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ERITREA
State of Eritrea (Hagere Ertra, Dawlat Iritriya)   Asmara - capital city
  • Italy conquered Eritrea and the Italian government formally consolidated it into a colony on January 1, 1890. In 1936 it became a province of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana), along with Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. The British expelled the Italians in 1941 and continued to administer the territory under a UN Mandate until 1951 when Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia as per UN resolution 390(A) adopted in December 1950. (Wikipedia.org)
  • Increasing unrest and resistance in Eritrea against the federation with Ethiopia eventually led to a decision by the Ethiopian government to annex Eritrea as its 14th province in 1962. An Eritrean independence movement formed in the early 1960s which later erupted into a 31-year long war against successive Ethiopian governments that ended in 1991. Following a UN supervised referendum in Eritrea dubbed UNOVER in which the Eritrean people overwhelmingly voted for independence from Ethiopia, (Wikipedia.org)
  • Eritrea declared its independence and gained international recognition in 1993.  Eritrea is a single-party state - whilst its constitution, adopted in 1997, stipulates that the state is a presidential republic with a unicameral parliamentary democracy, it has yet to be implemented. According to the government, this is due to the prevailing border conflict with Ethiopia which began in May 1998. English is also used in all of the government's international communication and is the language of instruction in all education beyond the fifth grade. (Wikipedia.org)
  • Pre-History. One of the oldest hominids, representing a possible link between Homo erectus and an archaic Homo sapiens, was found in Buya (Eritrean Danakil) in 1995 by Italian scientists. The cranium was dated to over 1 million years old. Furthermore, in 1999, the Eritrean Research Project Team, discovered some of the earliest remains of humans using tools to harvest marine resources. The site contained obsidian tools dated to the paleolithic era, over 125,000 years old. Epipaleolithic or mesolithic cave paintings in central and northern Eritrea attest to early hunter-gatherers in this region. A US paleontologist, William Sanders of the University of Michigan, also discovered a possible missing link between ancient and modern elephants in the form of the fossilized remains of a pig-sized creature in Eritrea. The fossil which is 27 million years old pushes the origins of elephants and mastodons five million years further into the past and asserts that modern elephants originated in Africa. (Wikipedia.org)
  • Pre-Colonial Civilization. The oldest written reference to the territory now known as Eritrea is the chronicled expedition launched to the fabled Punt (or Ta Netjeru, meaning land of the Gods) by the Ancient Egyptians in the twenty-fifth century BC under Pharaoh Sahure. Later sources from the Pharaoh Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BC present a more detailed portrayal of an expedition in search of frankincense. The geographical location of the missions to Punt is described as roughly corresponding to the southern west coast of the Red Sea. The name Eritrea is a rendition of the ancient Greek name Ερυθραία, Erythraía, the "Red Land" The earliest evidence of agriculture, urban settlement and trade in Eritrea was found in the western region of the country consisting of archeological remains dating back to 3500 BC in sites called the Gash group. Based on the archaeological evidence, there seems to have been a connection between the peoples of the Gash group and the civilizations of the Nile Valley namely Ancient Egypt and Nubia. (Wikipedia.org)
Panorama of Asmara (Asmera)  (http://en.wikipedia.org)