Ethiopia
Ethiopia (officially Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia) is a country in Eastern Africa, with its capital at Addis Ababa, and is home to roughly 132.1M people.
Amharic is the official language; the currency in circulation is Ethiopian birr (Br); people from here are called Ethiopian.
- »It was never colonised, apart from a brief Italian occupation.
- »The Ethiopian calendar runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one, and the day starts at dawn.
- »Coffee is generally held to have originated in the Ethiopian highlands.
Ethiopia touches six neighbours: Djibouti to the northeast, Eritrea to the north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, South Sudan to the west and Sudan to the northwest. Directions run from one centre to the other. Neighbours in six different compass directions make this one of the better-connected outlines in the set.
Addis Ababa means 'new flower' and was founded in 1886. It sits at around 2,350 m and hosts the headquarters of the African Union.
1,131,429 km² (436,847 sq mi), 26th largest of 198 countries and territories on file, almost exactly the size of Colombia.
Population 132,059,767, 10th of 198 on file. That averages 117 per km² (302 per sq mi).
Green, yellow and red here are the original pan-African colours, Ethiopia's resistance to colonisation made its flag the model that newly independent African states adopted. The blue disc and star were added in 1996.