Ethiopian culture: its own script, its own calendar, its own clock

Why the calendar is seven years behind

The Ethiopian calendar is the official civil calendar of the state, and it is not a variant of the Gregorian one. It is a solar calendar with twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth month of five or six days, adding a leap day every four years without exception.

Its epoch, the first day of its first year, equates to 29 August 8 AD, which is why Ethiopian years run seven to eight years behind Gregorian ones. The difference comes from a disagreement about the date of the Annunciation that the Ethiopian church never adopted the European correction to.

The year begins on 11 September, or 12 September in the year before a Gregorian leap year, with Enkutatash, which in Amharic means gift of jewels. It falls at the end of the long rains, when the highlands turn green and the yellow adey abeba flowers open, so the new year arrives with a visible seasonal marker rather than an arbitrary one.

The day is divided the same way. Ethiopian clock time begins at dawn rather than at midnight, so what a Gregorian clock calls seven in the morning is one o'clock in Ethiopia. Near the equator, where sunrise varies little across the year, that is the more rational arrangement, and it is used in ordinary speech and in scheduling.

Where the script came from

Ethiopia writes in Geʽez script, an abugida in which each character carries a consonant and a vowel together, giving a set of over two hundred characters rather than an alphabet of twenty-odd.

It descends from Ancient South Arabian writing and was adapted to write Geʽez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, before being carried into Amharic, Tigrinya and several other languages. Amharic is the working language of the federal government and, with Geʽez script behind it, one of the very few African languages with a continuous written record going back well over a thousand years.

The consequence for the culture is a body of manuscript literature that has no equivalent in the region. Church libraries and monasteries hold illuminated Geʽez manuscripts written on parchment and bound between wooden boards, produced continuously from the Aksumite period onward, and the Kebra Negast of the fourteenth century, which set out the Solomonic dynasty's claim of descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, is the political founding document of the country as well as a literary one.

What holds the religious life together

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the oldest institution in the country and the one that carried the culture through every change of government.

Christianity arrived around 330, when Frumentius converted King Ezana of Aksum. The church is one of the Oriental Orthodox communion and it retains practices the rest of Christianity dropped: it observes the Sabbath alongside Sunday, follows dietary rules close to kosher law, and practises circumcision.

Its fasting calendar governs how the country eats. Around 250 days of the year are fasting days for the devout, and fasting means no animal product at all, which is why Ethiopian cuisine carries an unusually large repertoire of dishes with no animal product in them. Before the 1974 revolution, 280 days a year were religious feasts or days of rest.

Timkat, the celebration of Epiphany, falls on 19 or 20 January and marks the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist. Replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, the tabot, are carried in procession from every church, and the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion at Aksum claims to hold the Ark itself, guarded by a single monk who is permitted to see it.

Islam is roughly as old in Ethiopia and arrived by welcome rather than conquest. Followers of Muhammad fleeing persecution were given asylum by the Aksumite king in 615, an episode Muslim tradition records as the First Hijra. Harar in the east grew into a walled city with more than eighty mosques and is treated as a holy city of Islam. Ethiopia's population divides roughly between Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Protestants, and the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, maintained a distinct liturgical tradition for centuries before most emigrated to Israel.

What the churches were cut from

The built expression of that religious life is subtractive rather than additive. At Lalibela eleven churches were cut downward into solid volcanic rock in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, each carved as a single piece from the top down, with windows, columns and drainage channels worked out of the same block. Bete Giyorgis, cut as a cross in plan and sunk into a pit, is the one that photographs.

The practice is older than Lalibela and continued after it. Rock-hewn churches appear across Tigray in positions that require a climb to reach, several of them cut into cliff faces reachable only by hand and rope, and Abuna Yemata Guh is the extreme case. Those churches are working parishes rather than monuments, which is why the priest is there when a visitor arrives.

What Ethiopians eat and what they eat it on

The base of the cuisine is injera, a large flat sourdough pancake fermented for days and made from teff, a grain cultivated in the Ethiopian highlands and almost nowhere else.

Injera is the plate, the utensil and the food at once. Stews are ladled onto it, diners tear pieces to lift the food, and by the end the plate has been eaten. Communal eating is the norm, from one platter, and gursha, feeding a mouthful to somebody else by hand, is an ordinary gesture of regard.

The stews are wat, built on onion cooked down without fat and on berbere, a chilli and spice blend that is the defining flavour of the highland kitchen. Doro wat, chicken with hard-boiled eggs, is the celebration dish. Kitfo is minced raw beef with spiced butter. The vegan repertoire the fasting calendar requires is extensive enough that most restaurants serve a fasting platter as a standard order.

Coffee is native here, and it is drunk in a ceremony rather than a cup. Green beans are roasted, ground and brewed at the table in a clay jebena, poured in three successive rounds that each have a name, with incense burning alongside. The ceremony can take an hour and is a form of hospitality rather than a performance.

What the music is made of

Ethiopian music is organised around qenet, a system of modes that gives the highland repertoire its immediately recognisable sound, and it varies sharply by ethnic group across a country of more than eighty of them.

The instruments are its own. The masenqo is a single-string bowed lute, the krar a lyre, the begena a large ten-string lyre used for meditative religious music. The washint is a bamboo flute of the highlands, and the kebero, a large hand drum, carries the Orthodox liturgy along with the senasel, a sistrum, and the prayer staff used to keep rhythm.

The secular tradition belongs to the azmari, itinerant musicians who improvise verses about the people in the room and who are regarded with a mixture of respect and suspicion for exactly that reason.

The modern history has a precise starting point. Forty Armenian orphans, the Arba Lijoch, arrived in Addis Ababa on 6 September 1924 and became Ethiopia's first official orchestra, which is how brass entered the tradition. By the end of the Second World War large orchestras backed singers, the Army, Police and Imperial Bodyguard bands foremost among them.

What followed between the 1950s and 1970s is the period the world knows. Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete, Tilahun Gessesse and Bizunesh Bekele recorded for Amha, Kaifa and Philips-Ethiopia, and Mulatu Astatke created Ethio-jazz by putting Ethiopian modes over jazz arrangements. The Buda Musique Éthiopiques series has reissued the catalogue since 1997 and is why the music travelled.

Under the Derg, censorship produced its own technique. Singers used sem ena worq, wax and gold, a poetic form of double meaning previously confined to qiné verse, to criticise the government in songs the censors passed.

Where the painting tradition comes from

Ethiopian religious painting is a continuous school rather than a series of imports, and it is instantly recognisable: large frontal eyes, flat planes of strong colour, figures ranked by size according to importance rather than perspective. Saints face the viewer directly and the wicked are shown in profile, a convention held for centuries.

The Gondarine period from the seventeenth century absorbed Byzantine motifs and, through prints the Jesuits brought, elements of Western Baroque and Renaissance composition, and folded both into the existing manner without displacing it. The result runs through illuminated manuscripts, church murals and the diptychs and triptychs carried by travellers, and it is still being painted.

How the country is put together

Ethiopia contains more than eighty ethnic groups and the culture is structured along ethnolinguistic lines rather than as a single national tradition.

The Afro-Asiatic-speaking majority developed a shared body of tradition through contact with the rest of north-east Africa, the Arabian peninsula, India and Italy. The Nilotic communities of the west, along the South Sudanese border, practise customs closer to those of South Sudan and the African Great Lakes, and the difference is real rather than a matter of degree.

Clothing marks the same divisions. The white cotton shamma and the habesha kemis, worn with woven borders whose patterns identify a region, are highland dress; the Afar and Somali lowlands wear something else entirely, and the peoples of the Omo valley in the south-west another thing again. A national costume in Ethiopia is a highland costume, and every discussion of national symbols runs into that.

The Oromo Gadaa system is the clearest case of an institution outside the highland Christian tradition: an indigenous democratic order in which authority passes between generation-sets on a fixed eight-year cycle, inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

What did not happen to this culture

Two absences shaped Ethiopian culture more than any single presence.

It was never colonised, so no European power imposed an administrative language, a legal code or a school curriculum. The five-year Italian occupation from 1936 did try, dismantling Ethiopian educational institutions and replacing them with a two-tier colonial system, and it ended before it could take root.

Its writing was never replaced. Most African languages that had no script before the twentieth century were written down in Latin letters by outsiders. Ethiopia already had one, and the languages that adopted it did so from a neighbour rather than from a coloniser.

What that produced is a culture that borrowed constantly and on its own terms: Armenian brass, Indian and Arabian trade goods, Byzantine painting in the Gondarine period, Italian coffee bars in Addis Ababa. The borrowing is everywhere, and in each case somebody in Ethiopia decided to take it.