Ge'ez Literary Culture and Philosophical Textual Traditions

Ge'ez is a South Semitic language whose script, an abugida in which each core consonantal sign is modified by attached vowel marks, developed from an Ancient South Arabian consonantal writing system introduced into the northern Horn of Africa in the pre-Christian era and is directly attested in the monumental inscriptions of Aksumite kings, most famously those of King Ezana in the fourth century CE. Ge'ez served as the spoken vernacular of the Aksumite kingdom before gradually ceasing to function as an everyday spoken language, probably by around the tenth century CE, even as it continued — and continues today — as the liturgical, scholarly, and literary language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, comparable in function to the continued liturgical use of Latin in the medieval and early modern Roman Catholic Church long after Latin had ceased to be anyone's mother tongue.