Nearly all Orthodox Ethiopians (98%) say religion is very important to them, compared with a median of 34% of Orthodox saying this across 13 countries surveyed in Central and Eastern Europe. The country in the Horn of Africa has 36 million Orthodox Christians, the world’s second-largest Orthodox population after Russia. (Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images)Įthiopia has the largest Orthodox Christian population outside Europe, and, by many measures, Orthodox Ethiopians have much higher levels of religious commitment than do Orthodox Christians in the faith’s heartland of Central and Eastern Europe. About three-quarters of Orthodox Ethiopians say they attend church every week. On the other hand, a more pronounced awareness of the role played by the material text carriers in the transmission of knowledge has introduced new factors, that also can and must be taken into account.An Orthodox priest at Nakuto Lab Rock Church, outside Lalibela, Ethiopia. Particularly crucial in this regard is listing all texts that can be attributed to the earlier period of the Ethiopic literary production. On the one hand, the first step in approaching this delicate question is a systematic mapping of texts and works attributed on some grounds to a precise period. One would expect that the complexity of this literary history is fully reflected in the changes in grammar, lexicon and stylistic means of the Ethiopic language, even though in-depth analyses have been attempted only rarely and no systematic correlation has been established between lexical, morphological, and stylistic features.
There is evidence for the emergence of a rich local written production only later in the course of time. It is commonly agreed that the earliest Ethiopic texts known so far are translations from Greek, while later works are much indebted to the Christian Arabic literary tradition, particularly to the Copto-Arabic one.
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