Ge'ez

Ge'ez is a South Semitic language that rose to prominence in the kingdom of Aksum, in the highlands of what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. Royal inscriptions of the early centuries CE record it in three scripts, including the distinctive Ethiopic syllabary that developed from South Arabian letters. The decisive innovation came in the fourth century, when the script began marking vowels by modifying each consonant's shape, producing one of the world's most systematic writing systems, still used today for Amharic and Tigrinya.

In the same century King Ezana adopted Christianity, and his later inscriptions invoke the Trinity where earlier ones had invoked the old gods, a conversion documented in stone. Bible translation into Ge'ez followed, traditionally associated with Syrian missionaries remembered as the Nine Saints. As a spoken language Ge'ez gave way to its daughter and sister tongues during the medieval period, surviving in the way Latin survived in Europe, as the fixed language of scripture, liturgy and learning. Ethiopian tradition continued to compose in it for centuries, producing theology, royal chronicles, poetry in the qene tradition of improvised sacred verse, and the national epic Kebra Nagast, the Glory of Kings.

The Ge'ez corpus preserves books the rest of the world lost. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, the largest of any Christian church, includes the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees complete only in Ge'ez, works quoted in antiquity and otherwise surviving in fragments. When European scholarship recovered Enoch from Ethiopian manuscripts in the eighteenth century, an entire stratum of Second Temple Jewish literature reopened. Beside the biblical books stand the liturgical treasures, above all the Deggua, the vast antiphonary of chant attributed to the sixth century St Yared, whose three modes still order the church's singing, together with anaphoras, homiliaries and the Miracles of Mary. Ge'ez remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches and of the Ethiopian Catholic Church, chanted daily by debteras, the trained cantors who carry the musical tradition.

The Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, likewise kept their scriptures and prayers in Ge'ez rather than Hebrew, a unique case of a Jewish community with an entirely non Hebrew liturgical language. Manuscript production in Ge'ez continued into the twentieth century, and church schools still teach boys and girls to read it, keeping a classical language alive as a living register of prayer.