Ethiopian tradition gives its chant a founding legend of great beauty. Yared, a deacon of sixth century Aksum, was a poor student until, watching a caterpillar persist up a tree, he returned to his books, and in time three birds from paradise appeared to him and carried him to the heavenly Jerusalem, where he learned the song of the angels.
Returning, he sang before the ark of Zion, and Ethiopia had its chant. The legend's most loved scene has him singing before Emperor Gebre Meskel, both so rapt that the emperor's spear, resting point down, pierced Yared's foot and neither noticed until the song ended, whereupon the emperor offered any reward and Yared asked leave to retire to the wilderness to pray. Beneath the legend stands a real tradition.
The corpus ascribed to Yared, above all the Deggua, the great antiphonary, orders chants across the liturgical year in three modes, ge'ez, the plain first mode, ezl, the grave mode of fasts and funerals, and araray, the brighter mode of feasts, which the tradition reads as figures of the Trinity. Yared is venerated as a saint of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, patron of its music, and the church has never ceased to sing what it believes he brought back, making the Deggua one of Christianity's oldest continuously performed chant repertoires.