Hawarya, and the Books That Only Ge'ez Preserves

Hawarya, the Ge'ez word for an apostle, begins with this letter, and so does Haddis Kidan, the new covenant, the name of the New Testament. Both belong to the vocabulary of a scriptural canon wider than any other Christian one. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts eighty-one books, and among them are works that survive complete in no other language.

The two best known are the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Both were composed in a Semitic language, and fragments of each in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the continuous text of either survived only in Ge'ez, copied and recopied in Ethiopian monasteries for well over a millennium while the rest of the Christian world lost it. When European scholarship recovered Enoch in the eighteenth century it was from Ge'ez manuscripts brought out of Ethiopia.

This is the strongest single argument for treating the fidel as more than a regional curiosity. A script preserved a body of ancient literature that would otherwise be known only in fragments, and it did so not through an archive or an accident of burial but through an unbroken practice of copying by hand inside a working church. The atlas records the letter. The letter is part of the mechanism by which those books are still readable at all.