The “Egyptian Saints” of the Abyssinian Hagiography

It seems possible to isolate a group of saints born in Egypt (or living there for a long time), different from the traditional saints of that country mainly because they were not martyrs, and substituted the martyrdom by penances and absolute asceticism; the presence of the desert is much more pronounced than in the rest of Abyssinian hagiography, and nearly absolute; the activity of the devil is also very heavily marked; almost all of them are of “Roman” birth or connection. They are Bula/Abib, Gabra Krestos/Alexius, Latṣun, Nob, Gabra Manfas Qeddus, John the Oriental, maybe Tadēwos of Dabra Bartarwa, Yoḥanni of Däbrä ʿAśa, and some others, to which the “Aksumite” saints must be added. The relationship of these saints among themselves is also demonstrated by the codices, in which the “Life” or the hymnography pertaining to one or more of them occur together with those of some of the others, in different combinations

Frustula nagranitica

The article tries to point out some miscellaneous problems related to the traditions of the Nine Saints and to the Ethio-Ḥimyaritic war of the 6th c. A.D. For the first subject the interesting results achieved by Antonella Brita 2010 are basically confirmed, and a paragraph against the alleged Syrian/Syriac provenance of these saints is added. As for the second subject, after some onomastic notes stressing the traditional etymology of the second name of king Kaleb (from *sbḥ ‘to dawn’) and recalling the existence in the Islamic tradition of two kings Yūsuf (this explaining in turn the indication “Yūsuf the younger” found in at least one of the versions of the “Martyrium Arethae”), the texts which tell of a pagan king of Ethiopia who defeats a Judaizing one from Yemen (who in turn has persecuted  Christians) are identified as speaking of the first of the two Ethio-Ḥimyaritic wars. Finally, the interesting proposal by Beaucamp – Briquel-Chatonnet – Robin 1999–2000, according to which the war should be dated at least in 531 because Procopius speaks of a still active (and not yet retired to monasticism) king Kaleb at that epoch, is put in doubt, because it tries to conciliate two entirely different kinds of sources, one historical and the other purely hagiographical, which as such has not to be compulsorily harmonized with the first

Siegbert Uhlig (ed.): Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. Vol. 3: He-N

 Review   

Some philological problems in the "Miracles" of Gabra Manfas Qeddus

The philological examination of the genealogical tree of the “Miracles” of Gabra Manfas Qeddus, based of course on the principle of conjunctive errors and not on that of marginal similarities, has shown two important phenomena: 1. that not just one, but at least six different stemmas (for miracles I, II‑VII, VIII, IX, X‑XIII) can be identified; and 2. that none of these stemmas has the slightest relationship with those already identified for the “Life”. This involves an important historical consequence, because it demonstrates the profound difference, which has always been supposed in hagiography, between the redaction of the “Life” and that of the “Miracles” of the same saint

Refashioning the Ethiopian monarchy in the twentieth century: An intellectual history

This article traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastisation of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination