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Ge’ez—Ethiopia’s classical language—bridges Africa’s ancient past with a living tradition.

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A Semitic language, Ge’ez appears in inscriptions from around the first millennium BCE and later flourishes in the Ethiopic fidäl, an abugida script still used today.

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Though no longer spoken as a daily language, Ge’ez remains the liturgical tongue of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches and underpins modern languages like Amharic and Tigrinya.

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For biblical studies, Ge’ez is a treasure.

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The only complete text of 1 Enoch survives in Ge’ez, preserving material otherwise fragmentary in Hebrew and Aramaic.

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While some traditions claim Ge’ez predates the Flood, scholarly evidence places its written history in historical times, not antediluvian.

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Ge’ez matters because it safeguards a vast corpus—scripture, chronicles, hymns, and scholarship—keeping one of the world’s oldest written heritages alive.