Division, Languages, and Religion.—1. Tigré, of the province of Tigré, speaking a language generally admitted to be derived from the Gheez or ancient Æthiopic. Christians.
2. Amharic Æthiopians of South-western Abyssinia, speaking a language not generally admitted to be derived from the Gheez, but still so like the Tigré as most probably to be so descended. Christians.
3. The Gafat Æthiopians, Pagans, nearly displaced by the Gallas, but whose language is considered to be allied to the Amharic.
Alphabet of the Christian Æthiopians.—Written from left to right, not (like the Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic) from right to left. Closely allied to the Himyaritic Arabian of the inscriptions.
Antiquities.—Chiefly of the ancient Gheez capital, Axum.
The ethnology of the Semitic Abyssinians has the following complications.
1. The Gheez language is too closely allied to the Arabic and Hebrew to lead to the belief that it is aboriginal, i. e. other than of comparatively recent introduction.
2. The Amharic, on the other hand, and, à fortiori, the Gafat, have too many African elements to lead to the belief that the first Semitic immigration was that which introduced the Tigré.
The hypothesis, which would reconcile these discrepancies, would be—
That the Gafat represented a primary, the Tigré a secondary migration; and this is much the same view which was taken concerning the relations between the island of Sumatra and the Peninsula of Malacca. It is also one which arises from the circumstance of the Isthmus of Suez being only one of the passages from Asia to Africa—the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb being the second.