Ethiopian tradition credits the entire chant system to Saint Yared, a deacon of Aksum in the sixth century, who is said to have received the three modes of the chant and set the liturgical year to them. What is certain is that the system attributed to him, with its three modes and its own notation of characters written above the text, is old, is peculiar to Ethiopia, and is the framework within which aquaquam sits. The dance is not a separate art form. It is the bodily part of the chant, and it cannot be learned by someone who does not know the chant.
That is enforced by the structure of the church schools, which are among the longest formal educations of any religious tradition. A student passes through reading, then the chant schools proper, then the schools of poetry, and aquaquam belongs near the end of that sequence. Its own school is a recognised institution with a recognised master, and a graduate carries a title. The whole progression can take twenty years or more, and the people performing at the front of a cathedral on a feast day have completed it.
The two churches that hold the tradition, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, were one body until 1993 and keep the practice in the same form, with the same schools behind it. The tradition also crossed into the wider diaspora in the later twentieth century, and aquaquam is now performed in Ethiopian and Eritrean parishes in North America and Europe by clergy trained in the same way.