The study of early and pre-Solomonic Ethiopia and Eritrea has advanced greatly in the last decades, owing largely to the surfacing of new manuscript evidence. This has not only broadened our understanding of the Ethiopic literature in the Aksumite and post-Aksumite periods, but also provided us with a more complex—and still not fully understood—picture of the development of the Gǝʿz language, orthography and paleography. A considerable number of the earliest manuscripts contain material that is later transmitted in a liturgical book known as the Dǝggʷā (a term of unclear etymology). This is the main antiphonary in the Ethiopic Christian liturgical tradition, containing chants for the Divine Office (wāzemā services, sǝbḥata nagh services, etc.) covering the entire liturgical year. The extensive corpus of Dǝggʷā-type antiphons is still in active use, and different versions of the book are attested in hundreds of manuscripts and, since the 1960s, also in printed form. Drawing on a PhD dissertation defended at the Universität Hamburg in 2022 (for a summary, see https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.25.0.1988), this paper presents features of the earliest manuscript witnesses to Ethiopic antiphonaries of the Dǝggʷā type. These manuscripts, many of them fragmentary, belong to the very earliest strata of preserved Ethiopic manuscripts, presumably dating from the middle of the fourteenth century or earlier. They share numerous features with other early manuscripts, such as the homiliary manuscript EMML 8509 from Ṭānā Qirqos and some of the liturgical notes in the famous ʾAbbā Garimā Gospels. Due to the plastic nature of Ethiopic antiphons, they frequently incorporate quotations from biblical and hagiographical texts. Consequently, they form an important and largely untapped source for lines of secondary transmission of many such works. In view of the considerable age of the preserved antiphonary manuscripts, this means that the corpus of Dǝggʷā-type antiphons could often contribute important information when such texts are edited critically. In this presentation, the earliest antiphonary manuscripts will be discussed from three perspectives. First, as witnesses to the development of Ethiopic antiphonary manuscripts, one of the most central genres of liturgical manuscripts in the Ethiopian–Eritrean Christian culture. Second, as examples of an early layer of Ethiopic manuscripts, characterized by a series of paleographical, orthographical and linguistic features that deviate from Classical Gǝʿz, including an exceptionally high level of so-called ‘non-standard vocalization’. Third, as sources for lines of secondary transmission, exemplifying how they can contribute to the wider study of Ethiopic textual transmission and philology.