Anayer
Anayer, also recorded as Ayner, is the eponymous founding ancestor of the Qemant in their oral origin tradition, which was set down in 1922 by the Ethiopian scholar Aläqa Tayyä Gäbrä Maryam. In this tradition the Qemant descend from Canaan, son of Ham, through his son Arwadi ('the Arvadite') and Arwadi's son Anayer; driven by drought and famine in his homeland, Anayer is said to have come into the Ethiopian highlands with his wife and to have settled in the forests of Kerker (Karkar), the district that remained the senior cult-centre of the Qemant. Standing within the class of culture-heroes who mediate between the people and the supreme sky-god Mezgana, Anayer is the named founder-figure of this Central Cushitic, 'pagan-Hebraic' people of North Gondar. His attested pedigree reaches back to figures outside the Qemant pantheon itself, so within this set he is connected only to the creator Mezgana whom his descendants worship.
Domains
- ancestry and ethnogenesis
- migration and settlement
Powers
- to found and give origin to the Qemant people
Epithets
Relations
- subordinate to: MezganaAs a founding culture-hero of the Qemant, Anayer stands beneath the supreme creator Mezgana, in whose religion the people he founded venerate the sky-god through their hilltop groves.Frederick C. Gamst, The Qemant: A Pagan-Hebraic Peasantry of Ethiopia (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). (secondary)
Sources
- Anayer (Ayner) is the eponymous founding ancestor and culture-hero of the Qemant, traditionally derived from Canaan through Arwadi the Arvadite and remembered as the settler of the forests of Kerker.: Aläqa Tayyä Gäbrä Maryam, Yä-Ityoṗya Hizb Tarik [History of the People of Ethiopia] (Asmara, 1922); Eng. trans. Grover Hudson and Tekeste Negash (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1987). (secondary); Frederick C. Gamst, The Qemant: A Pagan-Hebraic Peasantry of Ethiopia (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). (secondary)