![Look over the shoulder pose holding knives](https://knopkazmeya.com/16.png)
Mary-a non-Chalcedonian Christological doctrine of One Incarnate Nature of God the Word (Tamene 1998 Ayenew 2009). The EOTC (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church- Tewahido means “union”) believes that Christ has two births, from his Father and from his mother St. Both accounts will be important backgrounds in understanding the “charisma” and semiotic functions of the knife as slaughtering tool and as an identity marker.Īfter the mission of the Portuguese Jesuits in the Ethiopian highlands from 1536 to 1632 (Shabot and Alos-Moner 2006 Milkias 2011), the Ethiopian Orthodox Church dealt an internal Christological debate. The first one is a historical fact that takes us to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and afterward history of Christianity in Ethiopia, and the second one is a folkloric practice of using the knife to ward off evil spirits. Before we delve into our semiotic investigation of the so-called Christian knife and Muslim knife in Ethiopia regarding food and interreligious encounters, it is useful to have a brief look at two other functions of the knife in the country. Anthropological and ethno-archeological studies show that African knives not only have various forms, shapes, and types (Thomas 1925) but also different symbolic, magical, and sacrificial functions (McNaughton 1970). Coincidentally, the oldest examples of stone-cutting tools date back 2.6 million years to Ethiopia (Milkias 2011 Wilson 2012). The first knives, which were crafted out of stone, are believed to date back as far as two and a half million years ago, and those made of copper about ten thousand years ago, while those made out of bronze date back five thousand years ago, by craftsmen in the Near East (Ewalt 2005). 1 It is also worth noting that the flint was used for religious purpose: for making the first incision in the dead bodies prior to embalming (Herodotus in Wilkinson 1878 1878, 260 King and Hall 2005). Ancient Egyptians, well before mankind discovered smelting, used “Ethiopic” flint stones as knife. As a hyponym of other cutleries par excellence, the knife is apparently one of the oldest utensils that mankind started to use-even older than the fire (Wilson 2012)-evolving from a hunting tool in forest to an important household utensil on table, as Cohan ( 2009, 49) observes, making “the evolution of the knife as the primary tool for human survival and development.” Even for modern humans, in culinary process, the knife is “the earliest utensil used for manipulating food” (Farb and Armelagos 1980, 206).
![Look over the shoulder pose holding knives](https://knopkazmeya.com/16.png)