Recent discoveries indicate that Ethiopia is the ancestral home in which homo sapiens took its first faltering footsteps away from the apes and towards its own unique identity. The cradle of mankind lies in the sere north-east of the country, close to the banks of the Awash River - where the Great Rift Valley forms a wide, low-lying triangle. There the fossilised remains of the oldest direct human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, dating back 3.5 million years - and thus at least a million years older than any previous hominid remains - were discovered. The initial find in 1974 took the form of an almost complete female skeleton. Nicknamed Lucy by palaeontologist Dr Donald Johanson, of the US Institute of Human Origins, this fossil is better known to Ethiopians as Dinquinesh - meaning 'thou art wonderful'.

Supplemented in the 1980s and 1990s by many other finds of similar antiquity along the Awash, and in the Omo River valley further south, Dinquinesh was an upright-walking hominid under four feet tall with a small brain and ape-like features. Her teeth, legs and pelvic bones, however, were distinctly human. The discovery pushed the horizon of mankind's ancestry back to a remote and unimaginably distant past.

Ethiopia also boasts some fine examples of Stone Age and pre-Stone Age cultures: flint tools have been found in river beds, and delicate paintings - almost half-a-million years old - on the walls of caves. The country was also one of the earliest to make use of fire and crop cultivation. Later, the movement and interactions of peoples from the Horn of Africa and Southern Arabia created the country's first high civilisation - in the highlands overlooking the Red Sea coast.

Today's inhabitants of this region speak a Semitic language, Tigrinya, closely related to Ge'ez, the ancient tongue of Ethiopia still used in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. Amharic, the lingua franca of modern Ethiopia, is another descendant of classical Ge'ez.

Together, the Amhara and Tigray peoples constitute the group long known to the outside world as Abyssinians - an epithet almost certainly derived from Habashat, the name of a South Arabian tribe that long ago migrated to the Horn of Africa. The idea that the Habashat, together with other nomadic Arab groups, were the progenitors of Ethiopia's highland civilisation, is strengthened by the fact that Ge'ez was linked to Sabaean, one of the original languages of South Arabia and hence, also, to Hebrew and to Arabic.