Akele Guzai

Akele Guzai was a province in the interior of Eritrea until 1996, when the newly independent national government consolidated all provinces into six regions. The province's population predominantly consisted of followers of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Traditionally a part of the Eritrean Highlands, it is the locality of the town of Dekemhare. The province is now mostly part of the Northern Red Sea Region and the Southern Region.

Akele Guzai is one of the most ancient regions of Eritrea. It has an inscriptional record going back to at least the 9th century BC, the earliest example of the Ge'ez script. The province was part of Dʿmt, which would evolve into the Kingdom of Aksum.

Akele Guzai's name has been connected by some to the Gaze of the Monumentum Adulitanum (which later medieval Greek notes in the margins associate with the Aksumite people). If the note regarding the Gaze is accurate, it would connect the name of Akele Guzai to the Agʿazyān or Agʿazi (Ge'ez speakers) of the Kingdom of Dʿmt in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, who later became the Tigrayans and the Tigrinyas. This connection has been rejected by linguists in modern times, however, due to the lack of the middle voiced pharyngeal fricative in the triliteral roots, which is usually preserved in Tigrinya, the primary language of Akele Guzai.

Instead, the name may be connected with the Agwezat clan conquered by the 4th century king Ezana of Axum, and the Agʿaze (unvocalized 'GZ, referring either to a person or a group) of the Hawulti at Matara. Along with Agame in Ethiopia, it was a main center of Aksumite culture (second only to Western Tigray, where the capital was located), with a distinct sub-culture that separated the two regions from that of Western Tigray (Shire, Axum, Yeha), Central Eritrea (Serae, Hamasien, and Adulis), and frontier areas in northern Eritrea and Central Ethiopia.

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