Meron EstefanosThe oldest surviving Ethiopian manuscripts are the Garima Gospels, a set of two illuminated texts, brightly decorated with purple, green and blue paintings and written in about AD500. Today they are closely guarded by monks at the Abba Garima monastery in a remote part of Ethiopia’s mountainous Tigray region. Dozens of other churches in northern Ethiopia, many of them cut into rocky mountainsides, hold manuscripts that are also more than 1,000 years old.