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Ethiopia is a fascinating country in eastern Africa bordered by Eritrea to the north, Somalia and Djibouti to the east, Kenya to the south, and Sudan to the west. Highlands above 1500 m cover about 40% of Ethiopia's land area and make up almost half of Africa's highland area;It has several high mountains, the highest of which is Ras Dashan at 4620 m. The Blue Nile, or Abbai, rises in the northwest and flows in a great semicircle before entering the Sudan. Its chief reservoir, Lake Tana, lies in the northwest. Annually, more than 80% of the water of the Nile River comes from Ethiopia's highlands, as does virtually all of the rich silt reaching Egypt's Nile delta.

Ethiopia was one of the earliest world centres of agricultural innovation and archeologists have found the oldest known human ancestors in Ethiopia, including Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba (c. 5.8–5.2 million years old) and Australopithecus anamensis (c. 4.2 million years old). Unlike most African nations, it was never a European colony, and it has been important to the modern history of Africa as a symbol of independence. Its capital, Addis Ababa (or Addis Abeba), is the headquarters of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. The nation's recent history has been marked by the fall of one of the world's last emperors, a socialist revolution, a succession of devastating famines, and civil war between its central government and several of its regions. In 1993, Eritrea, a province of Ethiopia since 1962, seceded after a 30-year war with Ethiopia's central government. Major famines occurred in 1972-74, 1984-85, 1987, and 1989-90, killing perhaps 2 million people. In each case international donors, mainly from the West, provided millions of tons of food aid.

Originally called Abyssinia, Ethiopia is sub-Saharan Africa's oldest state, and its Solomonic dynasty claims descent from King Menelik I, traditionally believed to have been the son of the queen of Sheba and King Solomon. The current nation is a consolidation of smaller kingdoms that owed feudal allegiance to the Ethiopian emperor. To the ancient world Ethiopia meant all lands south of Egypt. Ethiopia's northern highlands were the site of the empire of Aksum (Axum; established in the 1st century AD), which controlled the Red Sea coast and had trade and cultural contacts with southern Arabia, Egypt, Rome, and Greece. In the 4th century Aksum's Emperor Ezana was converted to Christianity and Aksum then used its power to spread Christianity across the central highlands. Late in the 7th century Islam penetrated the region from the Red Sea coast and took hold in eastern Ethiopia.

Modern Ethiopia's borders are the result of the late-19th-century expansion under Emperor Menelik II, who assumed the throne in 1889 and used alliances with European powers and imported firearms to unite his rivals behind him and conquer rich lands to the east, west, and south. In 1896 his armies defeated a modern Italian army at the Battle of Adowa (Adwa) to assure Ethiopia's independence. Disorders that followed Menelik's death brought his daughter to the throne in 1917, with his cousin, Tafari Makonnen, as regent and heir apparent. When the empress died in 1930, Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I. Haile Selassie, called the "Lion of Judah", outlawed slavery, created a constitution, began a modern army, educational system, and bureaucracy between 1916 and 1935, when Fascist Italy invaded and occupied Ethiopia. Haile Selassie resumed the throne in 1941 and remained in power until he was overthrown on 12 September 1974 by a military clique.

Mengistu Haile Mariam, a young military officer who founded the Ethiopian Communist party, came to power after a series of bloody purges in 1977. The ruling military clique (called the Dergue) converted itself to a civilian party in 1987, when it made Ethiopia a one-party Communist state under a new constitution. But the country was in turmoil: the regime battled Eritrean secessionists as well as Somali rebels, and its own people in a campaign called the "red terror": thousands of political opponents were killed. When Mengistu's greatest supporter, the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991, he was overthrown and a group called the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front seized the capital. In May 1991 a separatist guerrilla organization, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, took control of the province of Eritrea. The two groups agreed that Eritrea would have an internationally supervised referendum on independence; this took place in April 1993 with almost unanimous support for Eritrean independence, which was recognised by Ethiopia. However, border disputes resulted in a vicious war in 1998-1999 that left more than 80 000 dead.