{"word_count": 604, "character_count": 3886}
[caption id="attachment_362" align="alignright" width="300"] The Nine Saints. Painting in the Abba Pentalewon Monastery near Aksum. Image taken by Ondřej Žváček; via WikiCommons; licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)[/caption]Ethiopian Christians have long venerated a group of monks from various cities in the Roman empire who allegedly arrived in Aksum in northeastern Ethiopia during the early- to mid-6th century CE. They are credited with establishing the first monasteries in Ethiopia and converting much of the country to Christianity. While the stories of individual saints might vary in some details, on the whole they tend to follow a predictable narrative structure, based closely on a highly popular Arabic translation of the 5th century Syriac hagiography of Saint Alexius of Rome, and other late antique texts translated from Greek and Coptic into Arabic, and then again into Ge’ez, or Classical Ethiopic. Each of the nine saints also begins his life in Rome as the son of a prominent Roman family, who then abandons his parents, sometimes a marriage as well, in order to pursue a monastic life. After completing his training, he journeys to Ethiopia either alone, or in the company of the other eight saints. After performing a variety of miracles the saint then passes away, usually in the company of his disciples.Even a cursory reading of these texts reveal that few, if any, genuine, indigenous memories of an Aksumite past are preserved, and the narratives when read as a whole make little chronological sense. By focusing on some of these narrative oddities in 3 of these texts, the 16th century recension of the Gadla Ze Mikael Aregawi as published by Ignazio Guidi, the Gadla Libanos, produced during the reign of king Amda Seyon (r. 1314-44) and the Gadla Garima the colophon of which dates that particular version to the reign of king Zar’a Yaqob (r. 1434-68), I wish to show that the authors of these hagiographic texts were engaged in competitively constructing the historical narrative of Ethiopia’s Aksumite past by defending their own particular claims to correct ideology, a particular land-holding, or historical or genealogical precedent through their hagiographies.All of the texts, with the exception of the life of Abba Garima, are written in the hagiographic genre known as gadl (pl. gadlat), which translates to “strife, combat, mortification, or a spiritual fight”, inviting comparison to the Greek agwn or Arabic jihad. In this genre, developed in the early 14th century at the Monastery of Debre Hayq, the author produced texts intended to be read episodically on particular days of commemoration. As such, Alessandro Bausi claims, narrative sequence tends to matter quite little and contents will often overlap with other titles. The life of Abba Garima however is not, strictly speaking, a gadl but a dersan, or homily, concerning the gadlat, or spiritual struggles of Abba Garima. Both of these genres share particular features that are significant to the reception of the texts by the audience as genuine historiographical works, and important to their utility in the Ethiopian intellectual milieu: Oral performance is fundamental to an audience’s reception of the text in both genres, potentially opening an avenue for apology or polemic through exegesis of the text. Furthermore, because these texts were not composed with the intent of being read as one extended biography, but rather, were usually read piecemeal in a commemorative or pedagogic context, the texts could conceivably easily serve as a jumping off point for critique or support of policy or ideological claims.This is the first of four blog-posts going back to a paper at the International Congress at Leeds in 2017:I. IntroductionII. Aregawi as Pachomios‘ sonIII. The saints’ interaction with the Aksumite kingsIV. Conclusion[cite]