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Gadla Sama'tat

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The Gadla Samāʿtāt (also spelled Gädlä Sämaʿtat, meaning "Spiritual Combat of the Martyrs") is an Ethiopic (Ge'ez) compilation of saints' lives, with the oldest components dating to the 13th century.[1] Egyptian martyrs are well represented but there are other Eastern saints as well. They are ordered by day of commemoration in the Ethiopian liturgical calendar.[2] The texts are all translations from Arabic save the life of Wasilides, which was translated from Coptic.[3][4] It is an open question whether any of the lives are derived from Greek originals,[5] but there is evidence favouring it in some cases (e.g, lack of Arabisms).[6]

The Gadla Samāʿtāt is a body of texts that only gradually came together as a collection.[4] The earliest attestation of a collection as Gadla Samāʿt is found in an inventory of Istifanos Monastery from 1292 referring to books donated by Iyasus Mo'a.[7] The translation of many individual lives, however, is attributed to Abuna Salama II (r. 1348–1388).[8] The full collection contains at least 142 lives.[9]

The Gadla Samāʿtāt survives in some form in at least 34 known manuscripts, but a majority of these contain only a fraction of the lives.[10] There are 24 main manuscripts that contain only the Gadla Samāʿtāt, ranging in completeness from two to twelve months.[11] There are five manuscripts in which lives from the Gadla Samāʿtāt are mixed with lives from the Gadla Qeddusān ("Spiritual Combat of the Saints"), which are mostly monastic lives.[12] There are another five manuscripts which contain just a single month of lives from the Gadla Samāʿtāt among much unrelated material.[13] A majority of manuscripts are from the 15th century or earlier. The Gadla Samāʿtāt was the first calendar of saints of Ethiopia before it was gradually replaced by the Ethiopian Synaxarium.[14]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ Bovon 2003, p. 309.
  2. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 1–2.
  3. ^ Brita 2015, p. 6.
  4. ^ a b Bausi 2002, p. 15.
  5. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 15–18.
  6. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 25–26.
  7. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 1 n2 and 7.
  8. ^ Bausi 2002, p. 10.
  9. ^ Bausi 2002, p. 2.
  10. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 2–3.
  11. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 3–6.
  12. ^ Bausi 2002, p. 6.
  13. ^ Bausi 2002, pp. 6–7.
  14. ^ Bausi 2002, p. 14.

Bibliography

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  • Bausi, Alessandro (2002). La versione etiopica degli Acta Phileae nel Gadla samāʿtāt (PDF). Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale.
  • Bovon, François (2003). "The Dossier on Stephen, the First Martyr". The Harvard Theological Review. 96 (3): 279–315. JSTOR 4151873.
  • Brita, Antonella (2015). "The Manuscript as a Leaf Puzzle: The Case of the Gädlä Sämaʿtat from ʿUra Qirqos (Ethiopia)" (PDF). Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin. 1: 6–17.
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