Found in Translation: The Egyptian Impact on Ethiopian Christian Literature (original) (raw)

2008, ‘Found in Translation: The Egyptian Impact on Ethiopian Christian Literature’, in Y. Gershoni and M Hatina eds., Narrating the Nile: Politics, Identities, Cultures,, 29-39.

Ethiopic, has historically been the primary vehicle of literary expression of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Indeed, although the emergence of Ge'ez as a written language may have somewhat predated the acceptance of Christianity in Ethiopia, the two processes were intimately linked as the need for Christian literature encouraged the development of the language, and the church's evolving self-awareness was inevitably recorded in Ge'ez. 1 Moreover, long after it ceased to be a spoken language, Ge'ez continued to be the language of church education and literary discussion. No history of Christianity in Ethiopia would be complete without a discussion of Ethiopic literature. For the purposes of this volume, it is especially significant that Egyptian influences on Ethiopic literature represent one of the most ancient and enduring examples of cultural interaction between societies inhabiting the Nile basin. In making this statement, it is not my intention to deny the long history of original Ethiopian composition, but rather to note that in virtually every period of literary activity, the works that arrived in Ethiopia came from Egypt. Unfortunately, there has yet to be a comprehensive work documenting this and other features of Ethiopic literature. Despite the publication of numerous individual texts over the past forty years, no scholar has attempted to produce a book-length history of Ethiopic literature since 1968, and even this work is a revision of an earlier work (1956). 2 Thus a considerable gap has developed between the state of knowledge regarding individual works in Ethiopic literature and our overall understanding of the development of the corpus as a whole. 3 Moreover, even in the existing survey arti-29 3