Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian- Eritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
chapter 11 Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian- Eritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights Denis Nosnitsin 1 Introduction In recent years the study of Christian Ethiopian manuscript culture has made significant progress.1 A number of research and digitization projects were ac- complished in a period when field research was freely possible in Ethiopia; at the same time, Ethiopic manuscript studies became better connected to the disciplines dealing with other manuscript traditions. Research topics com- mon in modern manuscript studies are increasingly being applied to Ethiopic manuscript material. The outcome of these developments can be seen in a number of recent publications ranging from manuscript catalogues to chap- ters in collective volumes, which will remain seminal works for a number of 1 The present study was carried out within the framework of the long-term project “Beta maṣāḥəft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea,” funded by the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg (https://www.betamasaheft.uni-hamburg.de/). A large part of the material used was collected and catalogued in the course of the project Ethio-SPaRe: Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia – Salvation, Preservation, and Research, headed by myself and funded by the European Research Council under the 7th Research Framework Programme IDEAS (Independent Researcher Starting Grant 240720, December 2009– May 2015). Descriptions of those manuscripts can be found in the database of Ethio-SPaRe (to be later incorporated in the “Beta maṣāḥəft” database). The following manuscripts are quoted below or used for images (here accompanied by the name of the cataloguers): AP-005, Homiliary, late 15th to mid-16th c. (D. Nosnitsin); AP-046, Acts of the Martyrs of Ṗäraqliṭos, 1523 (V. Pisani); AQG-005, Acts of the Martyrs, the second half of the 15th c. but before 1492 (V. Pisani); MAKM-053, Acts of Kiros and Nob, late 15th to early 16th c. (M. Krzyżanowska); MY-002, Homiliary, 1380–1412 (D. Nosnitsin); MY-004, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 15th c. (V. Pisani); QS-007, Horologium, 14th c. (V. Pisani); KY-002, Octateuch, 15th c. (I. Fridman); SDSM-004, Four Gospels, late 15th to mid-16th c. (M. Krzyżanowska); TKMG-004, Four Gospels, late 14th to early 15th c. (D. Nosnitsin); UM-035, Land Charters of Qǝfrǝya ʿUra Mäsqäl, early 18th c. (D. Nosnitsin); UM-040, Octateuch, 13th to mid 14th c. (Abraham Adugna); UM-027, Four Gospels, 14th to early 15th c. (S. Ancel); UM-050a, Four Gospels, 14th to early 15th c. (M. Krzyżanowska); UM-058, Books of Kings, before 1350 (M. Villa); MY-008, Four Gospels, 1380–1412 (S. Ancel). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_012 Christian Manuscript Culture of Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands 283 years to come.2 The present essay does not seek to supersede or go beyond them, neither to repeat what has already been said, except where absolutely necessary. The aim is to add some complementary information, reflect upon a few selected points and propose some new interpretations.3 In particular, the intention is to look at some phenomena of Ethiopic manuscript culture from a diachronic point of view, with some focus on the pre-mid-sixteenth century period, whenever possible, and from a comparative perspective.4 In the parlance of manuscript studies, “Ethiopic manuscript culture” ad- dresses manuscripts containing texts written in Gəʿəz (also called Ethiopic, Old Ethiopic) or Amharic, produced in the cultural framework of the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox (Täwaḥədo) Church throughout its history. The geographi- cal core of this culture is located in the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands, with pos- sible extension to any place in contemporary Ethiopia or Eritrea that was once under the sway of Christian rulers of the late antique kingdom of Aksum and, later, of the medieval kingdom of Ethiopia.5 Ethiopic manuscript culture also spread to various locations outside the Horn of Africa, in the first instance to the Mediterranean region where small communities of Ethiopians settled in pre-modern times. In some of these places Ethiopic manuscripts were not only present, but also produced. 2 Relevant articles in the EAe, the major reference work on the Horn of Africa and the Christian culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands; Alessandro Bausi, “La tradizione scrittoria eti- opica,” Segno e testo 6 (2008): 507–557; idem, “Copying, Writing, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jorg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin, 2014), 37–77; in particular, the relevant chapters in Alessandro Bausi et al., eds., Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction (Hamburg, 2015) (hereafter COMSt), the result of collective efforts, with an exhaustive bibli- ography, accessible also online. The only Ph.D thesis known to me focusing on the codicology of Ethiopic manuscripts of the last decades is Sean Michael Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture: Practices and Contexts” (Ph.D diss., University of Toronto, 2015). Some other impor- tant publications will be mentioned below. 3 The script and paleography will not be a special subject of this study. 4 The opportunities for this approach are obviously limited by the scope of the essay as well as by the author’s competence. Presentation of every practice and feature from a compara- tive perspective is beyond reach for the moment; however, some phenomena in Ethiopic manuscript culture call for comparison, in order to better understand them and hypothesize about their origin and function. See Marilena Maniaci, Archeologia del manoscritto. Metodi, problemi, bibliografia recente (Rome, 2002), 24–25; Alessandro Bausi, “General Introduction. Scope of COMSt,” in COMSt, 9. 5 See Alessandro Bausi, “General introduction. The manuscript traditions: Ethiopic manu- scripts,” in COMSt, 46–48. Today, the population of many of such areas is predominantly Muslim, but there are still small islands of Orthodox Christianity and tangible remnants of Ethiopic manuscript culture. .