Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ETHIOPIC

Classical Ethiopic (Geʿez), the oldest attested member of Ethiopic Semitic, a family of about a dozen Semitic languages spoken in Eritrea and the Ethiopian highlands. Ethiopic Semitic is presumably derived from one or more forms of South Semitic brought from Yemen, probably in the first half of the 1st millennium b.c. A South Arabian colony not far from the later Ethiopian capital Aksum has been paleographically dated to ca. 500 by Old South Arabian monumental inscriptions of the Sabean type. Classical Ethiopic disappeared as a spoken language probably some time before the 10th century a.d. However, it continues today as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and was the only official written language of Ethiopia up to practically the end of the 19th century.

The earliest attestation of Classical Ethiopic is a corpus of about a dozen royal inscriptions in Ethiopic (plus six in Greek), the most important from a king named Ezana (perhaps mid-4th century a.d.). Six of the Geʿez inscriptions are written in the Old South Arabian alphabet, two in nonvocalized Ethiopic, and four in the earliest attestation of vocalized Ethiopic script. The earliest inscriptions of Ezana are pagan, while the last few attest to the introduction of monotheism (presumably Christian) to the court at Aksum.

After Ezana the oldest core of Ethiopic literature gradually took shape in the form of translations from the Greek (in turn sometimes a rendering from Hebrew or Aramaic). This literature, preserved and recopied in churches and monasteries during a long “dark ages” when the rise of Islam in Arabia and the Red Sea area effectively cut Ethiopia off from the rest of the Near Eastern Christian world, includes an Ethiopic translation of the Bible and accompanying apocrypha (in particular a long, complete version of Enoch), many liturgical texts, some lives of saints, some patristic fragments (a few unattested elsewhere), and a version of the monastic Rules of Pachomius.

Ca. 1000 Ethiopia reestablished contact with Egypt. A metropolitan (abuna) for the Ethiopian Church was regularly dispatched by the patriarch of Alexandria, and there was a new flourishing of ecclesiastical literature of all genres (much of it translated from the Arabic, in turn translated from Greek, Coptic, Syriac, or other sources). In addition, an original secular or court literature arose in the form of royal chronicles, legal texts, even a sort of national epic (the Kĕbrä Nägäst, “Glory of Kings,” an elaboration of the legend of Solomon and Sheba). A more popular magic literature also took shape, centered around the production of amulets and “magic scrolls.” The production of this, and some hymnic genres, has continued into the present century.

Bibliography. A. Dillmann, Ethiopic Grammar, 2nd ed. (1907, repr. Amsterdam, 1974); T. O. Lambdin, Introduction to Classical Ethiopic (Geʿez). HSS 24 (Missoula, 1978); W. Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Wiesbaden, 1987).

Gene B. Gragg

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ETHIOPIC

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)