Now a reassessment is taking place and many former assumptions are being called in question. At the time when the Axumite state was being created there was no lack of communication between the two coasts of the southern Red Sea. The peoples of each side learned something from the other; cultural influences flowed freely. The close relationship between the ancient south Arabian language and Ethiopic had led Ullendorff to declare that 'it has long been almost axiomatic that the South Arabian immigrants imported into Africa a Semitic language ... which ... evolved into what we now call Ge'ez ... although there have at times been divergent views as to whether one or several of the South Arabian dialects were brought westwards across the Red Sea'.(1) In course of time Ge'ez became a 'dead' language, like Latin, and was used for literary and liturgical purposes, but it produced six 'Iiving' languages of which the principal ones are Amharic, which for centuries had been the language of the Amhara Court and of the majority of the population of the central tableland, Tigrinya, and Tigre.

Today the claims of Africa to be considered as the original home of this linguistic group are attracting more attention. A. K. Irvine has stressed 'that the proof of the relationship between Ge'ez and Sabaean has not yet been presented'(2) while Grover Hudson goes further and says that 'the modern geographical distribution of Hamito-Semitic languages suggests a north-east African origin for the family, and Ethiopia would be the natural focus of the extension of the Semitic branch from such a centre of origin'. (3) He also quotes A. Murtonen, who reached what many would regard as a revolutionary conclusion that 'the original home of the Semitic speaking nations was probably the Horn of Africa'. (4)

It is not only in the field of linguistics that theories are developing which suggest that civilisation flowed eastwards from the Horn of Africa to south Arabia. At different periods movements of course took place in each direction but since the African side of the Red Sea, represented by the Nile basin, had a much older history of civilisation than the eastern side, it would be

(1) Ullendorff, The Ethiopians, pp. 118-119.
(2) 'Linguistic Evidence on Ancient Ethiopia: The Relationship of Early Ethiopian Semitic to Old South Arabian', Abbay, no. 9, p. 43.
(3) Folia Orientalia, vol. 18, p. 159 (1977).
(4) ibid., p. 139.