on horseback spearing the demon Wǝrzalyā on a Geʻez prayer scroll meant to dispel evil spirits that were thought to cause various ailments,
Wellcome Collection, London The Geʽez script was derived from the
Ancient South Arabian script, and despite its name its origins are debated, and may have originated in what is now
Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Yemen. The earliest inscriptions of
Semitic languages in
Eritrea date to the 9th century BCE and are known as Epigraphic South Arabian (ESA), an
abjad shared with contemporary kingdoms in the
Southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. After the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, variants of the South Arabian script arose, evolving in the direction of the later Geʻez
abugida or alphasyllabary. This evolution can be seen most clearly in evidence from inscriptions (mainly graffiti on rocks and caves) in the
Tigray Region in northern Ethiopia and in multiple parts of
Eritrea mainly in the former province of
Akele Guzai. The oldest known example of the Geez script is the
Hawulti obelisk in
Matara, Eritrea. By the first centuries CE, what is called "Old Ethiopic" or the "Old Geʻez writing system" arose, an abjad written
right-to-left (as opposed to
boustrophedon like ESA) with letters basically identical to the first-order forms of the modern vocalized writing system (e.g. "k" in the form of "kä"). There were also minor differences, such as the letter "g" facing to the right instead of to the left as in vocalized Geʻez, and a shorter left leg of "l", as in ESA, instead of equally-long legs in vocalized Geʻez (somewhat resembling the
Greek letter lambda).
Vocalization of Geʻez occurred in the 4th century, and though the first completely vocalized texts known are inscriptions by Ezana, vocalized letters predate him by some years, as an individual vocalized letter exists in a
coin of his predecessor,
Wazeba of Axum. Linguist Roger Schneider has also pointed out, in an unpublished early 1990s paper, anomalies in the known inscriptions of
Ezana of Axum that imply that he was consciously employing an archaic style during his reign, indicating that vocalization could have occurred much earlier. As a result, some believe that the vocalization may have been adopted to preserve the pronunciation of Geʻez texts due to the already moribund or extinct status of Geʻez, and that, by that time, the common language of the people were already later the Eritrean and Ethiopian
Afro-Asiatic languages. At least one of Wazeba's coins from the late 3rd or early 4th century contains a vocalized letter, some 30 or so years before Ezana. Kobishchanov,
Peter T. Daniels, and others have suggested possible influence from the
Brahmic scripts in vocalization, as they are also
abugidas, and the
Kingdom of Aksum was an important part of major trade routes involving
India and the
Greco-Roman world throughout
classical antiquity. () to the Eritrean and Ethiopian diaspora in the US According to the beliefs of the
Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the original consonantal form of the Geʻez
fidäl was divinely revealed to
Enos "as an instrument for codifying the laws", and the present system of vocalisation is attributed to a team of Aksumite scholars led by
Frumentius (
Abba Selama), the same missionary said to have converted King Ezana to
Christianity in the 4th century. It has been argued that the vowel marking pattern of the script reflects a South Asian system such as would have been known by Frumentius. A separate tradition, recorded by Aleqa Taye, holds that the Geʻez consonantal writing system was first adapted by Zegdur, a legendary king of the Agʻazyan
Sabaean dynasty held to have ruled in Abyssinia (Eritrea and Ethiopia) . Geʻez has 26 consonantal letters. Compared to the inventory of 29 consonants in the South Arabian writing system, the continuants
ġ,
ẓ, and South Arabian
s3 (Geʻez Sawt ሠ being derived from South Arabian
s2 ) are missing, as are
ḏ and
ṯ; these last two absences reflect the collapse of the
interdental with the
alveolar fricatives. On the other hand, emphatic ጰ, a Geʻez innovation, is a modification of ጸ, while Psa ፐ is based on Tawe ተ. using the Geʻez script at the Ethiopian millennium celebration Thus, there are 24 correspondences of Geʻez and the South Arabian writing system: Many of the letter names are cognate with those of
Phoenician, and may thus be assumed for the
Proto-Sinaitic script. == Geʽez writing system ==