See C.C. Rossini, "Note per la storia letteraria Abissina," in _Rendiconti della R. Accad. dei Lincei_ (1899); Fumagalli, _Bibliografia Etiopica_ (1893); Basset, _Études sur l'histoire de l'Éthiopie_ (1882); Catalogues of various libraries, especially British Museum (Wright), Paris (Zotenberg), Oxford and Berlin (Dillmann), Frankfurt (Goldschmidt). Plates illustrating Ethiopic palaeography are to be found in Wright's Catalogue; an account of the illustrations in Ethiopic MSS. is given by Budge in his _Life of Maba Sion_; and a collection of inscriptions in the church of St Stefano dei Mori, in Rome, by Gallina in the _Archivio della Soc. Rom. di Storia Patria_ (1888). (D. S. M.*)
[1] For the topography and later history see SUDAN and ABYSSINIA.
ETHNOLOGY and ETHNOGRAPHY (from the Gr. [Greek: ethnos], race, and [Greek: logos], science, or [Greek: graphein], to write), sciences which in their narrowest sense deal respectively with man as a racial unit (_mankind_), i.e. his development through the family and tribal stages into national life, and with the distribution over the earth of the races and nations thus formed. Though the etymology of the words permits in theory of this line of division between ethnology and ethnography, in practice they form an indivisible study of man's progress from the point at which anthropology (q.v.) leaves him.
Ethnology is thus the general name for investigations of the widest character, including subjects which in this encyclopaedia are dealt with in detail under separate headings, such as ARCHAEOLOGY, ART (and allied articles), COMMERCE, GEOGRAPHY (and the headings for countries and tribes), FAMILY, NAME, ETHICS, LAW, MYTHOLOGY, FOLK-LORE (and allied articles), PHILOLOGY (and allied articles), AGRICULTURE, ARCHITECTURE, RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY, &c., &c. It covers generally the whole history of the material and intellectual development of man, as it has passed through the stages of (a) hunting and fishing, (b) sheep and cattle tending, (c) agriculture, (d) industry. It investigates his food, his weapons, tools and implements, his housing, his social, economic and commercial organization, forms of government, language, art, literature, morals, superstitions and religious systems. In this sense ethnology is the older term for what now is called sociology. At the present day the progress of research has in practice, however, restricted the "ethnologist" as a rule to the study of one or more branches only of so wide a subject, and the word "ethnology" is used with a somewhat vague meaning for any ethnological study; each country or nation has thus its own separate ethnology. It becomes more convenient, therefore, to deal with the ethnology as a special subject in each case. "Ethnography," in so far as it has a distinctive province, is then conveniently restricted to the scientific mapping out of different racial regions, nations and tribes; and it is only necessary here to refer the reader to the separate articles on continents, &c., where this is done. The only fundamental problem which need here be referred to is that of the whole question of the division of mankind into separate races at all, which is consequential on the earlier problem (dealt with in the article ANTHROPOLOGY) as to man's origin and antiquity.