Conversion of the king. – At the same time or almost at the same time as the introduction of Christianity, Ēzānā himself had to convert. The latter, in a large inscription of Aksum, professes idolatry, and worships Astar, Meder, Beḥēr and Maḥrem, whose son he proclaims himself, but in a later inscription, in place of these deities, professes to worship the “God of heaven “(with an expression of the biblical books, of the texts of Elephantine, etc., not unusual, but which here designates the God of Christians), who gave him the throne and” victory over enemies “; and promises to be fair to his subjects; also his coins with pagan symbols, of the crescent moon and the star, are followed first by coins without any symbol, and then by clearly Christian coins. His is certainly not a profession of Christian faith as one would expect from a convert not a few years after the Council of Nicaea, but such an unintelligible profession would have hurt the feelings of the still pagan population. It is very reasonable to suppose that political considerations influenced the conversion of Ēzānā, that is, to obtain friendship with Byzantium. The kingdom of Aksum had unfriendly peoples in the north, nor were the kingdoms on the opposite shore of Arabia, on which Sassanid influence was felt, be friendly. And Ēzānā’s profession of faith, although so little explicit, was more than enough to show the government of Byzantium that the official religion of the kingdom of Aksum was opposed to the idolatry of southern Arabia and the religion of the great enemy of Byzantium, the Sassanid empire. And this was of vital importance to Byzantium; on the remainder one could compromise: Theodora, Justinian’s wife, a point extraneous to the things of the kingdom, was Monophysite. For Ethiopia 2003, please check computerannals.com.
Syrian monks in Abyssinia. The ” Nine Saints they rejected the council of Chalcedon and the Epistle of St. Leo to Flavian, but they were quite against Eutyches and his strange doctrine. It is very probable that these monks were the famous “Nine Saints” who came from “Rōm”, that is the Byzantine Empire, and founded flourishing monasteries, greatly contributing to the conversion of the indigenous people who were still mostly pagans. Who in their rudimentary religion, without a sacred book that fixed their beliefs and without an ordered cult, could easily be converted to a higher religion, as is almost the case with the negroes who pass from fetishism to Islam. So it is that in the century. V and VI the population of the kingdom of Aksum was by now Christian. It was divided, as regards religion, into three main groups; the 1st and most numerous, the Scimezana group, the “Ṣādeqān”; the 2nd, north of the Mareb and Belesā, which was headed by Libānos or Matā ‘, and the 3rd, south of the Mareb, to which the Nine Saints belonged. Here are the names of these: 1. Za-Mikā’ēl ‘Arāgāwi; 2. Panṭālēwon; 3. Isḥāq Garimā; 4. Afsē; 5. Gubā; 6. Alēf; 7. Yem’atā; 8. Liqānos; 9. Ṣeḥmā. The kingdom was now largely Christian, and when Aksum ruled the Himalayan kingdom, he protected the Christian religion there, and the two churches built there are famous. But originally pagan beliefs and customs still persisted, as they usually do and happened, for example, among the pagan populations converted to Christianity or Islam. to which the Nine Saints belonged. Here are the names of these: 1. Za-Mikā’ēl ‘Arāgāwi; 2. Panṭālēwon; 3. Isḥāq Garimā; 4. Afsē; 5. Gubā; 6. Alēf; 7. Yem’atā; 8. Liqānos; 9. Ṣeḥmā. The kingdom was now largely Christian, and when Aksum ruled the Himalayan kingdom, he protected the Christian religion there, and the two churches built there are famous. But originally pagan beliefs and customs still persisted, as they usually do and happened, for example, among the pagan populations converted to Christianity or Islam. to which the Nine Saints belonged. Here are the names of these: 1. Za-Mikā’ēl ‘Arāgāwi; 2. Panṭālēwon; 3. Isḥāq Garimā; 4. Afsē; 5. Gubā; 6. Alēf; 7. Yem’atā; 8. Liqānos; 9. Ṣeḥmā. The kingdom was now largely Christian, and when Aksum ruled the Himalayan kingdom, he protected the Christian religion there, and the two churches built there are famous. But originally pagan beliefs and customs still persisted, as they usually do and happened, for example, among the pagan populations converted to Christianity or Islam. and the two churches built there are famous. But originally pagan beliefs and customs still persisted, as they usually do and happened, for example, among the pagan populations converted to Christianity or Islam. and the two churches built there are famous. But originally pagan beliefs and customs still persisted, as they usually do and happened, for example, among the pagan populations converted to Christianity or Islam.
Translation in ge ‛ ez of Holy Scripture. – To the Nine Saints or, in general, to the Syrian monks is due, in all probability, the translation into ge‛ez, the ancient language of Abyssinia, of the Holy Scripture. In fact, we see introduced in this translation of the Aramaic words, among which the word “hāymānūthā”, πίστις, the Christian faith, as in the Syriac, is noteworthy, as an indication of who introduced it in the ge‛ez. Of particular significance is the fact that the Greek text on which the ge‛ez translation was conducted is the one received in Antioch and Syria, or of St. Lucian (West Syrian), and not the one received in Alexandria, which certainly would have followed by Frumentius, from which we see how unlikely it is that the translation was due to him. Of which, moreover, the need was not great at the time, since most of the Christians were Greeks at the time. Also in Rome, not to mention other examples, the Latin translation of Sacred Scripture is much later than the introduction of Christianity. Besides the sacred books, other books were translated.
