Hora-Dambal, also known as Lake Ziway or Dambal (Oromo: Hora Dambal, Amharic: ዟይ ሐይቅ), is one of the freshwater Rift Valley lakes of Ethiopia.
Located about 100 miles south of Addis Ababa,[1] on the border between the Oromia and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region, the woredas holding the lake's shoreline are Adami Tullu-Jido Kombolcha, Dugda, and Batu town.
[5] It contains five islands, including Debre Sina, Galila, Funduro, Tsedecha and Tulu Gudo, which is home to a monastery said to have housed the Ark of the Covenant around the ninth century.
The early 20th-century explorer Herbert Weld Blundell describes finding "two distinct terraces of former shores rise some 80 feet above the present level, forming a ring round that nearest to the lake on the north, about 4 miles from the shore, marking a former basin."
Weld Blundell includes in his account of "a curious tradition, perhaps suggested by the apparent elevated shore," and that the lake "was a kingdom 50 miles across, inhabited by seventy-eight chiefs", which disappeared in a single night.