Ethiopia

Ethiopia is a historically antique polity. It is one of the very few places that managed to sustain an unbroken chain of historical civilization free of foreign corruption. Unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and others that were later overrun by alien and destructive forces, Ethiopia maintained its brand of African civilization intact. This created a fascination among Western intellectual circles. Nevertheless, Western scholarship saw Ethiopia as outlandish to Africa. Like ancient Egypt, Ethiopia was systematically deAfricanized in the annals of Western high culture. In this article, I attempt to identify the fundamental perceptions of Western Ethiopianist scholarship and the many images of Ethiopia that emanate from it.