This page contains the publication and translation (together with linguistic and philological comments) of an old Amharic poem that may have been written as early as the middle of the seventeenth century. The published poem has a different theme than previous Old Amharic poems with the same title, “Märgämä kbr” (“Condemnation of Glory”) (but not wholly independent from one another). The overarching notion and key topics of these poems are death, God’s judgment, and the significance of leading a good life in a fleeting world. This makes early Amharic writing of the Märgämä kbr type, which is derived from oral tradition and directed to the Christian community, a distinct genre in early Amharic literature. We are still gathering data, therefore any new text in an earlier form of Amharic is crucial and beneficial and can alter current perceptions, even if the quantity of texts that describe Amharic’s earliest stages of evolution and early literary works has steadily increased.
