In 1681, Hiob Ludolf (or Job Ludolphus, as his title page called him), probably the first European scholar to make a thorough study of the history and culture of the country that came to be known as Abyssinia or Ethiopia, pointed out the pitfalls of his enterprise: ‘Concerning [the Ethiopians] there have been many large, but few true relations…. Besides that the name of “Ethiopians”… is common to so many nations, that it has rendered their history very ambiguous’ (1681, 1). And to make matters worse, complained Ludolf, this protean uncertainty surrounding Ethiopia had over the centuries attracted myth-making on a large scale:

The following two instances attest to just how bizarrely fanciful late-Renaissance European conceptions of the whereabouts and status of Ethiopia had become. William Cuningham, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, managed to patch together in his description of Meroe (on the Sudanese Nile and, as we shall see, one of the ancient locations of ‘Ethiopia’) a rag-bag of classical, biblical, Aksumite, patristic, Arab and crusader myths: