Life of Lalibela (Gadla Lalibela)
The Ethiopian life of the saint-king Lalibela: his vision of ten churches in heaven, his kingship, and the cutting of ten churches from the rock with the help of angels. It is a saint’s life, written long after his reign.
The gadl (“contending”, the Ethiopian word for a saint’s life) of Lalibela is a work of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, written to be read in honour of a king whom that church venerates as a saint. Perruchon, who first published it, remarked that its author treats Lalibela as a saint more than as a king, and that it therefore gives few of the facts a historian looks for.
Perruchon printed extracts from a manuscript copied in the early nineteenth century and noted an older copy in the British Museum that he assigned to the fourteenth century. Nafisa Valieva, “The Portrait of a Queen” (Manuscript of the Month 2016.07, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg), says that the work was composed some time before the fifteenth century and is known from thirty-five manuscripts. It is evidence for how the churches of Lalibela were understood by those who worshipped in them in a later age; it is not a record of their construction.
Cited in
- about 1200, traditional date