Ambat

Ambat is one of the Ethiopian places recorded on Fra Mauro's world map, completed in Venice in the mid-fifteenth century, where it appears between Achiafed and Badabedi. The Venetian mapmaker drew on information from Ethiopian clerics in depicting the towns, provinces and rivers of the African interior. On his map, Ambat stands among a cluster of names in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, not far from a river he labelled Guaa.

The Wej country around the upper reaches of the Ethiopian highlands was a place of plateaus, valleys and scattered villages, where farmers grew teff and barley and kept cattle and sheep. Churches and monasteries, served by clerics who travelled between the courts and the provinces, linked these settlements to the royal government.