Bulletin of SOAS, 82, 2 (2019), 315–350. © The Author(s), 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unre- stricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0041977X1900034X An Old Amharic poem from northern Ethiopia: one more text on condemning glory Maria Bulakh Russian State University for the Humanities / National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
[email protected] Denis Nosnitsin University of Hamburg
[email protected] Abstract This article presents a publication and translation (with linguistic and philological commentaries) of a recently discovered piece of Old Amharic poetry, possibly dating to the first half/middle of the seventeenth century. The published text bears the title Märgämä kəbr (“Condemnation of glory”), but its content differs from that of several other Old Amharic poems (not entirely independent from each other) known under the same title. It is only the general idea and the main topics that are shared by all Märgämä kəbr poems: transience of the earthly world, the inevit- ability of death and of God’s judgement, and the necessity of leading a vir- tuous life. One can thus speak of Märgämä kəbr as a special genre of early Amharic literature, probably originally belonging to the domain of oral lit- erature and used to address the Christian community with the