and Gideon Force behind him.

›1959FaithThe church becomes its ownAfter sixteen centuries of receiving its head bishop from Alexandria, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church consecrated its own patriarch, Abune Basilios.

›13–19 December 1960StateThe Imperial Bodyguard revoltsOfficers seized the palace while the emperor was abroad. The coup failed in six days, but it put the idea of a republic into circulation and never took it back.

›25 May 1963LandmarkStateThe OAU is founded in Addis AbabaThirty-two heads of state signed the charter in the city of the country that had never been colonised. Its successor, the African Union, is still headquartered there.

›1972–1974StateThe famine the palace deniedPerhaps 200,000 died in Wollo and Tigray while the government said nothing. A British television film reached Addis Ababa, and the regime never recovered its authority.

Revolution and republic

›21 June 1974LandmarkStateThe Derg assemblesA committee of 120 junior officers, three from each unit, formed to investigate grievances — and found that no one in the government could stop them.

›12 September 1974LandmarkStateHaile Selassie is deposedThe last emperor was driven from his palace in a Volkswagen Beetle. Three thousand years of monarchy, as the state claimed it, ended in an afternoon.

›23 November 1974StateThe massacre of the sixtySixty officials of the old government — ministers, generals, two prime ministers — were shot without trial in one night. There was no going back after it.

›4 March 1975LandmarkStateLand to the tillerAll rural land was nationalised and tenancy abolished at a stroke — the single most far-reaching act of the revolution, and still the basis of land law today.

›1976–1978LandmarkStateQey Shibir — the Red TerrorThe state armed neighbourhood committees against its rivals on the left. Estimates of the dead range from tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands.

›1977–1978WarThe Ogaden WarSomalia invaded and nearly took the east. A Soviet and Cuban airlift reversed it — and switched the Cold War's patrons in the Horn overnight.