The Garima Gospels, two Ge’ez manuscripts kept at the Abba Garima monastery in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, are believed to include the oldest surviving complete illuminated Christian book.
An illuminated page from the Garima Gospels, Ge’ez manuscripts dated to roughly the fifth to seventh centuries and kept at the Abba Garima monastery in Tigray. (Unknown author / Ethiopian Heritage Fund via Wikimedia Commons, public domain) [file photo]
The volumes, written on goatskin and holding the four Gospels, are guarded in a small circular hut at the monastery, Face2Face Africa reported in August 2019. Experts also regard their bindings as among the oldest still attached to their original pages, the site said.
Monastic tradition credits the books to Abba Garima, one of the Nine Saints said to have arrived in the Aksumite kingdom in 494. According to the legend, he copied and illustrated the Gospels in a single day after God held back the sunset until he finished.
Western scholars long dated the manuscripts to about 1100 or later on the basis of their handwriting. Radiocarbon tests pushed that back by several centuries, giving a range between 330 and 650, Face2Face Africa reported.
Samples collected during later restoration work gave dates of about 390 to 570 for Garima 2, the earlier book, and about 530 to 660 for Garima 1, the French scholar Jacques Mercier reported at a 2013 conference in Oxford sponsored by the Ethiopian Heritage Fund. Those dates would make Garima 2 older than the Syriac Rabbula Gospels, dated to 586.
Garima 1 has 348 surviving pages and opens with 11 illuminated canon tables. Garima 2 has 322 pages and 17 illuminated pages, including portraits of the four Evangelists and one of Eusebius of Caesarea. A third gospel book, probably from the 14th century, had been bound with Garima 2 until restorers separated the volumes.
The Ethiopian Heritage Fund, a British charity, restored the fragile manuscripts in the late 2000s. British bookbinder Lester Capon spent three weeks working with the monks at the monastery and set up a makeshift bindery in its courtyard, Face2Face Africa reported, citing The Guardian.
“It was big – you could fell an ox with it – it was beautiful, the colours were vibrant. But the condition was poor. It had the look of a burst mattress,” Capon said, according to the report. All of the work was done on site and is reversible, the charity’s Blair Priday said.
The books are not known ever to have left the monastery. Scholars think they may have been hidden for centuries, possibly in a cave that the Portuguese chaplain Francisco Álvares described when he visited in 1520, and later rediscovered.
Sources: Face2Face Africa (Aug. 2019), Wikipedia: Garima Gospels (citing the Ethiopian Heritage Fund’s 2013 Oxford conference)