The ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' (also spelled ''Gädlä Sämaʿtat'', meaning "Spiritual Combat of the Martyrs") is an Ethiopic (Ge'ez) compilation of

saints' lives A hagiography (; ) is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian ...

, with the oldest components dating to the 13th century. Egyptian martyrs are well represented but there are other Eastern saints as well. They are ordered by day of commemoration in the Ethiopian liturgical calendar. The texts are all translations from

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

save the life of Wasilides, which was translated from Coptic. It is an open question whether any of the lives are derived from

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

originals, but there is evidence favouring it in some cases (e.g, lack of Arabisms). The ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' is a body of texts that only gradually came together as a collection. The earliest attestation of a collection known as ''Gadla Samāʿt'' is found in an inventory of

Istifanos Monastery Istifanos Monastery (or St Stephen Monastery) is a monastery in Ethiopia, located in Lake Hayq. (The Stephen commemorated at the monastery is not the Saint Stephen of Acts.) The church structure was built around the 9th century by the Aksumite ki ...

from 1292 referring to books donated by

Iyasus Mo'a Iyasus Mo'a (1214 – 1294) was an Ethiopian saint of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church; his feast day is 5 December (26 Hedar in the Ethiopian calendar). In life he was an Ethiopian monk and abbot of Istifanos Monastery in Lake Hayq of Am ...

. The translation of many individual lives, however, is attributed to Abuna Salama II (). The full collection contains at least 142 lives. The ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' survives in some form in at least 34 known

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

s, but a majority of these contain only a fraction of the lives. There are 24 main manuscripts that contain only the ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' and no other texts, ranging in completeness from two to twelve months. There are five manuscripts in which lives from the ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' are mixed with lives from the ''Gadla Qeddusān'' ("Spiritual Combat of the Saints"), which are mostly monastic lives. There are another five manuscripts which contain just a single month of lives from the ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' alongside unrelated material. A majority of manuscripts are from the 15th century or earlier. The ''Gadla Samāʿtāt'' was the first

calendar of saints The calendar of saints is the traditional Christian method of organizing a liturgical year by associating each day with one or more saints and referring to the day as the feast day or feast of said saint. The word "feast" in this context does n ...

of Ethiopia before it was gradually replaced by the '' Ethiopian Synaxarium''.

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* * *{{cite journal, url=https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/pdf/brita.pdf, title=The Manuscript as a Leaf Puzzle: The Case of the ''Gädlä Sämaʿtat'' from ʿUra Qirqos (Ethiopia), first=Antonella, last=Brita, journal=Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin, volume=1, date=2015 , pages=6–17 Texts in Ge'ez 15th-century Christian texts Christian hagiography Martyrologies

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