British specialists help save Ethiopia's ancient Garima Gospels

Legend has it they were created in a day after God intervened to delay the sunset. Today, a British charity revealed how it had worked to save the Garima Gospels and set out evidence suggesting they may form one of the earliest surviving illustrated Christian manuscripts.
A page from the Garima Gospels, one of the oldest-surviving Christian manuscripts. Photograph: BNPS.co.uk Kept at the remote monastery of Abuna Garima in northern Ethiopia, the two volumes had become fragile. But an Anglo-French team of specialists sponsored by the Ethiopian Heritage Fund travelled there to preserve them.
The gospels are named after Abba Garima, a monk who arrived in Ethiopia in the fifth century. The story goes that, with God's assistance, he copied the four gospels in a day. In the 1960s specialists studied them and concluded they were created around 1100. Later, however, a French specialist in Ethiopian art took two fragments to Oxford and one was dated to the fifth century.Read More