chapter 9 and the Christian Ecumene: Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Reception

Alessandro Bausi

Late antique and medieval Christian Ethiopia were intensively characterized by processess of cultural transmissions and interactions, the most evident and widespread form of which is translations.1 Attested starting from the most an- cient Ethiopian manuscripts, translations are therefore a substantial and con- stituent part of medieval Ethiopian cultural production and at the same time a core element of its literary heritage. Acquisition through translation from Greek characterizes ; acquisition, adaptation and revision of texts from Arabic and, later, revision of the Bible on the Hebrew text, occasion- ally at times, also from Latin, characterise the centuries from the twelfth at the latest to the sixteenth and beyond, with various phases and prevailing inter- ests. These translations transmitted from the literatures of other cultures were in the overwhelming majority into Gǝʿǝz, but there is a unanimous consensus that this form of interaction did not necessarily imply any cultural subordina- tion of the Ethiopian culture and that in most cases the processes of transla- tion implied a more complex cultural reception and appropriation.2 This large

1 This research has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Sonderforschungsbereich 950 (Manuskriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika und Europa), by the European Research Council, European Union Seventh Framework Programme IDEAS (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 338756 (TraCES), and by The Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities through a project of the Academy of Hamburg (Beta maṣāḥǝft). My thanks to Samantha Kelly, François-Xavier Fauvelle, and the Fondation des Treilles, for having encouraged and supported the realization of this contribution; to Alberto Camplani, with whom I had the privilege to discuss issues and share ideas concerning a com- mon subject of study over the last almost twenty years; to Antonella Brita, who substantially contributed in various ways to the research presented in this chapter; and to Jacques Mercier, who first entrusted me with the study of unpublished materials that have made me so incred- ibly busy for many years. 2 For a discussion of translation from this perspective in the Egyptian case, see the essays by Paola Buzi, Alberto Camplani, and Franco Crevatin, collected in Egitto crocevia di traduzi- oni, ed. Franco Crevatin (Trieste, 2018), with consideration of recent studies. From this point of view, the debate on the “originality” of Ethiopian literature is not at variance with many others, starting from the most outstanding case of the relationship between Greek and Roman literature. For a balanced and comprehensive evaluation, see, still, Enrico Cerulli,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_010 218 Bausi body of translated texts was the essential background against which the first original written production emerged in the course of time. Uncovering what texts were translated, in what period, and from what lan- guages is a very complex matter, and has justifiably been the central concern of most philological studies to date. To summarize briefly the present state of the art, we can say, first, that the schematic opposition outlined in several reference literatures between an ancient period and a later-medieval period has been increasingly nuanced by the recognition that at its earliest appear- ance (in the twelfth/thirteenth century) Ethiopian medieval literature drew on a preceding layer to a larger extent than was commonly believed, and that this layer was not always directly transmitted and preserved. Secondly, it has become clear that translations were virtually exclusively from Greek in late antiquity, and from Arabic in the . It is accepted, however, that the Arabic texts translated in the Middle Ages are themselves based on vari- ous linguistic models, including Coptic, Syriac, and Greek, and thus indirectly transmit streams of quite different origin.3 Our understanding of the process of transmission in Gǝʿǝz texts is hindered by two decisive factors. First, with one notable exception, no dated manu- script antedates the thirteenth century (or, with some caution, the twelfth), long after the decline of the ancient Aksumite kingdom. (The kingdom’s apo- gee is rightly placed between the third and the early seventh century; by the

“Perspectives on the History of Ethiopia,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern : Ethiopian, ed. Alessandro Bausi (Farnham, Surrey, 2012), 1–25. 3 This contribution draws heavily on previous essays of the author where a few topics were dealt with more in detail, in particular see Alessandro Bausi, “Writing, Copying, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin, 2014), 37–77; idem, “Ethiopic Literary Production Related to the Christian Egyptian Culture,” in Coptic Society, Literature and Religion from Late Antiquity to Modern Times. Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Rome, September 17th–22nd, 2012, and Plenary Reports of the Ninth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Cairo, September 15th–19th, 2008, ed. Paola Buzi, Alberto Camplani, and Federico Contardi, vol. 1 (Louvain, 2016), 503–71; idem, “The Earlier Ethiopic Textual Heritage,” in Scribal Practices and the Social Construction of Knowledge in Antiquity, Late Antiquity and Medieval Islam, ed. Myriam Wissa (Louvain, 2017), 215–35; idem, “Translations in Late Antique Ethiopia,” in Egitto crocevia di traduzioni, ed. Franco Crevatin (Trieste, 2018), 69–99; Alessandro Bausi and Alberto Camplani, eds. and trans., “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria (HEpA): Editio Minor of the Fragments Preserved in the Aksumite Collection and in the Codex Veronensis LX (58),” Adamantius 22 (2016): 249–302. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is not that of providing a catalogue of works translated into Gǝʿǝz, but that of showing with the necessary degree of accuracy and detail, a few case studies that in the author’s intention appear to be exemplary for reasons of contents and method.