In Eritrea it is used for Tigre, and it is often used for Bilen, a Cushitic language. Some other languages in the Horn of Africa, such as Oromo, used to be written using Geʽez but have switched to Latin-based alphabets. It also uses four series of consonant signs for labialized velar consonants, which are variants of the non-labialized velar consonants:  Although it is often said that Geʽez literature is dominated by the Bible including the Deuterocanonical books, in fact there are many medieval and early modern original texts in the language. Most of its important works are also the literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which include Christian liturgy (service books, prayers, hymns), hagiographies, and Patristic literature. For instance, around 200 texts were written about indigenous Ethiopian saints from the fourteenth through the nineteenth century. This religious orientation of Geʽez literature was a result of traditional education being the responsibility of priests and monks. "The Church thus constituted the custodian of the nation's culture", notes Richard Pankhurst, and describes the traditional education as follows:  However, works of history and chronography, ecclesiastical and civil law, philology, medicine, and letters were also written in Geʽez. Significant collections of Ethiopian manuscripts are found outside of Ethiopia in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The collection in the British Library comprises some 800 manuscripts dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries, notably including magical and divinatory scrolls, and illuminated manuscripts of the 16th to 17th centuries. It was initiated by a donation of 74 codices by the Church of England Missionary Society in the 1830s and 1840s, and substantially expanded by 349 codices, looted by the British from the Emperor Tewodros II's capital at Magdala in the 1868 Expedition to Abyssinia. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has at least two illuminated manuscripts in Geʽez. The Geʽez language is classified as a South Semitic language. It evolved from an earlier proto-Ethio-Semitic ancestor used to write royal inscriptions of the kingdom of Dʿmt in the Epigraphic South Arabian script. The Geʽez language is no longer universally thought of, as previously assumed, to be an offshoot of Sabaean or Old South Arabian, and there is some linguistic (though not written) evidence of Semitic languages being spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia since approximately 2000 BC.