World Discovery Safaris > Trips > 18 Day Wildlife & Cultural Safari to Ethiopia

Modern Ethiopia is the product of thousands of years of interaction among peoples in and around the Ethiopian highlands region in the north and amongst the Nilo-Saharan agriculturists, fisherman and pastoralists in the south. Anthropologists believe that East Africa's Great Rift Valley is the site of humankind's origins, and from these beginnings various ethnic groups have combined to produce a culture that at any given time differed markedly from that of the surrounding peoples. The evolution of this early "Ethiopian" culture was driven by a variety of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. One of the most significant influences on the formation and evolution of culture in northern Ethiopia consisted of migrants from Southwest Arabia. They arrived during the first millennium B.C. and brought Semitic speech, writing, and a distinctive stone-building tradition to northern Ethiopia. They seem to have contributed directly to the rise of the Aksumite kingdom, a trading state that prospered in the first centuries of the Christian era and that united the shores of the southern Red Sea commercially and politically. It was an Aksumite king who accepted Christianity in the mid-fourth century, a religion that the Aksumites bequeathed to their successors. The subsequent establishment of what became the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was critical in molding Ethiopian culture and identity.