The Garima Gospels Preserve Early Ethiopian Christian Art

High in the mountains of Tigray in northern Ethiopia, the Abba Garima Monastery preserves two ancient illuminated manuscripts known as the Garima Gospels. Written on vellum in Geʽez, the classical language of the ancient kingdom of Aksum, these volumes contain the four canonical Christian Gospels alongside decorative canon tables and portraits. Monastic tradition long revered them as holy relics copied in a single day by Saint Abba Garima, an early Christian missionary who, according to legend, arrived in the region in 494. For decades, outside art historians dated the books much later, often assigning them to the eleventh century or even later based on palaeographic comparisons.

A major shift occurred when modern scientific testing challenged those late classifications. Scholars were permitted to take two small parchment fragments to Oxford University, where radiocarbon analysis indicated dates between about 330 and 650. A second round of radiocarbon testing confirmed this antiquity, and the Ethiopian Heritage Fund describes the books as securely assigned to the late fifth to early seventh centuries. These findings place the Garima Gospels among the oldest surviving illustrated Christian manuscripts, comparable in age to the Syriac Rabbula Gospels of 586.