Ethiopic: History, principles, and influences of an African writing system

Ethiopic is an African Writing System designed as a meaningful and graphic representation of knowledge. It is a component of the African Knowledge Systems and one of the signal contributions made by Africans to world history and cultures. It is created to holistically symbolize and locate the cultural and historical parameters of the Ethiopian people. The System, in its classic state, has a total of 182 syllographs, which are arranged in seven columns, each column containing 26 syllographs. Ethiopic is a knowledge system because it is brilliantly organized to represent philosophical features, such as ideography, mnumonics, syllography, astronomy, and grammatology.;Ethiopic is also not only a cultural agency, but a foundation to a great literary tradition in Ethiopia, which, for instance, has made a critical contribution to the history of Christianity by organically preserving The Book of Henok, which is widely believed to be a precursor of Christianity among Biblical scholars. The Book is found in its entirety only in Ge'ez (the classical Ethiopian language). Ethiopia's critical role in preserving The Book became common knowledge in the eighteenth century when the Scottish traveller James Bruce took three copies of The Book from Ethiopia to Europe.;Ethiopic, given its holistic feature, further appears to be influential in the development of new writing systems, such as the Armenian alphabet, which was formalized by Mesrob Mashtotz and his associates in the fifth century of the Common Era. The Ethiopic direct and genetic link to inscriptions, such as the Sinaitic, suggests its possible role in the development of an alphabetic writing system.