As an earlier epigraph suggested, ‘geneticists are now in a race to study Ethiopians, some of whom may be descended from the source population of that single [out-of-Africa] exodus’ (Oppenheimer, 2003, 67) and from whom, in turn, the rest of non-African humanity has derived. Yet, as the present study has shown, the fascination with ‘Ethiopia’ as an originary concept not only in Africanist discourse, but in the foundational mythography of the entire Mediterranean world, has ancient roots. Jean Doresse (1956, 1957) has been able to trace a persistently mythic and iconic treatment of this part of north-east Africa over several millennia, from cryptic pharaonic reports of the Land of Punt to biblical legends of the Queen of Sheba and the late-medieval fascination with Prester John. We have seen how and why a fabulous ‘Ethiopia’ was invented and imagined long before the identifiable Ethiopia of the Simien highlands existed; why, indeed, the various ‘Ethiopias’ of Mediterranean myth were an inevitable outcome of the classical world's response to its limited understanding of the realities of Africa. Recently, David Phillipson has reiterated that ‘Ethiopia [the country we now know by that name] fits few categories, prejudices or preoccupations’ and ‘maintains an ill-defined separateness from the rest of Africa’ (2008, 519), yet we have seen it become, for precisely those reasons, an evocative presence in the earliest Mediterranean and southern European geo-mythology. The ironies raised by this enduring preoccupation with an exotic and fabulous Ethiopia are manifold, not least being the tenacious survival of such a race and place in the European imagination in the face of the almost universally negative perception of sub-littoral and non-Egyptian Africa and Africans that triumphed over the same period.

One reason for the mythic durability of Ethiopia was that the ‘real’ Ethiopia of the Simien highlands, later known as Abyssinia, was never wholly ‘lost’ from either the ancient Mediterranean consciousness or from the early medieval intercourse of trade, diplomacy and, later, ecclesiastical encounter.