The Ethiopian Empire: The Dark Age Of Ethiopia

The history of Ethiopian Empire started 2 millenniums ago when the state of Axum emerged into the wider light of history at the end of the first century A.D; it was well integrated, trading state (Marcus, Harold, 1994). The anonymous author of the Periplus [Geography] of the Erythraean Sea mentions Ethiopia 's main port at Adulis, twenty miles inside the Gulf of Zula, where visiting foreign ships anchored in the channel to protect themselves against attack at night by unruly local peoples. Adulis offered enough profit to receive a continuous stream of merchants who, in return for ivory, offered cloth of many types, glassware, tools, gold and silver jewelry, copper, and Indian iron and steel used to manufacture high-quality weapons. Its centrality in Ethiopia 's economy, Adulis was an impressive place with stone-built houses and temples, a dam, and irrigated agriculture (Marcus, Harold, 1994).

Ancient Ethiopian Empire by the 5th century A.D, its commercial vessels traded with the Mediterranean and Asian countries. Its naval vessels carried armies across the Red Sea into Arabia and it was a prosperous empire (Gibbon 1910: cited in Amha Dagnew). The Ethiopian dark ages was initiated by the rise of Islam in Arabia, Ethiopia’s Eastern neighbor across the Red Sea. The Dark Age of Ethiopia actually began when the Ethiopian Axumite kingdom lost its costal territories, first to the Arabs and after the 14th century A.D to the Ottoman Turks (Amha Dagnew, 2012). After these situations