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Alphabet Letters

Nahas (Na) ነ

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

Nahas is the twelfth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes a plain n. Ge'ez manuscripts are written on parchment prepared from goat or sheep skin, bound between wooden boards, and copied by hand; the practice has not been interrupted, and scribes in Ethiopian and Eritrean monasteries copy scripture and liturgical books in this script today. The oldest surviving Ge'ez gospel manuscripts are among the earliest illuminated Christian books anywhere, and the letterforms in them are close enough to modern ones that a reader trained on a printed fidel can work through them without special instruction.

Facts
Attributions
Associated Sound
n 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural Role
The 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
Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Why 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 Period
Descends 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 Origin
The kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Origin of the Name
The 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
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Ge'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 Source
Written 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
Transmission
Manuscript Tradition
Ge'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
Identity
Script Type
An 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
Position
Twelfth 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 Joins
The letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Use
Ritual Use
Read, 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
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language, but nahas resembles a Ge'ez word only closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing in the tradition supports. The atlas records no meaning for this letter's name.
No survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for an indigenous account of the name has been carried out against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, so whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached a sense to nahas is untested.
Learn More
Nahas, and a Name That Looks Like a Word

Nahas writes a plain n and continues a Semitic consonant that has come down without change. The Hebrew nun, the Syriac nun and the Arabic nun are all its cognates and all keep the same name. The letter itself raises no difficulty at all.

The name does. Nahas resembles the Semitic root behind the Hebrew nachash, a serpent, closely enough for the resemblance to be noticed often, while the Northwest Semitic name nun is glossed as a fish. If the Ge'ez name really were built on the serpent word it would be an Ethiopian renaming rather than an inheritance, which would be worth knowing. But a resemblance is not a derivation. The Ge'ez letter names as a set are only partly recoverable, several of them have plainly drifted, and picking out the ones that happen to look like words a reader already knows is exactly the method that produces confident nonsense.

What can be said is that the letter is the twelfth of the fidel, that it writes n, that its cognates are secure, and that its name is not glossed in the tradition. Where that leaves a question open, the atlas records the question rather than an answer, which is the whole reason the open question exists as a kind of record here.

The open question recorded against this letter puts the case in general rather than for nahas alone: whether the Ethiopian tradition ever glossed the letter names itself, and if it did, where that gloss is written down. Until somebody has looked, a blank is the honest entry, and it is a blank with a research question attached rather than a gap nobody noticed.

Negusa Negast, and the Title of an Emperor

Negus, the Ge'ez word for a king, begins with this letter, and the imperial title negusa negast, king of kings, doubles it. The title was borne by the rulers of Ethiopia until the monarchy ended in 1974, and the style has a long history behind it: the kings of Aksum used a comparable formula in their inscriptions, and the phrase is the same construction as the king of kings of the Persian and biblical record.

The claim the title carried in Ethiopia was more specific than a statement about rank. The Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth century work whose title means the glory of kings, tells the descent of the Ethiopian royal line from Solomon and the queen of Sheba through their son Menelik, and makes the removal of the Ark to Aksum part of that account. The dynasty ruling from the thirteenth century presented itself as the restoration of that Solomonic line, and the title sat inside the claim.

The atlas records the Kebra Nagast as a work with a date and a purpose rather than as a chronicle. It is a national epic composed at a particular moment in Ethiopian political history, and reading it as a record of events is a category error. The letter that opens the royal title is a convenient place to flag it, because the title is the thing the epic exists to justify.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Related To

Nun ܢ, Alphabet Letters

Nahas and the Syriac nun continue the Semitic n, and the Syriac letter keeps the inherited name unchanged.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Nun נ, Alphabet Letters

Nahas and the Hebrew nun continue the Semitic n. The Hebrew name is glossed as a fish. The Ge'ez name is not glossed in the tradition, and the resemblance it bears to the Semitic word for a serpent is a resemblance only.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau
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
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode ConsortiumView the Source
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
Open Questions (1 open question)
Do the Ge'ez letter names carry a sense inside Ge'ez, or are they inherited forms only?

A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What would resolve this A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.
Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schoolsDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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