Some 6, 000 Italians were killed in the disastrous battle of Adowa in Abyssinia in 1896.

ECONOMIST: Italy

Poncet's peregrinations take him to Egypt, across the Sinai and the mountains of Abyssinia, then again to Versailles and back.

ECONOMIST: Fiction from France

Peter Carl Mackay (1881-1965), rather than being a chief of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia), came from the Caribbean.

BBC: A History of the World