Many languages in Ethiopia use a unique alphabet called Ethiopic for writing. However, there is no OCR system developed to date. In an effort to develop automatic recognition of Ethiopic script, a novel system is designed by applying structural and syntactic techniques. The recognition system is developed by extracting primitive structural features and their spatial relationships. A special tree structure is used to represent the spatial relationship of primitive structures. For each character, a unique string pattern is generated from the tree and recognition is achieved by matching the string against a stored knowledge base of the alphabet. To implement the recognition system, we use direction field tensor as a tool for character segmentation, and extraction of structural features and their spatial relationships. Experimental results are reported.