Kidan, the Ge'ez word for a covenant, begins with this letter, and it names the two testaments: Haddis Kidan is the New Testament, the new covenant. The word also stands in one of the most common of all Ethiopian church dedications. Kidane Mehret, the Covenant of Mercy, names a promise the tradition holds Christ made to his mother, that those who call on her name will be shown mercy, and there are churches under that dedication throughout Ethiopia and Eritrea and in the diaspora.
Marian devotion is unusually prominent in this tradition even by the standards of Eastern Christianity. The Weddase Maryam, the Praise of Mary, is recited daily; the Miracles of Mary, a large collection of narratives, was translated and then extended in Ethiopia with local material; and thirty-three feasts of the Virgin are kept through the year.
The word kidan carries the same Semitic root as the Hebrew term for a covenant, so the vocabulary of the covenant is continuous across the family even where the theology built on it is not. That is the sort of thing a comparative dictionary is for, and it is the reason the atlas records letter-level cognates at all: they are the visible end of a shared lexicon.
The thirty-three feasts of the Virgin are spread across the months rather than gathered into a season, so a Marian commemoration falls somewhere in almost every month of the Ethiopian year. That distribution is itself the argument. The devotion is not concentrated into one part of the calendar but built into its ordinary run.