#abba garima

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Ethiopian Bible — considered as the oldest and most complete 'Bible' on earth.

The world’s earliest illustrated Christian book has been saved by a British charity, which located it at a remote Ethiopian monastery.

The incredible Garima Gospels are named after a monk who arrived in the African country in 5th century AD.

Abba Garima arrived from Constantinople in 494 AD. Legend has it that he was able to copy the Gospels in a day because God delayed the sun from setting and is said to have copied them out in just one day.

It is beautifully illustrated and the colours are still vivid. It has been conserved through the Ethiopian Heritage Fund.

The incredible relic has been kept ever since in Garima Monastery near Adwa in the north of the country, which is in Tigray region at 7000ft.

Experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages.

The survival of the Gospels is incredible considering the country has been under Muslim invasion, Italian invasion, and a fire in the 1930s destroyed the monastery’s church.

They were written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge’ez.

There are two volumes dated from the same time, but the second is written in a different hand from the first. Both contain illustrations and the four Gospels.

Though the texts had been mentioned by the occasional traveller since 1950s, it had been thought they dated from 11th century at the earliest.

Carbon dating, however, gives a date between 330-650 AD, which tantalisingly overlaps the date Abba Garima arrived in the country.

So, the first volume could be in his hand – even if he didn’t complete the task in a day as the oral tradition states.

The charity Ethiopian Heritage Fund that was set up to help preserve the treasures in the country has made the stunning discovery.

It also allowed incredible rare access to the texts, so experts could conserve them on site. It is now hoped the Gospels will be put in a museum at the monastery where visitors will be able to view them.

Blair Priday from the Ethiopian Heritage Fund said:

"Ethiopia has been overlooked as a source of these fantastic things. Many of these old Christian relics can only be reached by hiking and climbing to remote monasteries as roads are limited in these mountainous regions.

All the work on the texts was done in situ and everything is reversible, so if in future they can be taken away for further conservation, we won’t have hindered that.

The pages had been crudely stitched together in a restoration in the 1960s and some of the pages wouldn’t even turn. And they were falling to pieces.

The Garima Gospels have been kept high and dry, which helped preserve them all these years. They are kept in the dark so the colours look fresh.

This was the most astounding of all our projects. The Patriarch, the head of the Ethiopian Church, had to give his permission.

Most of the experts did the work for nothing. We are currently undertaking other restoration programmes on wall paintings and religious texts.

We believe that preserving Ethiopia’s cultural heritage will help to increase visitor revenue and understanding of the extraordinary history of this country."

📷 : Credit to the Owner

[kemetic-dreams]

Arwe, also known as Wainaba, in Ethiopian mythology, is a serpent-king who rules for four hundred years before being destroyed by the founder of the Solomonic dynasty. His story comes in a number of versions, all of which have him as a tyrannical rules who demands sacrifice. The myth is part of a wider tradition of serpent- or dragon-kings, such as the Babylonian dragon.

The veneration of Arwe, which was widespread, predates Christianity in Ethiopia,which became a state religion under Ezana of Axum in the early 4th century.Arwe ("wild beast" in Geʽez)is a snake-king who rules for four hundred years) over the land that is to become Ethiopia. He is a giant serpent ("No, Arwe is not beyond the hill, for the hill you see is Arwe") to whom humans must sacrifice their virgin daughters and cattle to calm his endless hunger. He reigns with terror until he is defeated by a man who becomes the next ruler of the land, and his daughter becomes the Queen of Sheba, and then the mother of Menelik I.

It is believed by some Ethiopians that Arwe, or Wainaba, ruled after Aksumawi, who is the great-grandson of Noah and son of Itiopis according to the Book of Aksum. Ethiopis, who was seventh in the ancestral lines, is also believed to be the twelfth direct descendant of Adam

In one version of Arwe's myth, a stranger comes to the land where Arwe reigns and after seeing a woman cry over the fact that she has to give her daughter in sacrifice to the serpent, the man offers to kill the serpent. He requests the woman to provide him with a spotless white lamb and a bowl with juice from the poisonous Euphorbia tree. He faces the serpent and offers him the lamb and the juice, which Arwe accepts not knowing it will be the cause of his death. After Arwe is finally defeated, the people offer the man to become their ruler, a position he gladly accepts until he is ready to let his daughter Makeda reign. She becomes the Queen of Sheba, and its capital city is Axum. In another version of this myth, Wainaba, the serpent ruler, is on his way traveling north from the district Tamben to Aksum when a man called Angabo promises the Aksumites to kill the serpent in exchange for the throne. He applied various forms of magic to the road the serpent traveled on, including an iron instrument that the buried under the road. He attacked Wainaba with fire, and burns him to death. Legend has it he was buried in May Wayno, where his grave still is

The serpent and the saints

Some versions of the myth clearly combine pre-Christian and Christian elements, in order to make Christianity (specifically the Nine Saints) victorious over a pagan monster. One of these is found among tribes in the north and published by Enno Littmann in 1904: the Tigre people worship a dragon; families sacrifice their oldest daughter as well as mead and milk. When it's the turn of Eteye Azeb ("Queen of the South"), a family's oldest child, she is tied to a tree for the dragon to take, but seven saints sit down in the tree's shade. They wonder if she's Mary but she explains she is a human, to be sacrificed. When the dragon comes, two of the saints hesitate but the third, Abba Mentelit, attacks him and then all seven kill the dragon with a cross. Some blood from the dragon lands on the girl's heel, which becomes like the heel of an ass. When she returns to her village, her people send her away because they think she ran away, but the next day she shows them the body, whereupon they make her the leader of the village, and she has a maiden appointed as her second. Her deformity is cured when she visits Solomon with her second, both disguised as men. He tricks them both, and has sex with them; her son is Menelek. This version was written down in 1902, and had been retold by a Tigre man from a village north of Keren, Eritrea.

Littmann notes the ubiquity of the dragon in various mythologies of (what he then called) the Semitic peoples, including that of the Babylonian dragon, and especially among the people of Ethiopia.Many Ethiopic sources place "King Arwe" at the beginning of history.The Tigre variant, with its seven saints (originally they were the nine saints who missionized in Ethiopia in the 5th century), thus add a Christian turn to a pre-Christian tradition, and the Christian saints deliver the world from a great evil. Littmann identifies the saint Mentelit with Abba Pantelewon.Other instances of the nine saints killing the dragon are found in a hymn to Abuna Aregawi, and a very detailed version is found in a homily on Abba Garima

[divalocity]

The Garima Gospels were first reported on in the 1950s, but it has only been within the last couple of years that scholars have been able to examine the work and help conserve it.The Garima Gospels are the oldest surviving illustrated Christian works in existence.