In this set of 6 Ethiopian stamps the Amharic letters spell out “Addis Ababa,” the capital of Ethiopia when they are arranged by value.
    Each letter has a syllabic valued made up of a consonant and a vowel. The differences between two syllables which begin with the same consonant can be seen by comparing the last two symbols. The first has an “e” vowel while the second has an “a” vowel. There are a total of 35 symbols or letters, each with 7 different forms to represent the vowels.

           
A                                                DDi                                            S

           
A                                              BE                                             BA

   For a table with all of the Amharic letters and their variants see: http://www.krysstal.com/writing_amharic.html.