The world / Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Capital: Addis Ababa
- Amharic and other Ethiopian languages are written in the Ge'ez script, in which each symbol stands for a consonant plus a vowel. It has been in use in Ethiopia since at least the 4th century AD.
- The Ethiopian calendar has twelve 30-day months plus a short 13th month of five or six days. Its year number is seven or eight years behind the Gregorian calendar.
- The Lucy fossil, Australopithecus afarensis, was found at Hadar in 1974 and is about 3.2 million years old. Around 40 per cent of its skeleton was recovered.
- Eleven churches in Lalibela were carved out of rock, most of them thought to date from the 12th and 13th centuries. UNESCO listed the site in 1978.
- Wild Arabica coffee is native to the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia. The popular goatherd story about Kaldi appears only after 1671 and is likely a legend.