Ethiopia is old: Old beyond all imagination. More than three million years ago the earliest known hominids walked here. Many 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 was, indeed, the Cradle of Civilisation.
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 both sides of the Red Sea, most of the goods seem to have come from the Ethiopian area. Today Ethiopia is a rich cultural mosaic due to its eighty different languages and dialects and as many, if not more, cultural variations. Semitic languages are spoken in the North and much of the centre of the country, including Tigrinya, Guraginya and Ethiopia’s official language, Amharic. All are derived from the ancient Ge’ez which today only survives in church liturgy and literature.
To the east and other parts of the south are the Oromos, the Afars and the Somalis who are Cushitic – speaking peoples while the associated Sidama languages are spoken to the south-east. To the west and south-west are to be found the Nilotic peoples, each with its own distinctive language and culture.
Elsewhere around the country there are a number of smaller communities whose cultures, languages and traditions are related to different facets of Ethiopia’s long history and, as with all the peoples of the country, to its religious be they Orthodox Christians, Moslems or members of other faiths. Folk culture is also an important element of today’s Ethiopia. Artists and craftsmen make their own contributions to the country’s cultural and social development. Almost every town has its own cultural troupe made up of singers and dancers, poets and writers, and its own cultural hall in which the troupe re-creates the song and dance of its particular area from a bygone age.
