Ethiopia can justly claim a place in the history of world art, thanks to the originality of its works manifest in the fields of painting, sculpture, music, architecture, dance and theatre.
During the three thousand years of its history, Ethiopia has had the opportunity to create wide ranging fields of expression within a cultural universe which is in Africa but is not of Africa, thus re-elaborating social organisations and structures, languages and cosmologies, daily practices and theologies in such an original manner as to represent an achieved alternative to the globalisation processes. This volume considers these peculiar expressive and figurative constellations without allowing any particular concession or complicity to the global artistic processes. This art is therefore difficult to classify, it has many faces.

The editors of the volume are well-known Ethiopists: Stanislaw Chojnacki is an art historian, Antonio L. Palmisano, a cultural anthropologist and Ariane C.H. Baghaï an Islamist. They have all spent many years in the country and have published numerous works in their specific field of studies and researches.