Frank Gerber
Dr. Opoku Agyeman
POLS204 Government/Politics of Africa
When one thinks of the country of Ethiopia it would not be uncommon for one to automatically think of one of those commercials that shows the poverty and starvation among the people who live there. However, this was not always the case. In antiquity Ethiopia was a grand civilization that build grand cathedrals long before those of Europe. This civilization, like many of man’s earliest civilizations on the mother continent, has been washed away by the sands of time and the fire of the gun. Why is it that when most of us think of this once thriving civilization we think of only starvation and a government that cannot feed it’s people? What circumstances surrounded this transformation from thriving civilization to mass starvation and the third world circumstances that surround Ethiopia today? To find out why Ethiopia is the way it is today, we must briefly examine the history of this once great nation.
The antiquity in Ethiopia is an extremely long tradition, some of the oldest fossilized human remains were found there. Those human fossils were found to be 5.9 million years old. It is also very likely that the civilization the ancient Egyptians referred to as Punt was located in what later was known as Ethiopia that can be traced all the way back to the twenty-fifth century BC. In the eighth century BC the kingdom of D’mt was established in what is now northern Ethiopia. Debate has come up do to the Africaness of this civilization. Many do not think it was a true African society, however, this is fairly ridiculous due to the fact that the civilization itself was in Africa and the fact that many western scholars have a ha ...