About this project

The lens we read through

Every history is written through a lens; ours is declared, not hidden. We read Ethiopian history through the lens of the state and political power — the contest over who rules, on what basis their rule is considered legitimate, and how the institutions of the state are built, held, and lost. That focus is a deliberate choice. It means we foreground governance, legitimacy, war, economy, religion, identity, and foreign relations as they bear on political authority, and it means other lenses — cultural, religious, or social history pursued for their own sake — sit at the edges of our frame rather than the center. Naming the lens is itself part of being trustworthy: you should know the angle from which a story is told.

Sources are required

Every published entry cites its sources. This is not decoration — it is the condition of publication. We lean first on peer-reviewed scholarship and primary documents, then on reputable general histories; tertiary and web sources are used only for orientation, never as the sole support for a contested or load-bearing claim. A claim tied to a specific page is checked against that page at the time it is written: that a source exists is necessary but not sufficient. Where we are uncertain, we say so rather than paper over the gap.

Neutrality, and steelmanning what is contested

Ethiopian political history is genuinely contested, and we treat it that way. Where scholars or political traditions disagree about causes, motives, or significance, we present the disagreement as a disagreement and give more than one reading a fair hearing — stating each at its strongest rather than knocking down a weak version of it. Contested interpretations are attributed ("supporters argue…", "critics contend…") rather than asserted in the site's own voice. We distinguish what is broadly agreed fact from what is interpretation, and we do not adopt any one faction's framing — imperial, revolutionary, ethnonationalist, or other — as the neutral default. When the scholarship itself is unsettled, we say so; acknowledged uncertainty is more honest than false confidence.

How to read our status labels

Because trust depends on knowing how far a page has been checked, every entry carries a status, and we show it to you:

• Verified — a person has checked every factual claim on the page against the cited sources. Only verified entries are presented as established fact.
• Unverified — the entry has sources attached but has not yet had that claim-by-claim check. It is shown with a visible "not yet source-verified" label and should be read as provisional.
• Draft — work in progress, not yet ready to stand as a reference.

We use AI tools to help draft and research, but AI output is treated as an unverified first draft by default — fluent is not the same as accurate. Nothing reaches "verified," and nothing is presented as fact, until a person has checked it against real sources. The same standard applies to passages written by hand: authorship by a human does not exempt a claim from sourcing and review.

Language

The site launches English-first, with Amharic planned. The structure is bilingual now — an Amharic edition lives under /am — and Amharic content is being added deliberately rather than machine-translated, because on a contested-history subject the precise wording carries weight. Names follow a consistent, readable romanization (plain English spellings, no heavy diacritics) and we avoid pejorative or colonial exonyms. While the content becomes bilingual, the site's navigation and labels remain in English for now.

Use & corrections

This is an educational and research reference. If you find an error — a wrong date, a misattributed quotation, a claim a source does not actually support — it should be corrected, and a claim that can no longer be supported is revised or its status downgraded until it is re-checked. The fuller editorial standards behind this page are maintained alongside the project's source materials.