Most of the area is in the Ethiopian Plateau. To the west the land falls off gradually, with mostly intermittent rivers flowing into Sudan. Amhara's eastern edge usually follows an extreme escarpment: the edge of the Great Rift Valley. The tallest peak is Mount Dashan at over 4,600 meters. In the west center of the area is Lake T'ana, the source of the Blue Nile or Abay River(2). This starts out eastward but turns westward to exit northwestward into Sudan; the Sudanese reservoir, Khazzar ar-Rusayris backs up its waters into Ethiopia.
There are more than 19 million people in the area, most of them in Amhara Kilil. More than nine in ten of them speak Amharic; no other single language accounts for as many as one in tweny. The Amharic speakers are Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, as are an uncertain number of others. The remainder probably follow indiginous religions, though Protestant Christian sources claim to have made a large number of converts.
There are no cities with 300,000 people. Bahir Dar, the capital of Amhara, has less than 200,000, similar in size to several other places in the kilil.
Later, according to the theory of Chistopher Ehret, speakers of Boreafrasian languages--a hypothesized one-time branch of the Afro-Asiatic group--passed through the area and spread far westward and northward. This group gave rise to the Semitic languages far outside the area. These spread to southern Arabia. About 2000 years ago, one group of South Arabian Semites moved en masse across the Red Sea to the Eritrean coast. These spoke Ethiopic, the ancestor of Amharic and other languages. Amharic spread as the preferred language when it became the lingua franca between slave owners and slaves.
north and east
south
west of southwesternmost Benishangul
west, from all but southwesternmost Benishangul
(1) Ityopia is a stricter transliteration from Amharic.
(2) The Nile is the world's longest river, but measured along the White Nile, not the Blue Nile.