“Ways of Knowing” Episode 3: Ge’ez

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Ways of Knowing

The World According to Sound

Season 2, Episode 3

Ge’ez

[instrumental music plays]

Sam Harnett: In the middle of the fourth century CE, the kingdom of Aksum was one of the most powerful empires in the world. Centered in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, it stretched from Sudan across the Red Sea to Yemen. Its location on the Red Sea allowed it to have a monopoly on the trade route between Rome and India. It played a major role in the histories of Egypt, Persia and Rome, as well as the early days of Christianity and Islam. Aksum left an extensive written record of its accomplishments, but that record was long overlooked by Classics scholars in part because of the language it was written in: the ancient African language of Ge’ez.

[background music continues]

[Hamza Zafer reading Ge’ez]

SH: Like Latin, Ge’ez is rarely spoken today. It survives as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches. But in the fourth century, it was the language of the Aksum empire.

[Zafer reading Aksum inscription in Ge’ez]

SH: This is an account of how the Aksum conquered its neighbors and expanded. It is being read in Ge’ez by Hamza Zafer, a professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures.

[Zafer continues reading in Ge’ez]

SH: The inscription was chiseled onto a giant slab of stone in the center of Aksum. It’s one of countless stone slabs, or stellae, that Aksum kings erected during the height of the empire. Over a hundred still stand in the center of modern day Aksum in Northern Ethiopia. These stones had the deeds of the kingdom written not just in Ge’ez, but also Ancient Greek and Sabiac. Like the Rosetta Stone that helped decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphics, these other languages helped give insights into Ge’ez.

[Zafer continues reading in Ge’ez]

Hamza Zafer: It’s actually telling you about — primarily it’s an inscription celebrating a particular conquest. That tends to be most of the inscriptions from this particular period.

SH: For Professor Zafer, the Aksumite Empire is just one of many threads of history and culture that this language brings to life.

HZ: I have been teaching Ge’ez for many years. I’m not from Ethiopia or Eritrea. I am from Pakistan. But I have been drawn to the language for a number of reasons, one of them being my own desire to bring into the fray languages of the Global South — classical languages of the Global South — which also includes languages from places like Pakistan.

SH: Hamza’s interest in Ge’ez began with his desire to better understand the Quran. He wanted to know how different cultures and languages influenced the writing of this sixth century text, and how that writing reflected the world that produced it.

HZ: There’s a lot of Syriac and Aramiac and Hebrew and even Greek influence in the language of the Quran. It’s a text from the sixth century in Western Arabia. It was a confluence of different cultures. But one language that was a part of the Quran’s language that I didn’t have easy access to at the time when I was doing my doctoral is Ge’ez, classical Ethiopic, so really that’s where it started. It started with this curiosity because I was trying to have an expansive view of how the language of the Quran reflects its cultural world.

SH: The Quran is filled with vocabulary drawn from Ge’ez. Knowing this language allows for a richer understanding of the text — the history and culture that it draws on.

[instrumental background music plays]

Hamza’s study of Ge’ez led him to more and more fascinating texts. The Aksumite inscriptions. Early versions of Bible stories. Letters detailing the coming of Islam. Poetry, historical records, religious texts. He became entranced with the language itself — its phonetics and beauty. Soon he was focused directly on studying Ge’ez.

HZ: It’s the same type of reason that one would study Greek or Latin or Sanskrit or Arabic. It’s like an insight into the past, into the premodern world.

SH: Through Ge’ez, the view of world history is quite different from what one sees through other classical languages like Latin and Greek. It provides a countervailing narrative to a Eurocentric perspective on world history.

HZ: Studying a language like Ge’ez will fundamentally change your notion of the way history has gone. Because so much of the way we have understood history, of course, is through a colonial, a postcolonial heritage, which places Europe at the top. But studying a language like Ge’ez opens you up to another world, opens you up to another set of possibilities about where knowledge comes from. It can be both an intellectual and also maybe a political act. We’re still at such an embryonic stage in the study of Ge’ez. I imagine 20, 30, 50 years down the line, maybe it’s not going to be so odd or unusual to study a language like Ge’ez. But right now, of course, because we’re still very much in an era where the idea is that knowledge comes from Europe and the North, it seems to be an outlier. But it is not an outlier. It is a language that has a 2000 year history.

SH: In most Classics departments, Greek and Latin are still the only two languages that are studied.

HZ: There are numerous other languages like Ge’ez that belong to what we call now the Global South, that are these classical traditions. Investigations of these languages tell us that there are these other trajectories of thought; there are other hierarchies of knowledge that are possible. So part of the attraction of studying Ge’ez is that it opens you up to understanding different connections. You understand that Africa and India, Africa and Arabia, Africa and Europe had these other types of connections and other types of movements of ideas, movements of thought. There were producers of culture, producers of intellectual traditions within Africa whose ideas spread widely, and this was the medium through which they travelled.

SH: Up until recently, the only reason European and American scholars studied Ge’ez was because of its importance in the history of Christianity. The Empire of Aksum converted to Christianity shortly after Rome in the fourth century, and Ge’ez was the language of Ethiopian Christianity. Some of the oldest surviving Bible texts are in Ge’ez.

HZ: So this is the first chapter of the Book of Jonah.

[Zafer reads the Book of Jonah in Ge’ez]

SH: The story is similar to the version that survived in Ancient Greek, but not quite the same. For instance, in the Ge’ez version, God is referred to in a totally different way. Instead of being named, he is called “The Lord of the Land,” which is a much older way of referring to a deity.

[Zafer continues reading the Book of Jonah in Ge’ez]

SH: Scholars have pored over these kinds of differences to help get more insight on the history of early Christian stories. But that has often been where the study of Ge’ez has stopped.

HZ: The challenge now is to center Ge’ez in our study rather than to think of it only in relation to the North, only in relation to the Mediterranean world, but rather to understand it on its own account, on its own basis as a literary corpus, a premodern literary corpus that connects the Indian ocean world to the Eastern Mediterranean world, but also has a local universe connecting Arabia and Africa.

SH: Like any classical language, Ge’ez provides a different lens, a different way of thinking about the world. You don’t need some objective or goal to get a lot out of studying it.

HZ: Students are disincentivized from taking any courses that don’t have an immediate business use in a sense. I think taking a classical language, any classical language — a European, an African, an Asian classical language — is a way to side step that a little bit, to do something purely for the intellectual pleasure of opening this other world.

[background music begins]

HZ: For me, just the study of a classical language in itself as an intellectual exercise is really, really important for critical understanding. It teaches you historicity. Something that seems so immovable, so natural like a language — when you study a premodern language that has such a long history like Ge’ez, you understand that language changes, which is a very important thing to understand. Language changes so the way people conceive thoughts. The way people construct thought changes. Secondly, this is not something that has a direct, immediate use. But it kind of opens you up — like time travel — it opens you up to this whole other universe of culture, of language, of thought, of belief.

CH: Here are five texts that’ll help you learn more about publishing culture and the digital humanities as a way of knowing.
“The Throne of Adulis,” by Glen Bowersock

A vivid reconstruction of the conflict between Christian Ethiopians and Jewish Arabs in the sixth century. This story is only possible to tell now because of a marble throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis that was covered with Ge’ez inscriptions.

“The Garima Gospels,” by Judith McKenzie

The earliest surviving Ethiopian gospel books capture the phonetic beauty and poetry of Ge’ez. They also provide insight into the history of the Aksumite kingdom and early Christianity.

“The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages,” by François-Xavier Fauvelle

A historical account of the Middle Ages focused on Africa, where the work of artists and thinkers in places like Ghana, Nubia and Zimbabwe reverberated beyond the edges of the continent.

“The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space,” by Alexis Wick

A critical, far-reaching history of the Red Sea that makes a deeper argument about how Eurocentrism has left us with a partial and distorted view of the world.

“Decolonizing the Mind,” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

This collection of essays examines how language shapes national culture, history and identity; and presents a vision for linguistic decolonization.

SH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the University of Washington and its College of Arts & Sciences. Music provided by Ketsa, Nuisance, and our friends, Matmos. The World According to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

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