Religious Artifacts

Church bells. Monasteries like the Debre Maryam have interesting artifacts surrounding them. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church uses stone chimes, also called lithophones, as single bells (dowel) as well as in sets of chimes. Our student guide rang this lithophone for us to demonstrate its purposes. On one end the chime is a call to prayer. On another end a warning sound. ​https://www.britannica.com/art/stone-chimes

This is the typical construction of the buildings in the area, especially on the island we visited. This is the entrance of the museum you see pictured below, though we were not allowed to go into it, just like the monastery pictured earlier. You can see how thick the walls are in this photo. This is common, though the weather this time of year is very moderate.

---

​The islands museum housed a variety of artifacts. The books are ancient bibles, written in the Ge'ez language. This is the language of the Ethiopian Church, but not the people. The common language of the people is Amharic. Students take English in grade school, and are only able to continue in high school if they pass a test and are proficient enough in English to study their subjects in English full time. So Ge'ez is a little like Latin was in the Catholic Church before Vatican II reformed the mass to celebrate it in the native language of the congregation.

---