NOTIONAL and INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES

The institute of Ethiopian Studies hosts several local and international conferences, seminars and scholarly meetings since in 1966. The institute is also constitutes the permanent secretariat for the international conference of Ethiopian studies .The first of these international conferences which are held approximately every three years, was connived in 1959 and one out of every three conferences are to be held in Ethiopia. The next international conference of Ethiopian studies, which will be the fifteenth, will be held in Hamburg, Germany in November 2003. Please visit the web site of the 15th International conference of Ethiopian Studies for further detail at :

www. rzz.uni.hamburg.de/ICES2003

The other conference which was recently held in Addis Ababa was the ;

Six international conferences on the history of Ethiopian art.

 Conference Report on the XIVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies

The Opening Day, 14th ICES - 2000 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The XIV^th International Conference was held from 6 -11 November 2000 in Addis Ababa under the auspices of Addis Ababa University and the administrative responsibility of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. The Conference coincided with the Golden Jubilee of the University in which it figured as one of the major events of the celebration that lasted over a period of two months. The main venue was the School of Graduate Studies, where the registrations, opening, closing and plenary sessions were held. The regular panel sessions wee held in the Faculty of Technology at Amist Kilo.

As shown in the pre-registration forms sent out to all colleagues, the themes of the Conference were the following:

• History and Archaeology

• Linguistics and Philology

• Literature

• Sociology and Anthropology

• Education and Fine Arts

• Law and Politics

• Development and Environment

• Religion and Philosophy

Participants

There were 268 scholars pre-registered following our initial circular in December 1998. Of these, 249 had sent in their abstracts for inclusion into our booklet, which was published. There were another 13 people, who applied late for participation and were accepted. The total number of participants expected was, thus, raised to 281. In addition, there were 137 people registered as observers. The breakdown of both the expected and actual number of participants and observers by country is as shown below:

The level of participation by Panels is as follows:

The total number of people in attendance is 338, which stands as one of the highest in the history of the Conference. This is excluding students and other members of the University community who attended most of the sessions free.

The conference program includes six plenary sessions in which five of the eight categories of themes were assessed in terms of their developments through the years and their future directions. These include History, Linguistics, Literature, Development, and Anthropology. History and Development took entire mornings whereas the other four took only 1:30 hrs of each morning. All were well attended and received.