Eritrea

Eritrea, officially the State of Eritrea, sits in the Horn of Africa on the eastern side of the continent. Its capital and biggest city is Asmara. To the south lies Ethiopia, Sudan is to the west, and Djibouti is to the southeast. The country’s northeastern and eastern sides stretch along a long Red Sea coastline. Covering about 117,600 square kilometers (45,406 square miles), Eritrea also includes the Dahlak Archipelago and several of the Hanish Islands.

Fossilized hominid remains in Eritrea date back one million years, and anthropological work suggests the area could hold important clues about human evolution. The Kingdom of Aksum, based in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, arose in the first or second century AD. The Persian prophet Mani, founder of Manichaeism, considered it one of the world’s four great powers. Aksum adopted Christianity around the middle of the fourth century. From the 12th century onward, the Zagwe and Solomonid dynasties held shifting control over the highlands and the Red Sea coast. Eritrea’s central highlands, called Mereb Melash (“Beyond the Mereb”), served as the northern frontier of Ethiopian kingdoms, ruled by a governor known as the Bahr Negus (“King of the Sea”).

In the 1500s, the Ottomans spent decades trying to conquer the Highlands but failed, eventually signing a peace treaty that limited them to the Eritrean coastline. In May 1865, much of the coastal lowlands came under the Khedivate of Egypt, then passed to Italy in February 1885. From 1885 to 1890, Italian troops pushed inland from Massawa toward the highlands, forming the colony of Italian Eritrea in 1889 and setting the country’s current borders. Italian rule lasted until 1942, when British Military Administration took over during World War II. In 1952, following a UN General Assembly decision, Eritrea got its own parliament to govern locally, but foreign affairs and defense were handled by Ethiopia in a ten-year federal arrangement. Ethiopia dissolved the Eritrean parliament and formally annexed the territory in 1962. The Eritrean Liberation Front, formed in 1961, led the secessionist movement and fought the Eritrean War of Independence until de facto independence came in 1991. Full legal independence followed in 1993 after a referendum.

Today, Eritrea is a multi-ethnic country with nine recognized ethnic groups, each with its own language. Tigrinya is the most widely spoken language; others include Tigre, Saho, Kunama, Nara, Afar, Beja, Bilen, and Arabic. Tigrinya, Arabic, and English are the three working languages. Most residents speak Afroasiatic languages, either from the Ethiopian Semitic or Cushitic branches. Ethnic Tigrinyas make up about 50% of the population, and Tigre people about 30%. There are also several Nilo-Saharan-speaking Nilotic groups. Most people follow Christianity or Islam, with a small minority practicing traditional faiths.

Eritrea is a unitary one-party presidential republic and a de facto totalitarian dictatorship. No national legislative or presidential elections have ever been held. Isaias Afwerki has been president since independence in 1993. The country’s human rights record is among the worst globally; the government dismisses these criticisms as politically motivated. Eritrea belongs to the African Union, the United Nations, and is an observer state in the Arab League, along with Brazil and Venezuela. It was part of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development until it withdrew in December 2025, accusing the organization of “becoming a tool against” countries like itself.

The name Eritrea comes from the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea, the Erythraean Sea (Ἐρυθρὰ Θάλασσα, from ἐρυθρός meaning “red”). It was first officially adopted in 1890 with the creation of Italian Eritrea (Colonia Eritrea). The name stuck through British and Ethiopian rule and was reaffirmed by the 1993 independence referendum and the 1997 constitution.

A fossil called Madam Buya, found at an Eritrean site by Italian anthropologists, is among the oldest hominid fossils known. It is thought to show key stages in human evolution and may link earlier Homo erectus with archaic Homo sapiens. Her remains are one million years old, making her the oldest skeletal find of her kind. The Danakil Depression in Eritrea is believed to be a major site of human evolution, possibly holding other links between Homo erectus and anatomically modern humans.

During the last interglacial period, roughly 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, early anatomically modern humans lived along Eritrea’s Red Sea coast. Scholars think this area was on the route out of Africa used by early humans to populate the rest of the Old World. In 1999, the Eritrean Research Project Team—made up of scientists from Eritrea, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, and France—found a Paleolithic site near the Gulf of Zula, south of Massawa, with stone and obsidian tools over 125,000 years old. These tools were likely used to harvest marine resources like clams and oysters.

Tools from the Barka Valley, dating to 8,000 BC, offer the first solid evidence of human settlement in the area.