Gudit

Also Known As: also Gwedit; Yodit, the Ethiopian form of Judith; Esato or Isato, “fire”, in Amharic; Ga’wa in the Teltal country. Gudit may play on the Amharic gud, a word that runs from “monster” to “wonder”
Region/Culture: East Africa
Mythos: Ethiopian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Gudit is the destroyer queen of Ethiopian tradition, credited with burning the churches of Aksum, throwing down its great stelae and ruling the wreckage for forty years.
Role in Mythos: She is the figure on whom the tradition hangs the end of the Aksumite kings, standing between the old royal house and the Zagwe dynasty that followed.
Relation to Humans: She was a mortal woman, and behind the legend stands a real queen of the tenth century whom two foreign writers of her own time describe without naming. To the Christian highlands she became the name for every ruin, so that scorched ceilings and fallen stones across Tigray are still explained as her work.

The ceiling of the rock church of Abreha and Atsbeha, in the hills of eastern Tigray, is black. Visitors who ask why are told by the priests that a queen had the nave packed with hay, floor to roof, and put a torch to it. That was more than a thousand years ago. The soot is still there, and so is her name.

Gudit is what the Ge’ez tradition calls her. In Tigrinya and Amharic she is Yodit, the local form of Judith. Amharic speakers also call her Esato, which means fire, and the people of the Teltal lowlands knew her as Ga’wa. Even the commonest name may be a verdict in disguise, since the Amharic word gud covers everything from a monster to a marvel. A woman can be both, and the stories suggest she was.

The outline of her legend is short and brutal. Sometime in the tenth century a non-Christian queen came against Aksum, the ancient holy city of the Ethiopian highlands, and broke it. She killed or drove out the king. She hunted the princes of the royal house, the line that claimed descent from Solomon, and tradition says she stormed the flat-topped mountain of Debre Damo where the king’s male relatives were kept, a place reached only by rope up a sheer cliff. The Scottish traveller James Bruce, collecting stories in the eighteenth century, was told that four hundred princes died there. She burned the churches. She wrecked the cathedral of Aksum. Then she sat on the throne for forty years and her descendants held it after her.

At Aksum the giant stelae are laid at her door as well. The largest of them, a single carved block of granite that would have stood taller than a ten-storey building, lies shattered across the ground like a dropped column of sugar. Townspeople say it stood for centuries until she pulled it down. Archaeologists think it fell on the day its makers tried to raise it. A field of rougher standing stones on the western edge of the town carries her name to this day, and the name alone is the whole of the connection. Nobody blames a collapse on an engineer when a queen is available.

Who she was depends on who is telling it. One story makes her a princess of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews, daughter of a king named Gideon, who took her father’s throne when he fell fighting Aksum and finished the war he started. Another makes her an Aksumite princess, cast out of the city in disgrace, who married a Syrian prince called Zenobis, took his Jewish faith and came back with an army. A version preserved in Ethiopian manuscripts calls her the granddaughter of an emperor, married to a Jewish prince and attacking from the coast. In every one of these she is Jewish by birth or by marriage, and her war is a war on the Church.

Historians have been less sure. The Italian scholar Carlo Conti Rossini argued a century ago that she was no Jewish queen but the ruler of a pagan kingdom to the south, Damot, and later writers have largely agreed that the Jewish label was pinned on afterwards. The name Judith may have done some of that work by itself.

What makes her more than a story is that two outsiders wrote about her while she was alive. The Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal, in the later tenth century, recorded that the land of the Habasha had been ruled for many years by a woman, who had killed its king, a ruler he calls the hadani. Another Arabic report has a zebra arriving in Iraq around the year 970, sent on by the king of Yemen as a present he had received from the queen of the Habasha. So somewhere in the highlands, between burning one province and governing another, she was also choosing diplomatic gifts.

The second witness is a letter. An Ethiopian king whose name is not given wrote to George, king of Christian Nubia, begging him to carry a message to the Patriarch of Alexandria. A woman had risen against him, the king said. She was burning churches and cities, taking captives, and chasing him from one hiding place to the next, and the faith itself was close to going out in his country. He thought he knew why. Earlier kings had quarrelled with their bishop, and for years no new one had been sent from Egypt. This was the punishment. The Patriarch Philotheos, who held office from 979 to 1003, relented and sent a monk named Daniel as the new bishop. The Egyptian account says that the trouble then ended.

The letter is the nearest thing to hearing her enemies speak, and it shows what kind of power she held. It was plain military strength, the ability to take a city, hold it and take the next. No telling gives her magic. No spirit fights for her and no charm protects her. She had soldiers, patience and, if the forty years are anywhere near true, a talent for staying alive. The tradition’s horror is the horror of people who met an army they could not stop.

Her limits are the same shape. She could kill a king and still not end the kingdom, because one prince, in the tellings, was always carried away to safety in the south. She could burn churches and not the Church, which outlasted her and wrote the only version of her life that survived. No account of hers exists. Nothing she built is pointed out, no law of hers is remembered, and no source says how she died or where she is buried. Everything known about her comes from the people she defeated, written down by their grandchildren.

The priests at Abreha and Atsbeha still show the ceiling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Gudit?

Gudit was a non-Christian queen of the tenth century who, in Ethiopian tradition, destroyed the holy city of Aksum, burned its churches and ruled for forty years. She is also called Yodit, the Ethiopian form of Judith, and Esato, which means fire in Amharic. The tradition blames her for ending the old Aksumite line of kings.

Was Gudit a real person?

A real queen stands behind the legend of Gudit. The tenth-century Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal wrote that a woman had ruled the land of the Habasha for many years after killing its king. A letter from an Ethiopian king to the Patriarch of Alexandria, sent through King George of Nubia, also complains of a woman burning churches and driving him from place to place. Neither source gives her name.

Was Gudit Jewish?

Ethiopian tradition says Gudit was Jewish, either as a princess of the Beta Israel or as an Aksumite princess who converted after marrying a Syrian prince named Zenobis. Many historians doubt this. Carlo Conti Rossini argued that she was the ruler of a pagan kingdom to the south called Damot, and that the Jewish identity was attached to her later.

What did Gudit destroy?

Gudit is credited with wrecking the cathedral of Aksum, burning churches across Tigray and killing the princes held on the mountain of Debre Damo. Local tradition also says she pulled down the largest stele at Aksum, although archaeologists think it fell while it was being raised. The soot on the ceiling of the church of Abreha and Atsbeha is still explained as her fire.

How did Gudit die?

No source says how Gudit died or where she is buried. The tradition gives her a reign of forty years and says her descendants ruled after her. Everything recorded about Gudit was written by her enemies or their heirs.