Tselot, and the Hours of the Day

Tselot, the Ge'ez word for prayer, begins with this letter. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches keep an office through the day, and the books that carry it are among the most copied in the tradition.

The most widely used of them is the Weddase Maryam, the Praise of Mary, a cycle with a portion for each day of the week which is recited daily in monasteries and by many of the laity. Ethiopian tradition attributes it to Ephrem the Syrian. The attribution is traditional, and the atlas records it as an attribution rather than as an authorship, because the text as it stands in Ge'ez is a translation with an Ethiopian history of its own and the question of what stands behind it is not one a content record should settle by repeating the tradition.

Beside the office there is the Psalter, which in Ethiopian use is not only read but memorised, and a student in the church schools is expected to know it. The Ge'ez Psalter includes a fifteen-part canticle section drawn from elsewhere in scripture, so the book a student learns is longer than the hundred and fifty psalms. That is one more instance of the general shape of this tradition, where the received text is wider than the one a reader elsewhere would expect.