MY POSTBOX: ETHIOPIA - ኢትዮጵያ/ Itiyoophiyaa / Itoobiya

Tuesday, 5 April 2016

ETHIOPIA - ኢትዮጵያ/ Itiyoophiyaa / Itoobiya

Ethiopia (Amharic: ኢትዮጵያ,), Afar: Itiyoophiyaa, Ge'ez: ኢትዮጵያ. Oromo: Itoophiyaa, Somali: Itoobiya, Tigrinya: ኢትዮጵያ), officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west and Sudan to the northwest. With over 109 million inhabitants as of 2019, Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world and the second-most populous nation on the African continent. The country has a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometres (420,000 sq mi). Its capital and largest city is Addis Ababa, which lies a few miles west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the Nubian and Somali tectonic plates.

Ethiopia and Eritrea use the ancient Ge'ez script, which is one of the oldest alphabets still in use in the world. They follow the Ethiopian calendar, which is approximately seven years and three months behind the Gregorian calendar. Oromo is the most populous language by native speakers, while Amharic is the most populous by number of total speakers and serves as the working language in the federal government. Ge'ez remains important as a liturgical language for both the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and for the Beta Israel.

Ethiopia is an ecologically diverse country, ranging from the deserts along the eastern border to the tropical forests in the south to extensive Afromontane in the northern and southwestern parts. Lake Tana in the north is the source of the Blue Nile. It also has many endemic species, notably the gelada, the walia ibex and the Ethiopian wolf ("Simien fox"). The wide range of altitude has given the country a variety of ecologically distinct areas, and this has helped to encourage the evolution of endemic species in ecological isolation. Some of the oldest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans has been found in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia has 31 endemic species of mammals. The African wild dog prehistorically had widespread distribution in the territory. However, with last sightings at Finicha'a, this canid is thought to be potentially locally extinct. The Ethiopian wolf is perhaps the most researched of all the endangered species within Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a global center of avian diversity. To date more than 856 bird species have been recorded in Ethiopia, twenty of which are endemic to the country. Sixteen species are endangered or critically endangered. Many of these birds feed on butterflies, like the Bicyclus anynana.

As part of the 1867-8 invasion that culminated in the Battle of Magdala, the British established a field post office at Massawa (then a port of Ethiopia) in November 1867, using stamps of British India. The territory of Harar was taken by Egypt in 1875, and in the following year a post office was established; letters from there used Egyptian stamps canceled with a Maltese cross. On 9 March 1894 Menelik II of Ethiopia awarded a concession to Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg to develop a railway including postal services. Prior to the admission of Ethiopia to the UPU in 1908, international mail from Ethiopia had to be additionally franked with stamps of UPU members. France operated post offices at Addis Ababa, Harar, and Dire Dawa, using stamps of Obock or the French Somali Coast, and mail is known with a triple franking of Ethiopia, British Somaliland (via the town of Zeila), and Aden.

The first stamps of Ethiopia valid for international mail were a 1 November 1908 set of overprinted stamps of the first issue. A further issue was required in new designs in 1909 which, in addition to Amharic, included the Latin inscription "POSTES ETHIOPIENNES" and the value in guerches. The older issues lost postal validity and the use of French Somali Coast stamps on mail sent abroad was discontinued as a result of the admission to the U.P.U., and that meant that Ethiopia could send mail to any country on earth. In 1928, a set of ten stamps depicting Tafari and Zewditu was issued and soon after overprinted, first to mark the opening of the General Post Office in Addis Ababa, and a month later for the coronation of Tafari, the latter overprint including the phrase "NEGOUS TEFERI" in Latin letters. In May 1936, Italy issued seven colonial stamps inscribed "ETIOPIA" and depicting Victor Emmanuel. All of these stamps were inscribed in Italian, Arabic and Amharic, and marked "9 May 1936" to take note of the date Ethiopia was annexed by Italy.

Ethiopia was then incorporated in Italian East Africa with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland until the territory was liberated in 1941. These series were replaced by the stamps of Italian East Africa on 7 Feb, 1938. The first stamps after liberation were a series of three of 1942 depicting Haile Selassie, with the denomination printed in lower case, and reissued as a set of eight three months later, with the denomination in all capitals. Subsequent issues typically, though not always, included a portrait oval of Haile Selassie in the design up to the 1960s.

In 1974, the Ethiopian monarchy was overthrown by the Derg, a communist military junta backed by the Soviet Union. In 1987, the Derg established the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. The communist government was overthrown in 1991 and replaced by the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.