Ge’ez—Ethiopia’s classical language—bridges Africa’s ancient past with a living tradition.
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.
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.
For biblical studies, Ge’ez is a treasure.
The only complete text of 1 Enoch survives in Ge’ez, preserving material otherwise fragmentary in Hebrew and Aramaic.
While some traditions claim Ge’ez predates the Flood, scholarly evidence places its written history in historical times, not antediluvian.
Ge’ez matters because it safeguards a vast corpus—scripture, chronicles, hymns, and scholarship—keeping one of the world’s oldest written heritages alive.