ORTHODOXY : The notion that the Ark of the Covenant was removed from Jerusalem to Axum is central to the reverence accorded to the tabots, the Tablets of the Law, in Abyssinian Christian practices. The belief system of which the tabots are a part is, however, an unusual one. No other Christian Church gives such importance to what is, by definition, a pre-Christian - indeed a Judaic - tradition. Furthermore, the Christian faith did not itself reach Ethiopia until the fourth century AD - some one thousand three hundred years after Solomon's rule in Israel. The only satisfactory explanation for the unique position given to the Ark and to the tabots, therefore, is this: in Old Testament times, there must have been a period when there were very close cultural and religious links between Abyssinia and the Holy Land.
Gambela --