#gudit

@ketchuplaser ‘s Gudit, the Street Samurai.

YODIT by David Dennis

You can see the making of process on my Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/20452491

Buy Prints Here

Queen Gudit ~ Judith, Yodit, Ge'ez

Gudit, 960 CE.

This entry is tragically going to be brief, because we only have a tiny bit of historical evidence about Gudit, the Ethiopian revolutionary legendary possibly-Jewish queen, and I've pretty much summed it up in the preceding sentence.

In the 900s, the Axumite Empire was a powerful, if somewhat declining, Christian dynasty in what is now Ethiopia. Not everyone was thrilled with this, particularly some of the subject populations. For example, Gudit. Who may or may not have decided that this was enough rule by people who weren't her, killed the emperor, and taken control of the empire for forty years. (This is what the oral tradition attests!) Or she may have been queen in her own right, of Damot or Agäw and/or the Ethiopian Jews or a Muslim country. Either way, the entirety of the historical record consists of a letter in which the meant-to-be-emperor of the Axumites writes frantically to a Muslim king, saying, excuse me, um, could we please have some more priests, because we prayed frantically to God to keep this queen from stabbing us all and laying waste to the countryside because we're Christian and she finds that obnoxious, and we tried running away and it isn't doing anything, so do you have, like, a supermonk? Is there a supermonk on hand? Can the Pope come? The chronicle in which the letter appears then goes on to say that the supermonk went to Ethiopia, fixed things up, everything is fine again, that woman got put in her place.

The other document consists of an Arab traveler who comments casually some time later that Ethiopia is now under the control of a woman who killed the emperor and took over everything.