A Sixth-Century Attribution, a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript

The Deggua, or Mazgeba Deggua, is the core hymnary of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, a collection of chants covering the full liturgical year that church tradition attributes to Saint Yared, said to have lived from 505 to 571 during the reign of Emperor Gebre Meskel in Aksum. The honest gap in that account matters as much as the tradition itself does. The Gadla Yared, the principal hagiography recounting Yared's life, survives only from a text recovered in the sixteenth century, roughly a thousand years after Yared is said to have lived, and the earliest surviving chant manuscripts of the Deggua itself date only from the fourteenth century, centuries after the sixth century compilation the tradition describes.

None of that distance is a reason to dismiss the tradition, and it is not the same claim as saying the attribution is false, only that it cannot be independently confirmed by material evidence contemporary with Yared's own lifetime. What can be said without leaning on the hagiography is that every surviving source, however many centuries removed from the events it describes, consistently names the same founding figure, and that the chant tradition those sources describe him originating remains a living, actively performed practice within Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox worship today, not a historical curiosity preserved only in manuscript. Later composers added further hymns to the corpus across the centuries that followed, but the core layer has always carried Yared's name.