5 Questions to...Alessandro Bausi

11 March 2022

In our series '5 Questions to…', members of CSMC chat about their background, current work, what motivates them, and about their favourite written artefacts. In this episode, we talk to Alessandro Bausi, co-spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence and the only professor for Ethiopian Studies in Germany.

Alessandro Bausi, Please tell us a little about yourself.

I am an Italian scholar in Ethiopian Studies, a very small field with only one chair in Germany. In 2009, in my mid-forties, I took the chance and challenge to start a new professional experience abroad and became a Professor of Ethiopian Studies at Universität Hamburg, an institution which offered opportunities not comparable to those in Italy at the time. Since then, I used to commute between Hamburg and Florence. The pandemic has fundamentally changed my everyday life, as it has happened to many others.

I have kept a deep and lasting feeling of gratitude towards the city of Florence where I received my school education, and to the University of Florence (Università degli Studi di Firenze) where I obtained my MA; in those years, it was one of the strongest centres of philological and linguistic research in Italy. I feel the same way about the Oriental University Institute (Istituto Universitario Orientale, now Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’), the oldest and most prestigious Italian institution for Asian and African Studies, where I received my PhD. After completing my civil service and making an important experience as a schoolteacher still in Florence, I started my academic career in Naples, first as assistant and then associate professor.

Born in a family whose members did not have any chance to pursue higher education, I owe everything to my parents and also to the democratisation process that opened up university education in the 1960s and 70s. Likewise, I am indebted to some extraordinary teachers, among whom I would like to point out my first teacher of Greek, Teresa Parri, a student of Giorgio Pasquali in Florence (one of the most influential philologists of the 20th century) and an exceptional intellectual, and my professor of Ethiopian Studies, Paolo Marrassini; were it not for him, I wouldn’t even have known of the existence of the field I am working in. I mention these two persons as examples for a stimulating environment also shaped by many other charismatic figures, many of whom became dear friends and colleagues over time.

What are you currently working on, and how does your project contribute to your field?

Along with the usual teaching, supervision, and administrative tasks as Professor for Ethiopian Studies at the Asien-Afrika-Institut (in African Linguistics and Ethiopians Studies), I have a number of roles at the Cluster and in other projects. At the Cluster, I am one of two co-spokepersons; I am responsible for Theory and Terminology (TNT), a research unit which I have been leading since 2012, and for the one-year MA programme ‘Manuscript Cultures’. I am also coordinating the conference ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’, which will be held in 2023. While I am currently not heading any Cluster-based project, I am supervising PhD students within and outside the Cluster. Besides TNT, I also participate in the activities of Inscribing Spaces (Research Field B), Formatting Contents (Research Field D), and Archiving Artefacts (Research Field E). As one of the longest-serving Principal Investigators at the Cluster, I have to keep track of what has been done, in order, as one says, not to reinvent the wheel — although, to be honest, what we learn is that reinvented wheels always have different shapes.

A large part of my remaining time is taken up by editorial work. I am chief-editor of one journal, chief-co-editor of another one, on the editorial boards of two further ones, chief-editor of two series, and editor of a sub-series. Very little time remains for personal research, but I try to keep a regular output.

This project offers the rare chance to do research without the pressure to immediately achieve results, which often prevents research from being deep, broad, and sustainable.

Your project 'Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea' has a duration of 25 years and will not be completed until 2040. How do you organise such a long research project and how do you specify concrete goals for it?

This project, which is funded by The Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities through the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg, is a key asset not only for Ethiopian, Eritrean, and general African Studies at Universität Hamburg but also for the Cluster and CSMC. It offers the rare chance to carry out fundamental research without the pressure to immediately achieve results, which often prevents research from being deep, broad, and sustainable. Nonetheless, I think that we have already achieved some good results during the first six years. The project employs a very cooperative approach. It offers support to the international community of scholars and institutions in Ethiopian Studies and is pivotal to developing related projects at Universität Hamburg.

Importantly, such a comprehensive project requires a clear and rigorous approach: everyone has to agree on common rules and conventions. This regards, for example, the description and encoding of written artefacts, and the way in which we identify different kinds of information manuscripts provide, including texts, images, and material features. I will not see (if I will still be there) the completion of this project in any institutional capacity because I will be retired long before. Still, I am confident that the project has the potential to advance the field and to establish common paradigms for the study of the Ethiopian and Eritrean manuscript culture. Thanks to the project’s open-access policy, our data will be not only accessible for but also extended by people and institutions from Europe, the US, Africa, and other areas, thus building up a globally shared body of knowledge.

Besides your other roles, you are also the director of the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies (HLCEES). What is this institution and what does your role involve?

HLCEES is formally part of the Asien-Afrika-Institut and hosts projects in Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies at Universität Hamburg in cooperation with CSMC. It is one of the world’s most important centres of its kind, carrying out fundamental research in our field. HLCEES has produced the five-volume Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, the most comprehensive lexicon about a sub-Saharan country, and hosted major projects like the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies networking programme, now supported by CSMC, and two ERC projects: Ethio-SPaRe ('Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation, Research', headed by Denis Nosnitsin), and TraCES ('From Translation to Creation: Changes in Ethiopic Style and Lexicon from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages', headed by myself).

Besides the long-term project Beta maṣāḥǝft and other short-term projects, HLCEES currently also hosts young Postdocs and offers Summer Schools in manuscript studies in cooperation with CSMC. It also provides opportunities for guests, for example Jacopo Gnisci, an art historian who was a fellow at HLCEES a few years ago with a project on a fund of art-historical relevance at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. He is now a lecturer at University College London and Principal investigator (together with me) of a project on medieval Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts ('ITIESE: Demarginalizing Medieval Africa: Images, Texts, and Identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527)'). Another example is Mersha Alehegne, an alumnus of Universität Hamburg, who is now an associate professor at Addis Ababa University, an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, and a Co-Principal Investigator (together with me) of a project documenting the ancient tradition of Ethiopian Church education ('Documenting an Ancient Education System in Africa: ʾAbǝnnät Tǝmhǝrt in Ethiopia').

Do you have a favourite written artefact? If so, what is it and why is it so special to you?

This is the easiest question to answer. I wrote my MA (1988) and PhD (1991) dissertations on medieval Ethiopian canon law texts. This is probably not the most appealing topic to a young researcher, but I have kept working on this subject for many years, which confirms that someone interested in philological and manuscript studies does not look at content first. In 1999, while I was on a research trip in Addis Ababa, the well-known anthropologist and art historian Jacques Mercier asked me to look at a couple of ancient parchment codices he had come across and microfilmed while working in Tǝgrāy in northern Ethiopia. One of them is a canon law manuscript that is or contains (there are reasons to opt for both terms) what I have called the Aksumite Collection (‘Sinodos of Qǝfrǝya’, MS C3-IV-71/C3-IV-73, Ethio-SPaRe UM-039). This collection includes ancient and archaic Ethiopic (Gǝʿǝz) canonical and liturgical texts with one exceptional historical text (the History of the Episcopate of Alexandria), probably translated directly from Greek in late antiquity.

Discovering and studying this manuscript inspired a profound rethinking of the making of the mediaeval Ethiopian manuscript culture and its contribution to the history of early Egyptian Christianity. Under intricate circumstances and thanks to the help of several people — here I must mention my student Antonella Brita, who first digitised this manuscript in 2006, and Denis Nosnitsin, who discovered two additional detached leaves in 2009 (a Manuscript of the Month) — I eventually had the chance to study this manuscript in more detail. Lack of time has prevented me from studying it as comprehensively as it deserves. Nevertheless, I have published a number of articles on it since 2002, and also on related topics that have opened up unexpected perspectives. I had the chance to directly see, touch, and examine this written artefact only once in 2014, after it had been restored in 2012. After the outbreak of the civil war in Ethiopia in 2020, there has been no information on the whereabouts of this exceptional and unique written artefact.