Elucidating the linguistic history of the Aksumite kingdom during the first seven centuries AD is fraught with difficulty. Two very distinct written languages are represented: Ge'ez and Greek, belonging respectively to the Semitic and Indo-European families. The texts that were demonstrably produced during this period were largely limited to inscriptions on stone, less than a score of which have significant length, to those on coins, and to graffiti, including very short texts – often only a single word, name or abbreviation – on rocks and also on pottery or other portable objects. Only the last of these – the graffiti, which are exclusively in Ge'ez – are likely to reflect at all closely the speech employed in everyday life at any level of Aksumite society; they often record the names of individuals, perhaps as owners or users of land or simply as passers-by. As Chapter 3 makes clear, some sections of the northern Horn's population had been literate during the second quarter of the first millennium BC, but the extent of continuity from this into Aksumite times has not yet been fully demonstrated. Among the Aksumites, it is clear that basic literacy – at least in Ge'ez – was not restricted to an élite and to scribes, perhaps becoming progressively more widely distributed in later centuries.