Habesha History is a record of the peoples of the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands and the coast below them: the kingdoms they built, the churches and palaces they left standing, and the manuscripts and objects that survive in collections scattered across three continents. It began as a newsletter in 2024 and has grown into an archive.
The writing is meant for readers who want the evidence rather than the summary. Essays name their sources, quote the chronicles and the travellers where those exist, and say plainly where the record runs out. A great deal of this history is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty is part of the subject rather than an embarrassment to be smoothed over.
Who writes it
A Tigrinya Eritrean network engineer who loves this history, particularly Eritrean and Ethiopian. The publication is independent and has no institutional affiliation.
How the collection is sourced
Objects and manuscript pages come from the open-access catalogues of the institutions that hold them, and every record links back to that institution’s own page so a reader can check the object against its keeper. Rights are recorded as the holder states them, and where a holder states nothing, the record says so:
Unknown is preserved as unknown. No licence is inferred from possession, publication, attribution, or age.
Dates behave the same way. An object with no recorded date is published as undated rather than assigned a plausible century, because a century invented for the sake of a tidy filter is the kind of error that outlives the person who made it.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. Corrections and sources are welcome through the Discord and the other channels, and substantive ones are made to the essay itself rather than tucked into a footnote.