Verbal and written communications, which are integral components of human society, havernbeen tram formed by the development of the respective communication devices. Through thernswift development in processing devices, the need and access to digitize printed informationrnitems by means of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) became possible. Despite the factrnthat most world languages are beneficiaries of this technology, the application of characterrnrecognition technology to Amharic text is a recent experience, and in its infancy stage whenrnhandwritten recognition is considered.rnThis study is then an attempt made to develop a recognition engine for Amharic handwringerrntext written in a special type of writing style, which is called "Yekum Tsihuf"rn(á‹¨á‰áˆ áŒ½áˆá)Before mechanical and electronic text processors were introduced inrnEthiopia, information used to be recorded on natural materials by hand writing, animal skinrnbeing the dominant one. Those handwritten documents, wine in this writing style, hold vitalrninformation about history, tradition, religion, nature and etc., which render undeniablerncontribution to current and future studies. The availability of this information in an electronicrnform would greatly help preservation and communication.rnIn this study, the application of handwritten character recognition with Artificial NeuralrnNetwork implementation for the 231 main character set of Amharic language is all empted.rnThe training and test data sets are produced by scribers who are trained to write text usingrnthe writing style. The study used various techniques at each phase from digitization tornrecognition levels. Preprocessing methods like image binarization, character segmentation,rnand size normalization and neural network recognition is made using Visual C++.Net andrnMATLAB programming environments. While segmentation rate of 95.96% is attained usingrnstage-by-stage segmentation algorithm, recognition rate that ranges from 98.8% to 20.3% isrnobtained for different test cases. Based on the findings and the knowledge acquired during thernexperimentation, topics for filature research are also identified.