History in Ge'ez. Reading the Ezana Stone at Axum

[Belay Tekalign]

Happy Easter for those of you taking vacation for Easter.

Today I found an excellent scholar (sounds middle eastern) reading Ge'ez and not just any Ge'ez, but the inscriptions on Ezana Stone at Axum. At the time of Ezana,  Ge'ez was not vocalized meaning there is only the first letter of each consonant. So to write Nigus you read only the three root letters "ngs" . You have to fill the rest. 

አናባቢውን እራስህ መስጠት አለብህ ። አዳምጡት በሞቴ ። በጣም ነው የማረከኝ ።

ካዳመጣችሁ ብኋላም የምታነቡት የአክሱም ታሪክ እዚህ አያያዣለሁ ።

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JewabPJ0rw

This is the Text on the Ezana Stone in Geez, Pseudo-Sabaic and Greek.

The 1st order of the Ge'ez script is the original consonant alphabet. That means, before the Abugida was formed and Ge'ez was written in a pure consonants script, the letters looked like today's 1st order. By adding small diacritics, the other orders were created.

So for example the 2nd word in this text looks like as if it's written "nägäsä" but these are just the old consonantal letters of Ge'ez. This word is just "ngs" and of course it is to be read as "negus"

Ezana was a king (Negusä Nägäst) of Axum (approximately today's North Ethiopia and Eritrea) in the 4th century. He was the first Axumite ruler to embrace Christianity but this inscription is from the pagan era as Ezana calls himself son of the deity Mahrem (the Greek text translates Mahrem as Ares) and the Christian God is not mentioned.

The first part I read out is the Geez part, which was the easiest to me although it contained some difficulties. First of all it is written in unvocalized Fidäl (Geez script). Some time later the Fidäl was transformed into a syllable script but this text is purely consonantal just like the South Arabian script the Fidäl was derived from.

Besides that the Geez in this text is a bit different from the Geez I learned so far. It might contain dialectal influences that were banned from Literary Geez later. And it contains mistakes.

One interesting fact about the Geez text on the stone is that it looks like it was an unplanned addition since it is written whereever there was space left.

Together with the Fidäl I'll also display the transliteration (without vowels). The way I vocalized it might not be 100% correct. I didn't find any suggestions on the vocalization in literature, so I did it myself (the hardest part of making this video).

The second part of the Video is in Pseudo-Sabaic. Actually it is just Geez and it is the same text. But the Geez here was written in Old South Arabian letters. Many words received a suffixed -m (which served as the absolute state ending in Sabaic... just like Akkadian Mimation in /sharrum/ 'the king, a king' or Arabic Nunation/Tanween in /malikun/ 'a king') but in this Pseudo-Sabaic text it is used hypercorrectly on words where it shouldn't be.

Besides that the Pseudo-Sabaic text has some minor alternations, e.g. mlk instead of negus, that make it look more Sabaic. I don't know if this was actually meant to be read out or if it was just meant to look good. Maybe the writer couldn't speak Sabaic and just knew the letters? Or perhaps he wanted to make it intelligible to non-Sabaic speakers?

That text also lacks the numerals.

The third part is the Greek part of the inscription. I don't read it out because I can't speak Greek so I wouldn't be able to read it out correctly with the right intonation and so on. Again it is mostly the same content as the Geez text.

What I translated here as 'Ethiopians' is Habashat in the Ge'ez text. It probably has the same meaning that Habesha has today in Ethiopia, thus speakers of Semitic languages (Geez, Tigre, Amharic etc) in Northeastern Africa. Here it is used to distinguish these people from Semites of Southern Arabia (Himyar, Raydan, Saba etc) aswell as from other peoples of the Ethiopian area (Kush, Beja etc.).

I could aswell translate it as 'Habesha' but I chose 'Ethiopians' to make the translation easier to understand for people who are not that familiar with those ancient tribal names.

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The attached is found from this link : http://www.dskmariam.org/artsandlitreature/litreature/pdf/aksum.pdf

Use the link instead if the attached (839k) is heavy.