to the Ethiopian Highlands. These regions served as slave-hunting grounds since Aksumite times, and their Nilosaharan-speaking inhabitants were pejoratively called Shanqella (Šanqəlla, also Shanqila, Shankella) by the highland Ethiopians. Besides slaves, gold was traditionally an important export of Benishangul. Little is known about its history before the 19th century. Archaeologists have found sites that they date to the end of the 1st millennium BC or the beginning of the 1st millennium AD and assign them to the forerunners of today's Komuz-speaking ethnic groups. Finds attributing them to the Berta date from the 17th to 20th centuries and are mainly located on mountains, hills and in rocky areas that are easy to defend. It was not until the mid-20th century that Berta also settled in the lowlands, as slave hunts and armed conflict had ended. The area lay as a "buffer zone" or "no man's land" between southern Sennar and Damot in the highlands. The Ethiopian Emperor Susenyos invaded the area in 1617/18, and it fell to the Funj Sultanate in 1685. According to Negasso Gidada, Oromo penetration into the region began in the mid-18th century. In the first quarter of the 19th century, Arab traders arrived from Sennar, which was occupied by Ottoman Egypt from 1821. These traders married into the Berta upper class and thus gained political influence. By the middle of the century, the waṭāwiṭ, the descendants of Arabs and Berta, had become the new ruling class. They also began to spread Islam among the Berta. Various trade routes met in Benishangul, and local gold and Ethiopian amole (salt bars) were exchanged for slaves, cattle, horses, iron, civet, musk, coffee, ivory and honey (which also came from the Oromo areas of Sibu and Leeqaa). Luxury goods such as textiles and glass beads were imported via Sudan. Later in the 19th century, Benishangul was affected by the Mahdi uprising. In the late 19th century, Ethiopia, under Menelik II, annexed the Sultanates of Beni Shangul and Gubba (Qubba in Arabic) at the behest of Abdallahi ibn Muhammad of Sudan who feared the British would occupy it. In 1898, Asosa became the political and economic capital. Until the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s, the area supplied gold and slaves to the central government on a large scale. Slaves were also smuggled into Sudan across the border, which was established in 1902. Under the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, who