Arwe

A short text in the Tigray language, published by Carlo Conti Rossini in 1897, begins on the road from Adwa to Aksum, at a plain called Hasabo. The name means “he washed it”, and the traveller wants to know why. The answer is a girl in a sycamore tree. She had been hung there as tribute. A band of holy men walking past sat down in the shade beneath her, a tear fell on them, and they looked up. They asked where the serpent was. She pointed. Near that hill, perhaps? “He is what looks like a hill,” she said. The saints made the sign of the cross, the serpent burst apart, and its blood ran out across the plain and washed it.

That serpent is Arwe. The Ge’ez word means serpent, and also wild beast or noxious beast, and Ethiopian writers set the creature at the very beginning of their history, a king who reigned four hundred years before any human did. In the seventeenth century the Ethiopian scholar Abba Gregorius told the German orientalist Hiob Ludolf that the most ancient Ethiopians had worshipped a serpent as a god, and that for this reason some people counted Arwe as their first king. The German scholar Enno Littmann, who gathered the variants in 1904, observed that almost every form of the story makes Arwe both at once, a ruler and an object of worship. One Tigre manuscript he used says the people “were ruled by” the dragon; a second copy of the same text corrects it to “worshipped”.

The worship had a price, and the tellings agree on its shape. In the Tigre legend Littmann published, each man gave in turn his first-born daughter, along with a measure of mead and a measure of milk, each measure about three hundred litres. The fullest description comes from a homily in honour of Abba Garima, one of the Nine Saints, attributed to Yohannes, bishop of Aksum, and edited by Conti Rossini in 1898. A governor of Aksum tells the saints that the serpent is king over the land of Ethiopia and that all the governors worship him. When his tribute falls due, they choose a virgin of great beauty, anoint her, adorn her, bring her to him and leave her alone, and the serpent devours her. His daily ration is ten cows, ten bulls, a thousand goats, a hundred sheep and ten thousands of ten thousands of birds, and a hundred and seven measures of drink do not quench him.

The same governor gives the only full portrait. The serpent is a hundred and seventy cubits long and four broad. His teeth are a cubit each and a horn of three cubits rises from him. His eyes resemble a fiery flame, his eyebrows are black as a raven, and his whole body is like lead and iron. When he moves, the noise carries for eight days’ journey. Two of the saints, Isaac and Os, went with the governor to see for themselves, and found Arwe doing what a king does: travelling from place to place with governors following behind him and princes walking in front. Fourteen miles off they heard thunder. The earth shook, the mountains trembled, and the princes bowed down. Abba Os took one look and fell on his face.

Nobody drew a sword. The saints went home, fasted and prayed for forty days and forty nights, and received a visit from the archangels Michael and Gabriel, who arrived looking like foreign monks and let their feet be washed before revealing themselves. Then God sent a mighty flash down from heaven and cut the serpent into twelve pieces with a fiery sword. The Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge, surveying this material in 1928, suspected that ʾarwe had begun life as a term of abuse for idolaters and their cults, and that native writers, taking the word at its commonest meaning, then set about measuring the monster. If so, the insult grew teeth a cubit long.

The saints were not the first to kill him, and they were not the last. In the older line of the story, the stranger Angabo destroyed the serpent, called Wainaba at Aksum, and took the throne as his fee; the Aksum tradition Budge retold has the creature come up from Tamben shooting fire to right and left, and die at Aksum, where its grave was still shown at May Wayno. Budge noted the obvious difficulty: the chronicles have Arwe killed again about two thousand years later by the Nine Saints, who reached Ethiopia around the fifth or sixth century. Littmann found that the tradition generally counts three separate reigns of the serpent, one at the start of the nation’s history, one at the time of the Assumption of Mary, and one in the days of the Nine Saints, and admitted that he could not account for the middle one. Budge also recorded a king named Yaʿkob, remembered as so cruel that he was called ʾArwe, the Beast, who ruled for nine years until ʾElla ʾAsbeha, whom Ludolf identified with the Elesbaas of the church historians, lit fires at both ends of the defile where he lived, lined its sides with soldiers, and cut him down as he leapt through the flames.

In Tigre country the story turned toward the Queen of Sheba. There the girl tied to the tree is Etiye Azeb, the Queen of the South, and seven saints sit in the shade below her. Abba Mentelit runs at the dragon first, the others fall on him and beat him to death with the cross, and as he dies a drop of his blood lands on her heel and turns it into the heel of an ass. Her own village, not believing the dragon is dead, drives her out; she spends the night up a tree, leads them to the body in the morning, and they make her their chief. The deformed foot sends her to Solomon in search of a cure. Another text, the history of the kings of Dabra Yohannes, has the Queen of the South, daughter of Agabos, kill ʾArwe Medr herself, with her father and the Blessed Ones, before setting out for Jerusalem. Littmann compared the Arabic legends of Bilqis, who had an ass’s hoof and who was said to have killed a tyrant who ravished the maidens of her country, and whom the historian al-Masʿudi made the slayer of a first South Arabian king who reigned four hundred years. He thought that tyrant and Arwe had probably once been the same figure.

Some Ethiopian writers used the serpent as shorthand for paganism itself. An abridged chronicle says that when Abba Salama arrived in the days of Abreha and Asbeha, part of the people lived under the Mosaic law and the rest worshipped the serpent. The archaeologist Andrea Manzo, writing in Aethiopica in 2014, asked whether the story preserves anything real. In Proto-Aksumite tombs at Betä Giyorgis, north of Aksum, excavators found offering basins with snakes modelled on their rims, in the same cemetery as traces of human sacrifice; similar basins came from Sälä’la’a and from the earliest monumental building beneath the Cathedral of Maryam Seyon at Aksum. Manzo argued that these finds may support the reality of a snake cult and of human offerings, and that the serpent’s meaning shifted over time, from helpful being to monster to the Christian symbol of sin. He also pointed to a detail that sits oddly with pure villainy: in some tellings grain springs up from the serpent’s head after its death.

Arwe’s power is bulk and terror and the plain fact of rule. Governors worship him, princes walk before him, a kingdom feeds him, and the earth itself cannot bear his weight. Yet every telling finds him beatable by something small: a buried piece of iron, a fire at each end of a pass, a sign of the cross, forty days of prayer. What he never manages is to stay dead. The chronicles kill him at the dawn of the kingdom, in the age of the saints and once more as a human tyrant, and every time the blood soaks into the ground and the story waits for the next deliverer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Arwe in Ethiopian mythology?

Arwe is the serpent-king of Ethiopian tradition, placed at the very beginning of the royal lists as a ruler who reigned four hundred years before the human kings. The Ge’ez word ʾarwe means serpent, and also wild beast or noxious beast. The people are said to have worshipped Arwe as a god as well as obeying him as a king.

What did Arwe demand as tribute?

Arwe demanded young women. In the Tigre legend published by Enno Littmann, each man gave in turn his first-born daughter with a measure of mead and a measure of milk, while the homily on Abba Garima says a beautiful virgin was anointed, adorned and left for the serpent to devour. The same homily adds a daily ration of cattle, goats, sheep and birds.

Who killed Arwe?

Arwe is killed several times in Ethiopian tradition. The hero Angabo kills the serpent, called Wainaba at Aksum, and becomes king; much later the Nine Saints destroy Arwe by prayer, and in the homily on Abba Garima a flash from heaven cuts the serpent into twelve pieces. In the Tigre version seven saints beat the dragon to death with the cross, and one king list credits the Queen of the South herself.

How big was Arwe?

The homily on Abba Garima makes Arwe 170 cubits long and 4 cubits broad, with teeth a cubit long and a horn of three cubits. It describes eyes like a fiery flame, raven-black eyebrows and a body like lead and iron, and says the noise of Arwe moving could be heard for eight days’ journey.

Is Arwe connected to the Queen of Sheba?

Yes. In the Tigre legend the girl offered to Arwe is Etiye Azeb, the Queen of the South, whose heel turns into an ass’s heel when the serpent’s blood falls on it, which later sends her to Solomon for a cure. Angabo, the hero who killed Arwe, is named in the royal lists as her father or predecessor.

Related Entries

Angabo, Ethiopian Mythology, Adbar, Werehyena, Ark of the Covenant, Seal of Solomon, Apep/Apophis, Ninki Nanka, Perseus, Cetus, Gorgon, Yamata no Orochi, Saint George, Illuyanka, Dragon