Amhara

The Amhara are the Amharic-speaking Orthodox Christians of the central and northern Ethiopian highlands around Lake Tana. They took shape as Aksumite-descended Christians settled the highlands and absorbed the Cushitic Agaw; Amharic served court and government for more than seven centuries.

First named in twelfth-century records, the Amhara rose to power when Yekuno Amlak overthrew the Zagwe in 1270 and founded the Solomonic line. In 1337 the warrior-emperor Amda Seyon I ruled from mobile highland camps, extending Christian rule over lowland Muslim states; his successors built the first fixed capital at Debre Birhan in 1456.

The Adal invasion of 1529 to 1543 under Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi devastated the highlands until Emperor Galawdewos, with Portuguese help, won the war and rebuilt the state. From 1636 Gondar became the permanent capital, opening a period of castles and church art, before the eighteenth-century Zemene Mesafint, an age of rival lords reducing emperors to figureheads.