Ayele Bekerie. _Ethiopic: An African Writing System: Its
History and Principles_. Lawrenceville, N.J., and Asmara,
Eritrea: The Red Sea Press, Inc., 1997. xiv + 176 pp.
Tables, figures, bibliography, and index. $18.95 (paper),
ISBN 1-56902-021-3.

Reviewed for H-Africa by Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@worldnet.att.net>

I approach this book as a linguist specializing in Semitic
languages and in the study of writing systems. Ayele Bekerie
(AB) does neither: his two master's degrees from Cornell
University are in Agronomy (M.Sc.) and in Africana Studies
(M.P.S.); the book under review corresponds to his Ph.D.
dissertation from Temple University's famed African American
Department.  Accordingly, it represents the application of
Afrocentrist dogma to questions of historical fact, and on
the matter of Ethiopia's indigenous writing system, these
two realms of knowledge conflict.

The first time I read the book, I could not make head or
tail of it. It is a congeries of apodictic statements on
historiography, especially African historiography; a handful
of observations on the Ethiopic script, many of them
factually incorrect; an overview of classical Ethiopian
literature and esthetics; and personal attacks on certain
European scholars. I then came upon Stephen Howe's
_Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes_ (1998), a
survey of the background, claims, and practices of that
discipline, and on a second reading, various aspects of AB's
_Ethiopic_ were clearer. Howe's work also reintroduced me to
a number of Afrocentric dogmas that I had first encountered
in the same place where I first encountered AB, viz., the
Athena Discussion List established by the publisher
HarperCollins a few years ago ostensibly to foster
discussion of Martin Bernal's _Black Athena_ (1987, 1991)
via structured debate between Bernal and Mary Lefkowitz,
whose own screed against Afrocentrism, _Not Out of Africa_,
had just been published, not coincidentally, by
HarperCollins (1996). However, alleged electronic glitches
prevented Bernal's fourth contribution from appearing, and
Lefkowitz apparently took this as a personal snub and
declined further participation. The Athena List thereupon
became a stew of vicious and racist name-calling into which
an occasional serious Afrocentrist would contribute
assertions about ancient Egypt based on Herodotus and other
ancient authors, and an occasional serious Classicist would
attempt to explain critical method and contextual
interpretation of sources; others would put forward claims
about historical connections between Egyptian and other
African languages, and an occasional serious linguist
(including this one) would attempt to explain historical
linguistics methodology and to reveal the flaws in the
language-oriented publications of Cheikh Anta Diop and
Thophile Obenga.  >From time to time, a posting by AB would
appear, making odd-seeming claims about the Ethiopic script.
Requests for elucidation were met with the statement that a
book was in preparation; the editor of H-Africa, who
sometimes contributed to the discussion, said he would ask
me to review it. When I espied _Ethiopic_ in a bookstore, I
reminded him of his offer, and here is the result.

From Howe, I learned that the dogmas I had earlier been
exposed to have been common coin in some (mainly American)
circles for well over a century, and that they have been
handed down ever since, uninfluenced by more recent research
and scholarship, often complete with the original
century-old attributions, often without. I learned that the
concept of a critical approach to sources does not exist in
Afrocentrist teaching--that appeal to authority is decisive:
that the writings of Diop in particular are sacrosanct, and
that a particularly authoritarian figure is Temple
University's Molefi K. Asante, whose edited volumes and
journals virtually never carry any contributions challenging
any Afrocentrist teaching. In the intellectual realm, I
learned that guiding principles of Afrocentrism include
hyperdiffusionism, indigeneity, and an ethnology grounded
firmly in the now completely discredited racial science of
nineteenth-century Europe. These three principles in
particular find expression in AB's book.

There are an Introduction (pp. 1-30) and five chapters: The
Arabian Peninsula in Ethiopian Historiography (pp. 31-60),
The History and Principles of the Ethiopic Writing System
(pp. 61-103), _The Book of Hnok_ and African Historiography
(pp. 105-18), _Se'en_: Aesthetics and Literary Traditions of
Ethiopia (pp. 119-39), and Conclusion (pp. 141-49). Each
chapter includes bibliographic endnotes, though many of
their entries are not repeated in the Bibliography (pp.
151-64) and many of the entries in the Bibliography are not
cited in the book. At the end is a detailed Index (pp.
165-76).

Specific difficulties with AB's book can be grouped in four
categories:  theory of writing, Semitic languages, Ethiopic
writing systems, and conduct of scholarship.

1. Theory of writing

Although my concern here is not Afrocentrist theory per se,
I note that within the Introduction, sections on a
"Locational Theoretical Model" (pp.  12-18) give evidence of
a schism, with AB defending the position of his teacher C.
T. Keto against an assault by Samir Amin. This passage is
sandwiched within the initial characterizations of writing
systems, to which I now direct my attention, and I do not
think that the obscurities of the following extracts can be
attributed to Afrocentrism:

***

"Signs, symbols, syllographs, and writing systems are
mechanisms of knowledge systems, which may be shown at
various stages of knowledge creations, conceptions,
development and transmissions." (pp. 1-2)

"What is writing? What is a writing system? Writing systems
are components of knowledge systems. Writing is a means by
which people record, objectify, and organize their
activities and thoughts through polygraphs in order to
facilitate and ensure existence, growth, nurturing,
creativity and continuity from generation to generation.
Writing could also be simply defined as a representation of
speech and thoughts through various forms of sound graphs. A
writing system then is a conventional and principled way of
actualizing activities and thoughts, such as languages,
natural science, theology, commerce and aesthetics, through
polygraphs depicting polysounds and meanings." (p. 2)

"Close and careful examination of writing systems ...
reveals layers of knowledge beyond language and linguistics.
It could be argued that the study of writing systems may
help us to understand thought patterns or how people
organize their thoughts. It may also enable us to probe the
scope of human liberty that permits the creation of ways and
means to improve and enhance 'beingness' and togetherness.
Writing is a way of transforming our sensual perceptions
into recognizable imagery. It is a means to describe
phenomena." (p. 3)  ***

("Syllograph" is AB's word for what in English is called a
syllabograph;  he writes "syllabry" for "syllabary," even
injecting the spelling into quotes from other authors, e.g.
p. 91.)

These quotations show at least that AB is not familiar with
the literature on the history and nature of writing systems,
and at best that his approach is mystical rather than
scientific, and that he has not found the words to express
this mystical approach in such a way that others can grasp
his viewpoint. In the absence of explanations of many of the
terms used, I am at a loss to understand how AB's view fits
into or contrasts with mainstream interpretations. The last
quote says that a particular suggestion "could be
argued"--but it is not argued anywhere in the book.

(Compare my definition of writing, published e.g. in _The
World's Writing Systems_, p. 3: "A system of more or less
permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way
that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the
intervention of the utterer.")

2. Semitic languages

There is one major point where Afrocentric dogma seriously
impacts AB's investigation of Ethiopic writing, and that is
the insistence on total autonomy of African culture and
civilization. From the moment the Ge`ez (Classical Ethiopic)
language came to the attention of European scholars, in the
sixteenth century, there was no doubt of its similarity to
Arabic, Hebrew, and the other languages that would later
(1781) be dubbed "Semitic." Whatever sort of color prejudice
there may have been in Europe at the time, it was never
suggested that the language of "black" people was
disqualified from relation to these other, better known
languages.

The similarity is patently obvious to anyone with the most
superficial familiarity with any of the languages concerned,
and the data may be examined in any number of standard
reference sources on Semitic comparative grammar (e.g.
Moscati 1964, Bennett 1998). Yet AB writes (p.  49), "The
Kibr Ngst [and other Ethiopian classics] classifies Ge'ez as
a language of the house of Ham. ... Ge'ez sources are clear
on that score.  If Ge'ez is not a Semitic language, then
much less so would be the other Ethiopian 'Semitic'
languages like Tigr, Tigrinya, Amarinya, Harari, Gurag. The
classification of Ge'ez as a Semitic language is a rather
arbitrary and recent European one." (There is a close-quote
quotation mark at this point, with a footnote referring to
an "unpublished manuscript" by one Haile Habtu of the City
College of New York. This ms. is heavily relied on by AB,
but the numerous quotations give the impression that it
cannot have been anything more than an undergraduate term
paper, since they are wildly inaccurate.) I do not see that
there is any conflict between Ge'ez being a Semitic language
(which is a matter of an arbitrary label for a language
family and simple observation of the characteristics of the
languages assigned to that family) and a traditional label
for it as "of the house of Ham," which is hardly the result
of linguistic or philological examination.

Similarly AB writes (p. 44) "Hamitic/Semitic divide, of
course was nothing but a means to keep the Ethiopian people
divided." This is complete nonsense. "Hamitic," like
"Semitic," in linguistics is an arbitrary label, taken from
the genealogies in Genesis 10 but implying nothing as to the
historicity of the Biblical account of tribal relationships
nor especially of its pertinence to the genetic
relationships of languages (which are independent of ethnic
and even cultural relations between peoples).  "Hamitic" was
applied to the set of language families that are known to be
genetically related to the Semitic languages: Semitic is one
of six branches of what is now called the Afroasiatic phylum
of languages, as has been recognized since the second half
of the nineteenth century; the other branches are Egyptian
(ancient Egyptian and Coptic), Berber (spoken by millions in
North Africa), Cushitic and Omotic (found in the Horn of
Africa, from northern Sudan to Tanzania), and Chadic (mostly
in and around northern Nigeria, the best known Chadic
language being Hausa). The name "Hamitic" for the other five
has been abandoned because the compound "Hamito-Semitic"
incorrectly suggests that the other five are more closely
related to each other than to Semitic. The Hamitic/Semitic
divide, then, is nothing but a recognition that Ge`ez,
Amharic, Tigrinya, and so on are much more distantly related
to languages like Oromo and Somali than they are to Hebrew,
Arabic, and so on.

3. Ethiopic script

AB makes a number of assertions about the history of the
Ethiopic script that are less than accurate. In his zeal to
deny any South Arabian influence on the beginnings of
Ethiopian (Aksumite) civilization, he makes the claim that
the monumental South Arabian script is a development from
(an early form of?) the Ethiopic. At the same time, he
claims that one of the "issues" of Ethiopic studies "for
future scholarly investigation" is, "What is the
significance of having more than one syllograph for some of
the phonemes in the Ethiopic writing system?" (p. 148). This
is not at all an issue requiring investigation; it is a
simple fact that the script underlying the Ethiopic was
devised for a language richer in consonants than Ge`ez; when
some of the consonantal phonemes (laryngeals, sibilants)
merged in Ge`ez, the letters for them were retained in the
script even though the scribes could not know from the sound
of a word which letter to write it with. Only the
investigation of Semitic etymologies makes it possible for
lexicographers to catalogue words with the historically
appropriate spellings. If, conversely, the South Arabian
script derived from the Ethiopic, there is no way the
homophonous letters could have been consistently assigned to
the etymologically appropriate sounds.

AB suggests that the ultimate origin of the Ethiopic script
is the so-called "Proto-Sinaitic," which dates to some time
in the first half of the second millennium BCE and was found
on some votive objects near mines in the Sinai (in this he
reflects mainstream scholarship of the history of the
alphabet, although many scholars are no longer certain that
the "decipherment" of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions
published by W. F.  Albright is successful). He seems,
though, to have the impression that but a single such
inscription exists, and that it is on a sphinx (p. 70); in
fact, about twenty inscriptions have been found, on a
variety of items that seem to have been dedicated to the
Egyptian goddess Hathor. But, departing from the usual
understanding (Daniels 1997) whereby Proto-Sinaitic
represents the earliest attested state of the West Semitic
script, from which or from something similar to which two
descendants developed, one in the northern Semitic-speaking
realm, which through Proto-Canaanite led to Phoenician,
Aramaic, and eventually the Greek and Latin alphabets, and
the other in the southern Semitic-speaking realm, which
through the Old North Arabic inscriptions (Safaitic,
Thamudic, Lihyanic) led to the script of the South Arabian
inscriptions, which was brought into the Aksumite region and
developed into the Ge`ez script (others prefer to derive
this from Thamudic, references and discussion in Bernal
1990:63), AB would have Ge`ez script somehow come directly
from Proto-Sinaitic, somehow passing through the Nile Valley
without leaving a trace. Somehow, moreover, it crossed with
hieroglyphs and took on pictographic properties.

The one piece of evidence offered by AB in support of his
notion of the Egypt-mediated background of Ethiopic script
comes from letter-order. The northern Semitic scripts
exhibit the familiar letter-order

' b g x d h w z H T y k S l m V n Z s ` p c q r F G t

(where capital letters are an Internet expedient
corresponding with a variety of diacritics; "V" and "F"
represent the interdentals, equivalent to English th in
"thy" and "thigh" respectively, which are found in Ugaritic,
Arabic, and South Arabian but merged with other consonants
in the other Semitic languages)

but the Ethiopic order is different:

h l H m S r s q b t x n ' k w ` z y d g T P c D f p

AB claims that the first and last letters in Ethiopic
correspond to Egyptian words _ha_ 'the beginning' and _peh_
'the end'; the shape of the first letter--like the roman
letter U--is said to correspond both with the horns of a
bull and with a man's arms upraised to heaven (p. 82). No
explanation is given for the shape of the last letter--like
the roman letter T. These two letters are also (p. 83)
associated with hieroglyphs representing the forequarters
and hindquarters of a lion respectively. In fact, according
to the standard signlist in Gardiner's _Egyptian Grammar_
(1957), the former (sign no. F4) represents the word _H`t_
'front' and not the sound H (note, moreover, H, not h); the
latter (sign no. F22)  represents the word _pHwy_
'hindquarters, end' and hence the sound sequence pH (not p
alone).

AB's only other suggestion for a connection with hieroglyphs
concerns the letter S--shaped like a rounded roman letter
W--which he compares with the hieroglyph he describes as "a
garden or farm ..., a sign representation of alternate raws
of papyrus and lotus" (p. 83), presumably (there is no
illustration) 'pool with lotus flowers' (sign no. M8), which
represents both the word _S`_ 'lotus pool' and the sound
sequence S`. In isolation this one case is useless for
showing dependence or relation of Ethiopic on Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Instead, the shape of Ethiopic S relates to the
shape of the corresponding letter in South Arabian in ways
similar to those seen with the other letters of the two
scripts.

AB offers no suggestions as to the order of the rest of the
letters between the first and last.

The Ethiopic order does, though, find at least a partial
explanation in the ancient order of the South Arabian
letters, which was discovered about twenty years ago
(summary in Ryckmans 1985) and is now known to have been in
use well before 1000 BCE (Bordreuil and Pardee 1995):

h l H m q w C r b t S k n x c s f ' ` D g d G T z V y F Z

(where C stands for the consonant corresponding to Hebrew sin)

What has not yet been explained is the divergence between
the ancient South Arabian and the modern Ethiopic
letter-orders. Moreover, the letter p is unique to Ethiopic
script; it corresponds to no letter in any other Semitic
script (including Proto-Sinaitic, South Arabian, and
Thamudic) and is placed at the end, as is usual for letters
added to a standard inventory after its adoption.

AB is aware of the most striking difference between Ethiopic
writing and all other West Semitic writing--the
incorporation of explicit vowel indication into the letters,
so that there are 7 x 26 = 182 syllabograms (and not just 26
consonant letters) in the basic script--but his only
allusion to the origin of this unusual practice is to
pooh-pooh the theory that it represents influence from India
(where vowels had been notated similarly for about 600 years
by the time Ethiopic script took on vowel notation--took it
on along with Christianity). AB politicizes the suggestion:
"The South Arabian paradigm, found difficult to defend, has
been conveniently replaced by the Indian paradigm, for the
purpose is to assert the non-African origin of the Ethiopic
writing system. The presence of a close relationship between
the Ethiopian and the Indian does not automatically mean the
latter is a source to the former" (p. 19). If only the
caution of the last sentence were observed in connection
with other hyperdiffusionist Afrocentric claims. Of course
the suggestion of Indic inspiration for the Ethiopic
vocalization system has no bearing on the South Arabian
origin of the consonant shapes. Nor is it shameful for one
civilization to make use of an innovation of another!

AB's discussion of the history of Ethiopic script does
nothing to displace the accepted understanding that it is a
development from a form of the South Arabian, or Sabean,
script. This accounts for the apparent duplication of
letters for the same sound and for the idiosyncratic letter
order. Any pictographic background of the letters (that may
or may not have played a part in the origin of the script)
has long since been obscured by millennia of gradual
calligraphic alterations to their shapes.

4. Conduct of scholarship

AB takes a number of pages to discuss a topic that seems to
have little bearing on the history and principles of the
Ethiopic writing system: the book of Enoch. In Western
Christianity, this work (which has survived complete only in
a Ge`ez translation; fragments in Aramaic were found among
the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some portions are known in Greek
as well)  forms part of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of
the Old Testament. In Ethiopia, the book is canonical.

With what sadly looks like paranoiac nativism, AB insists
that Enoch must have been composed in Ge`ez, that it cannot
have been translated from Greek or Aramaic. Without
considering their evidence for the languages underlying the
Ge`ez, he condemns the scholars who have discussed it:
Knibb, Milik, Ullendorff, Charles. AB seems to think that it
is necessary to have a complete original-language text in
order to demonstrate that a book has been translated: "The
fact that _The Ethiopian Book of Hnok_ is found in very
fragmentary forms in the Aramaic and Greek languages has
raised the issue regarding its original language" (p. 112).
This is utterly untrue; it was obvious when the book first
became known in Europe (1773) that it was a translation, and
the Greek fragments did not become known for another
century, the Aramaic more than a half century later than
that. "It is hard to agree with Knibb's suggestion of
Aramaic being the original language of [Enoch] given the
above statement" [that the DSS Aramaic fragments relate to
just 196 of the 1,062 verses of the complete book] (p. 114).
But the fact of a translation can be determined even in the
absence of the slightest shred of original text.

AB makes his assertions without the least familiarity with
the philological methods that demonstrate the fact of
translation. This one example from M. A. Knibb's 10-page
discussion of the problem (The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, vol.
2, pp. 37-46) may illustrate the thinking: "In 101:4 the
Ethiopic text reads 'do you not see the kings of the ships
[Ge`ez text given]?' where the context requires rather 'the
sailors of the ships'.  Halvy long ago suggested that the
rendering 'kings' derived from a misreading of [Aramaic]
_mlHy_ as _mlky_, and this explanation was generally
adopted" (p. 39). Knibb, like Edward Ullendorff, sees the
Ge`ez as translated directly from Aramaic, with, apparently,
consultation of a Greek version. Ullendorff gives this
example (Ethiopia and the Bible, p.  61) showing a Greek
background: "One need only think of the misreading in Enoch
22:2 where the context seems to require 'hollow places' and
where the Ethiopic version is likely to have mistaken
[Greek] _koloi_ for _kalo_ ([Ge`ez] _Sanayat_)."

R. H. Charles, writing nearly a century ago (thus long
before the discovery of any Aramaic fragments of Enoch),
discussed the relationship between the two main Greek
fragments known to him and the Ethiopic: "Even the most
superficial study makes it clear that E and Gg are more
closely related than E and Gs or Gs and Gg. Indeed the
evidence makes it clear that _E was translated from a MS.
which was also the parent or ancestor of Gg._ This follows
from the fact that _the same corruptions_ appeear in GgE
over against true readings in Gs where this exists" (The
Book of Enoch, p.  xviii). He deduces that there was an
"Original Greek Translation from the Semitic" from which
were copied Gs and a lost copy; and from this lost copy were
made both Gg and the Ethiopic version (p. xix). Much later
in his introduction he discusses at length what the original
Semitic language might have been (pp. lvii-lxx), concluding
that Enoch chapters 6-36 were written in Aramaic and
chapters 1-5, 37-104 were written in Hebrew.

AB reserves special scorn for J. T. Milik, who edited the
Aramaic fragments of Enoch found among the Dead Sea Scrolls:
"Milik, perhaps, has no parallel in his contempt of _The
Ethiopic Book of Hnok_. Milik used unscholarly and
unscientific methods in his long and quite dormant effort to
establish the Aramaic fragments of Qumranic Enoch as the
original source of the Book. Just a glance at his Aramaic -
Greek Ethiopic Glossary clearly shows his brutal contempt
and, perhaps, ignorance of Ge`ez. While the Aramaic and
Greek words are written in their respective scripts, Milik
used the Roman or English script for the Ethiopic words, as
if the Ethiopic is devoid of its own script. This is
actually the case throughout the text. To a lay reader, the
absence of the Ethiopic writing system may suggest that the
Ethiopic is an oral language" (p. 116). This is the most
specious claim of all. Had AB read even just a few pages of
Milik's book, he would have seen that the only non-Roman
type used is Hebrew (for the Aramaic text itself), Greek,
and (curiously) Coptic. More than twenty other languages are
cited (see Milik's indexes, pp. 408-26), and not one of
them--not even Syriac or Arabic--is printed in its own
non-Roman script.

From Milik's conclusion (not quite accurately quoted) that
"collation of [the Aramaic fragments] with existing
witnesses of Enochic Books reveal the very secondary,
periphrastic, and often confusing nature of the Ethiopic
text. One should never trust any given detail of the
version" (p.  116, quoting p. 88), AB draws the inferences
that "Milik, who cannot even read Ge`ez, reached a
conclusion that is more a reflection of his bias than a
product of his unfermented experience. [The last quoted
sentence] is nothing but a good example of hegemonic
scholarship" (p. 117). Milik's knowledge of Ge`ez is
certainly not nonexistent, but as was brought out by his
reviewers--Ullendorff and Knibb--twenty years before AB was
writing, it was not adequate to studying the relation
between the Aramaic fragments and the Ethiopic text; whereas
they pay due respect to his "profound attainments in
Aramaic" and conclude "If only he could have been persuaded
to restrict the quite gratuitously wide compass of his
disquisition! Had he given us less, it would have been
infinitely more."

AB thus rejects all modern scholarship not only on the
history of Ethiopic writing, but also on the book of Enoch.
In so doing, he impoverishes his own understanding of this
document that is so vital for Ethiopian civilization.

5. Ethiopian civilization

Several chapters of the book are devoted to subjects even
more distant from the study of the history and principles of
the script. The passages on philosophy and esthetics are
quite interesting; the passages on numerology merit a
comment. AB describes an equivalent to Hebrew gematria,
where a numerical value is assigned to each character and
calculations are made based on the letters with which a word
or name is written. According to the diagram on p. 88, each
simple letter (consonant plus a) represents a number (h = 1,
l = 2, ..., p = 800) and the vowel variations represent
multipliers (hu = 2, lu = 4, ..., pu = 1600, ..., ho = 7, lo
= 14, ..., po = 5600); but in all the examples of
numerological calculations, the vowel variations are not
taken into account.

Not surprisingly, AB denies the obvious fact that the
Ethiopic numerals are taken directly from the Greek numerals
(i.e., the letters of the Greek alphabet). Instead, he
attempts (p. 89f.) to match the numerals to Ethiopic letters
(and actually gets one of the correspondences right: 3 <
gamma = g). He shows 12 of the 19 different numerals, and
assigns letters to 8 of them. Not only is no principle
suggested for which letter is assigned to which numeral, and
not only are four (or eleven) of the numerals unassigned,
but the letter g is assigned to three of them, and h to two!

6. Conclusion

I could have quoted many additional outrageous statements
concerning facts of the history of Ethiopic writing and the
conduct of scholarship by Europeans. The whole book is so
confused that even if there were an Afrocentric case to be
made for a revision of our understanding of the history of
Ethiopia, it cannot be found here. If this is simply a
transcript of AB's Temple University dissertation--still
more if it is a revision of it--it casts more of a pall than
even Stephen Howe imagined on intellectual life in its
Department of African American Studies.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for assistance and comments to Martin Bernal,
Gene Gragg, Grover Hudson, and M. O'Connor.

References

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