This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of Ethiopia. Long an independent state in Africa, messages were originally carried by couriers called méléktegnas, who held the letters attached to a stick. British posts in Ethiopia As part of the 1867-8 invasion that culminated in the Battle of Magdala, the British established a field post office at Massawa (then a port of Ethiopia) in November 1867, using stamps of British India. The territory of Harar was taken by Egypt in 1875, and in the following year a post office was established; letters from there used Egyptian stamps canceled with a Maltese cross. Establishment of the Ethiopian postal system On 9 March 1894 Menelik II of Ethiopia awarded a concession to Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg to develop a railway including postal services. Ilg arranged for Frenchman Leon Chefneux to contract with the engraver Louis-Eugène Mouchon to design a set of seven stamps, four depicting Menelik, and three with a heraldic lion. They were printed by Atelier de Fabrication des Timbres-Postes in Paris, along with four values of postcards. Most of the stamps remained in Paris where the dealers Maury had the exclusive right to sell them but 135,000 sets were taken to Ethiopia. The earliest known use is 29 January 1895. These stamps were valid only for local mail and mail to Djibouti. Initially the tasks of cancelling and forwarding letters were entrusted to the Catholic mission at Harar. After a delay occasioned by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Ilg hired several Swiss postal officials and they began organizing a system of postal bags carried by the railway that was being constructed at the same time. The Harrar mission continued to process all mail until 1904, when a post office opened at the newly established town of Dire Dawa. In the meantime, it was discovered that Ethiopian stamps sold by an agent in France at a discount, for publicity purposes, were being shipped to Ethiopia and used on mail. To prevent this, beginning in 1901, stamps were locally overprinted in different ways each year, and were only valid for postage with the overprint. UPU membership Prior to the admission of Ethiopia to the UPU in 1908, international mail from Ethiopia had to be additionally franked with stamps of UPU members. France operated post offices at Addis Ababa, Harar, and Dire Dawa, using stamps of Obock or the French