Seven hundred years of unbroken imperial rule. Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty claimed descent from King Solomon himself, held the highlands against all comers, and in 1896 handed colonial Europe the most humiliating defeat of the Scramble for Africa.
Adwa Aksum Gondar ★ Lalibela Addis Ababa ★ Greatest extent — stylized map 1270 Solomonic line 1530s Gran's invasion 1896 Victory at Adwa 1974 Fall of the empire Rise · zenith · fall Adwa, 1 March 1896 — the numbers Italian army 17,000 Ethiopian force 100,000 Italians killed 7,000 Italians captured 1,500 By the numbers The rise The Solomonic line began in 1270, when Yekuno Amlak overthrew the Zagwe dynasty and restored — so the chronicles say — the lineage of Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Whether or not the genealogy holds, the politics did: the new dynasty fused church and crown, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church became the empire’s ideological backbone for seven centuries.
