> "beit" is a very stable semitic root. So I lean towards the rotated
> table as the origin of the word and hebraic scripts for the order.

Forgot to say that I had thought the alignment of Ethiopic syllables
to Hebrew letters had been a way to transfer Gematria (aka Isopsephia)
of proper nouns from one script to another.

Just my theory, I'd be interested if anyone knew this to have been the
case.

Some notes:

http://ethiopic.org/Numerals/Numerology.html