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Bete Guraghe

Bete Guraghe¹ is the name of a group of people in Central Ethiopia.

According to Murdock Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, the first people settled in the land of Guragué as far back as 3000 B.C. and those who settled there for the first time trace their origin to Southern Sudan. Apparently these were negroid.

Ato At'me's unpublished manuscript tells us that the entire peple of Guragué are origins of Tigre. Ato Seifu Debabe, in his book Azmatch, listed the Tigre, and Adere and Gojam to be the main roots of the Guragué. There are also accepted facts that there were Black Jews and Yemenites who went to the land of Guragué and settled there.²

In geographical terms Bete Guraghe can be described as an area roughly from the Gibe River in the west to Lake Zway in the east and from the Awash River in the north to the Hadiya-region in the south.

Guraghe languages belong to South-Ethio-Semitic. But they build different subgroups like northern Guraghe with Kistane as well as Dobbi, and Muher, Western Guraghe with Mäsqän, the Chaha and Endegegn groups and Eastern Guraghe with Silt'e, Wolane and Zay.

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