Alphabet Letters
Bet (Ba) በ
Ge'ez Letters
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Origin Descends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE
Bet is the ninth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes a plain b. Its name is the inherited Semitic word for a house, the same word that stands behind Hebrew bet and Arabic ba, and it is one of the clearest points of contact between the Ge'ez letter names and the Northwest Semitic ones. Ge'ez itself is no longer anyone's first language. It is the classical language of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and it remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches and of the Ethiopian Jewish tradition, so the script is read, sung and copied daily by people who speak Amharic or Tigrinya at home.
Facts
Transmission
Manuscript TraditionGe'ez scripture and liturgical books are copied by hand on parchment and bound between wooden boards, a practice that has continued without interruption 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting SourceWhy the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not. Origins
Origin PeriodDescends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Place of OriginThe kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origin of the NameThe Ge'ez letter names are traditional names carried with the script; some are recognisably the inherited Semitic words and others are not, and the relation of the set as a whole to the Northwest Semitic names is only partly recoverable 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Sense of the NameBet's own description states its name is the inherited Semitic word for a house, the same word behind Hebrew bet and Arabic ba; extracted directly from its own text. Use
Ritual UseRead, chanted and copied in the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, and used for the religious texts of the Ethiopian Jewish tradition 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script of the Ge'ez liturgy of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, where the text is chanted rather than read silently 4Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Identity
Script TypeAn abugida: each base consonant is written in seven vowel orders and is never written without a vowel of its own, which sets the script apart from the consonantal abjads of the rest of the Semitic family 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script PositionNinth of twenty-six in the halehame order, the traditional order of the fidel, which is not the inherited Semitic order 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script How the Letter JoinsThe letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Attributions
Associated Soundb 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceGe'ez numbers are written with a separate set of twenty numeral characters, so no numeral value attaches to a letter and the script has no counterpart to Hebrew gematria or the Arabic abjad reckoning 5Tradition: The Ge'ez script Meaning in the Attesting SourceWritten in seven orders, ge'ez, ka'eb, salis, rabi', hamis, sadis and sabi', which carry the seven vowels of the classical language; the first order is the citation form and the others modify its shape 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Learn More
Bet, and a Letter Name That Is Still a Word
Bet writes a plain b and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew beth, the Syriac beth and the Arabic ba. The correspondence is exact and uncontested. What distinguishes this letter is its name, which is not merely recognisable as a relative of the Northwest Semitic one but is the same word, and a word still in use.
Ge'ez bet means a house. It is a live noun, and it turns up in the ordinary compounds of the religious vocabulary: bete krestiyan, the house of Christians, is the term for a church building, and Beta Israel, the house of Israel, is the name the Jewish community of Ethiopia uses of itself. The Hebrew letter name beth means the same thing in Hebrew for the same reason, because both continue one Semitic word.
This is one of a small number of places where the acrophonic principle behind the Canaanite alphabet is still visible from the Ethiopian side. Most Ge'ez letter names have worn down into forms carrying no sense in the language. Here the sense is intact and can be stated as a fact rather than as a reconstruction, which is the test applied before any meaning is recorded against these twenty-six rows.
The compound bete krestiyan also shows the construct state, the Semitic way of joining two nouns so that the first is defined by the second with no word standing for of. Hebrew and Arabic build phrases in the same way, and it is one of the constructions an English translation always has to expand into something longer than the original.
Bete Krestiyan, and What Is Inside One
Bete krestiyan, the house of Christians, is the Ge'ez term for a church building, and the buildings it names are laid out on a plan the phrase does not prepare a visitor for. A traditional Ethiopian church is often round, with three concentric zones: an outer ambulatory where the cantors stand and the chant is sung, a middle ring where communicants receive, and an inner sanctuary at the centre that only priests enter.
What is in that sanctuary is the tabot, a consecrated tablet that is the real centre of the building. A church without one is not a church. It is kept covered, and when it is carried out in procession at Timkat and at other feasts it is wrapped in cloth so that it is never seen. The congregation is oriented towards it.
The resemblance of that arrangement to the plan of the temple in Jerusalem is obvious, and it is one of the reasons the relation between Ethiopian Christianity and Israelite practice has been argued over for more than a century. The atlas records the arrangement and the argument without deciding between the readings. The letter is where a description of the building starts, because bet is the word the building is named with, and the same word names both a house and the community that meets inside it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Bet and the Syriac beth continue the Semitic b and share the inherited name, which is the word for a house in both languages.
Bet and the Hebrew beth continue the Semitic b and share one inherited name. The name means house in both languages, and Ge'ez bet is still the ordinary word for one.
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source 2. Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries
David W. Phillipson, Yale University Press, 2009
3. Ethiopia and the Bible (The Schweich Lectures 1967)
Edward Ullendorff, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1968View the Source 4. Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology
Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, A-R Editions, 1993
5. The Unicode Standard
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
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