Demarginalizing Medieval Africa: Images, Texts, and Identity in Early Solomonic Ethiopia, 1270-1527 (ITIESE)

2021 – 2024

The ITIESE project intends to shed new light on the art, history, and culture of the Ethiopian Empire during the early Solomonic period. Collaborating with libraries and institutions across the world, it will focus on the dynasty that claimed to descend from the biblical King Solomon from its rise in 1270 to its near collapse in 1527. ITIESE will set up a platform for exchange between scholars working on the history of manuscript illumination – especially the Oriental Orthodox traditions of the Armenian, Coptic, and the Syriac worlds – and on the Christian arts of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The Ethiopian Empire was the longest-lived empire in Africa behind that of Ancient Egypt. The colourful hieratic images that decorate Ethiopic manuscripts are unlike anything else produced in sub-Saharan Africa. These illustrations embody the spiritual aspirations and cultural identity of the artists who made them.

However, while publications on the arts of Ancient Egypt abound, the visual culture of Ethiopia continues to be marginalized and misrepresented. Most survey books of medieval art and manuscript illumination overlook the evidence afforded by the rich literary tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Likewise, many survey books of African art disassociate the heritage of Ethiopia from the rest of the continent. Ethiopian art thus remains unjustly at the periphery of academic discourse about African and medieval art, and at the fringes of debates about medievalism and orientalism. At the same time, the work of Ethiopian artists continues to be inappropriately looked at to identify a succession of foreign “influences” from non-African contexts rather than to understand the cultural, religious, and socio-political significance of their activities.

It is high time for an approach that pays attention to the representational intentions of Ethiopian artists. By looking at the illustrations in medieval Ethiopic manuscripts, focusing especially on hitherto little-known examples in collections in Germany and the UK, this project aims to improve our understanding of the vibrant cultural and religious history of the Ethiopian Empire during the early Solomonic period.

ITIESE is supported by an AHRC-DFG grant (ref. no. AH/V002910/1). Seed funding was provided by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. The project will run from 2021 to 2024 and will be co-hosted by UCL and Universität Hamburg. It is being co-directed by Alessandro Bausi (Universität Hamburg) and Jacopo Gnisci (UCL), who are working together with Theo M. van Lint (University of Oxford), Vitagrazia Pisani (Universität Hamburg), and Sophia Dege-Müller (Universität Hamburg). The project benefits from a wide network of advisors and is collaborating with several institutions and projects with overlapping research objectives.