African Art

Ennarea

Ennarea, also known as E(n)narya or In(n)arya (Gonga: Hinnario), was a kingdom in the Gibe region in what is now western Ethiopia. It became independent from the kingdom of Damot in the 14th century and would be the most powerful kingdom in the region until its decline in the 17th century. Being located on the southwestern periphery of the Ethiopian Empire, Ennarea was its tributary throughout much of its history, supplying the emperor with gold and slaves. The culmination of this relationship was the Christianization of the Ennarean elite in the late 1580s. From the late 16th century the kingdom came under increasing pressure by the Oromo, who finally conquered Ennarea in around 1710. Our knowledge of Ennarea primarily comes from oral traditions and a few foreign written sources, as it had no indigenous literacy tradition.

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See also

• ▸Dionysus
• ▸Hercules
• ▸1904

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.