Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea

2016 – 2040

‘Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea’ (Schriftkultur des christlichen Äthiopiens und Eritreas: Eine multimediale Forschungsumgebung) is a long-term project of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg headed by Prof Dr Alessandro Bausi. The project started in early 2016 and is scheduled to be completed by 2040.

‘Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea’ aims at creating a comprehensive research environment for the description of the written heritage of Christian Ethiopia and Eritrea. At its core there is a digital XML-based platform on Gǝʿǝz manuscripts collecting information on texts, various physical elements, colophons and notes, but also institutions, authors, owners, and scribes. Digital images are supplied wherever possible, with some of the texts and passages edited and available additionally in textual form. The hypercatalogue/portal interoperability with other online repositories allows search from one central place across all the existing platforms. The users are able to perform varied queries on texts, authors, scribes, and codicological elements for most known Ethiopic manuscripts. Both manuscripts preserved in western libraries and those still in Ethiopia and Eritrea are incorporated, as far as they are available.

As a result, a repertory of manuscripts is enhanced by a repertory of texts (Clavis), literature (annotated bibliography), places (Gazetteer), and persons relevant for the Ethiopian and Eritrean written heritage.

Writing was adopted by the Semites settled in the area between the northern highlands of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea as early as the first millennium BCE.

The Ethiopic language (Gəʿəz) and the vocalized Ethiopic script as they appeared by the fourth century are, apart from certain specific features, very near to the language and script used later on for centuries as the literary language of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia.

An extensive Christian literature in the region, consisting mostly of biblical and patristic texts translated from Greek, emerged beginning with the Christianization of Aksum in the fourth century CE. In the centuries to follow, texts translated from Arabic followed, as well as works composed locally in Ethiopic. A full repertory of known texts of Ethiopic literature does not yet exist and is one of the lacunae to be filled by Beta maṣāḥǝft.

Manuscript studies are thus of primary importance for those studying the history and culture of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The manuscript must be studied both as an artefact (the main subject of such disciplines as codicology and palaeography), product of human activity (focusing on the authors of texts, scribes and bookmakers, provenance, and other aspects of the historical and social context), and as carriers of texts (which are the primary subject of study in philology). All these fields are addressed by the project.