S
Saint Yared — the man who wrote the chant.
Tradition gives him the whole of Ethiopian sacred music: three modes, a notation of small marks above the words, and the aquaquam, the slow chanted dance with prayer staff, sistrum and drum. The story says he learned it from three birds sent from Eden. His books are still the ones cantors learn from.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
Tewahedo — made one.
The word is Ge'ez for unified, and it is the church's name for itself. In Christ the divine and the human are one nature, one person, one will, without separation and without confusion. It is the same confession the Coptic and Armenian churches make, and the reason all of them refused Chalcedon.
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Held by most — broad, but not universal
The Ark of the Covenant is in Aksum.
The church holds that the original Ark, taken from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, rests in the chapel beside the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. One monk guards it and never leaves the enclosure; no one else, including the patriarch, may see it. Every church in Ethiopia keeps a tabot, a consecrated replica of its tablets, and it is the tabot rather than the building that makes a church a church.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
A world with a visible order and an invisible one laid over it, both governed by the same God.
After death
Resurrection and judgment; the dead are commemorated at the fortieth day, the eightieth, and the year.