Lalibela, and Churches Cut Downwards Into Rock

Lalibela, the name of a king of the Zagwe dynasty and of the highland town that carries his name, begins with this letter in its fourth order. The eleven rock-hewn churches there are cut down into the living stone rather than built up from it. Trenches were dug around each block to free it from the rock, and the interior was then hollowed out, so that a church stands in a pit with its roof at ground level. The tradition attributes the whole group to the king.

David Phillipson's survey of Ethiopian church architecture sets them alongside the earlier Aksumite and Tigrayan rock churches and argues that they belong to a longer building history rather than to a single reign. The atlas follows the survey in treating the traditional attribution as tradition, which is not the same as treating it as false.

The site is not a ruin. The churches are in use, the liturgy is sung in Ge'ez in them, and at the great feasts the town fills with pilgrims. That is the ordinary condition of the things this script serves: the manuscripts are working books, the chant is a working repertory, and the language, although nobody speaks it at home, is read aloud somewhere in Ethiopia or Eritrea every day of the year. An account that treats Lalibela as an archaeological site is describing half of what is there.