An African “Constantine” in the Twelfth Century: The Architecture of the Early Zagwe Dynasty and Egyptian Episcopal Authority

Sometime around the mid-twelfth century, two antique structures in Tǝgray, Ethiopia’s northernmost province, appear to have been converted into churches or otherwise reconsecrated. One was a temple dedicated to the south Arabian sun god Almaqah in Yǝḥa from 800 BCE, while the other was an anonymous palace plinth from the sixth century near the contemporary village of ‘Addi Awona. The churches that took over these structures went on to serve important functions in this burgeoning kingdom. The palace plinth became the seat of the Ethiopian metropolitan installed from Egypt, while the Yǝḥa temple later became a church associated with the legendary sixth-century Byzantine missionary Afṣe.The decision to appropriate these monumental structures for use as churches in the twelfth century is anomalous but, as I argue here, constitutes material evidence of a general political centralization, re-Christianization, and reintegration into world trade that characterized the period we now call Zagwe (eleventh to thirteenth centuries). Because all these phenomena had been in flux, the change in the Zagwe period was seen by ecclesiastics in Ethiopia as well as Coptic Christians in Egypt as a restoration of past glories akin to those of Constantine in Rome, especially the apocryphal Constantine found in Coptic martyr literature. The construction of five-aisled basilicas specifically in sites understood as ancient therefore yielded platforms with which to parallel this Christian transformation.