Mount Amara

Mount Amara was a mountain in Ethiopia reported by early European explorers including Francisco Álvares, which entered the imagination of John Milton's description of Paradise that appeared in Paradise Lost and Coleridge and many other poets.^[1] The mountain, at least in Samuel Purchas's Purchas, His Pilgrimage, which Pakenham (1959) believes inspired Milton, is possibly to be identified with Amba Geshen among the list of mountains in Ethiopia.^[2]

References

1. Duncan, Joseph E. (6 July 1972). Milton's Earthly Paradise: A Historical Study of Eden. University of Minnesota Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-0-8166-5750-6. Retrieved 17 January 2016. Mount Amara, which deeply affected Milton and Coleridge and many lesser poets, rose into the European imagination as travelers returned and wrote colorful accounts that would be repeatedly adapted in travel literature and poetry. The first of these European descriptions of Mount Amara was given by Francisco Alvarez in his account of the Portuguese embassy in the years 1520 to 1527. Alvarez did not regard Amara as a paradise, and in fact reported that it was cold and uncomfortable.
2. Pakenham, The mountains of Rasselas: an Ethiopian adventure, pp. 139f