Abyssinian Orthodox UniversityOpen KnowledgeA curated, annotated gateway to the openly available primary sources of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition — the Glory of Kings, the Book of Enoch, the lives of the saints — with our own open study materials alongside them.
For more than a millennium and a half, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserved its learning the way the world now calls open: texts copied by hand, freely given from monastery to monastery, held in trust for the whole community of the faithful. The scribe’s labour was an act of devotion, not of property.
This library continues that vocation in a digital age. It gathers primary texts of the Ethiopian tradition that are already in the public domain, alongside reference works and our own openly licensed study materials — each one annotated so a newcomer can find their footing. We link to trusted repositories; we do not gate what was always meant to be shared.
Translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1922.
Ethiopia’s national epic: the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, their son Menelik I, and the coming of the Ark of the Covenant (the Tabot) to Aksum. Foundational to Ethiopian Orthodox identity and the Solomonic dynasty.
Read it →Translated from the Ge’ez by R. H. Charles, 1917.
Quoted in the New Testament Epistle of Jude and preserved complete only in Ge’ez, 1 Enoch is canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Its visions of the Watchers, the heavens, and the final judgment shaped early Jewish and Christian thought.
Read it →Translated from the Ethiopic by R. H. Charles, 1917.
Known in Ge’ez as the Book of Division, Jubilees retells Genesis and Exodus through a calendar of jubilee cycles. Suppressed elsewhere, it survives complete only within the Ethiopian canon.
Read it →August Dillmann, 2nd edition, English translation 1907.
The foundational scholarly grammar of Classical Ethiopic (Ge’ez) and still a standard reference for the language of the liturgy and the canon.
Find it at the Internet Archive →Abyssinian Orthodox University, 2026.
Our own three-lesson introduction to reading the fidel and praying the Lord’s Prayer in Classical Ge’ez — available in English, Spanish, and French.
Begin the course →Translated by E. A. Wallis Budge as The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, 1928.
The daily commemorations of the saints across the church year — the great calendar of memory that orders Ethiopian Orthodox devotion.
Find it at the Internet Archive →Translated by J. M. Harden, 1920.
An early church order on worship, ministry, and discipline, preserved in the Ethiopian tradition — a window into how the early Church governed its common life.
Find it at the Internet Archive →Our curation is openly licensed. The descriptions, annotations, and study notes on this page are © Abyssinian Orthodox University and released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — free to reuse, adapt, and share with attribution.