Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Ethiopia: What a trained outsider can see today

Abstract: Ethiopia, one of the oldest Christian countries on the Horn of Africa, remains one of the few in the world where parchment manuscripts still constitute an integral part of the church life. At the same time, printed liturgical books are getting  more accessible, while manuscripts are getting recognized as a precious historical heritage. One can define the situation as a transitional period from parchment Gǝʿǝz manuscripts to printed Gǝʿǝz (or /and Amharic) books. Working on Gǝʿǝz manuscripts, one observes three typical scenarios: (i) a church has only printed books, (ii) a church has only manuscripts or (iii) a church has both, printed books and manuscripts. This article address the question of what kind of reality emerges if one tries to contrast practices around manuscripts and practices around printed books and how church conservatism adapts to these innovations. From our perspective of today, one can say that in the pre-printed era in Ethiopia, ‘the agents of Ethiopian Christian culture did not treat books as a precious historical heritage, but as sacred objects intended for practical use’ (Nosnitsin 2020, 289). This essay, based on interviews and observations the author made during various field trips in Ethiopia, shows that for this transitional period from usage of parchment manuscripts to printed books, the idea of treating books as sacred objects intended for practical use is true for both items. Due to the raising of awareness of parchment manuscripts’ historical value, their usage has become discouraged  in Ethiopia, which stimulates various debates. This is a key moment to document the existing practices around living manuscript culture and its dialogue with newly emerging printing culture.

Citation: Valieva, Nafisa.  “Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in Ethiopia: What a trained outsider can see today.” The Jugaad Project, 8 Sept. 2020, thejugaadproject.pub/manuscripts-in-ethiopia [date of access]

(An Amharic version of this photo essay can be download here.)

In the parlance of manuscript studies, “Ethiopic manuscript culture” addresses manuscripts containing texts written in Gǝʿǝz  (also called Ethiopic, Old Ethiopic) or Amharic, produced in the cultural framework of the Ethiopian Christian (Täwahǝdo) Church throughout its history.’(i) The vast majority of these texts are written on parchment and ‘Ethiopian Christian manuscript makers stress that they faithfully adhere to the use of parchment, in contrast to the Muslim craftsmen who produced their books out of paper’ (ii). There are over 500,000 (iii) manuscripts in Ethiopia that are housed in churches and monasteries. This brings beauty and challenge to a scholar who works with manuscripts in the Ethiopian context. It makes one meet people and engage with their diverse opinions on what is appropriate and not appropriate when dealing with manuscripts, what makes manuscripts valuable or sacral. If one tries to generalise on the question of treatment, I would agree that what was said for the past that ‘the agents of Ethiopian Christian culture did not treat books as a precious historical heritage, but as sacred objects intended for practical use’ (iv) is still true to some extent today. Here I present some observations I did in Ethiopia during my fieldtrips in 2014–2018, while working on my PhD on the ‘Life of Lālibalā’, a hagiographic text of the twelfth century king and saint, on its scholarly and liturgical tradition and documentation.  My objective, besides studying manuscripts containing the ‘Life of Lālibalā’ for its critical textual reconstruction, was to collect local stories about manuscripts, histories about the places where these manuscripts are preserved, as well as to inquire about manuscripts’ current use. As King Lālibalā (v) and his wife Masqal Kəbrā (vi) are historical figures, who lived during the turn of the twelfth century, there are many places in Ethiopia related to these  figures; some of the places are world-known, such as the rock-hewn church complex of Lālibalā city (vii), others are known only locally, while a few became almost forgotten nowadays.

Figure 1. Church of Libānos in Lālibalā city, one of the renowned rock-hewn churches. ‘The Life of Lālibalā’ counts this church among those built by King Lālibalā, while a parallel tradition ascribes its construction to his wife, Queen Masqal Kəbrā. Her monastery, second main place of her veneration after the church of Libānos in Lālibalā, is situated in Tabor Madabay, several hundred kilometers to the north from Lālibalā city, passing Šəre (Təgrāy). Photo by the author, Lālibalā city, 2017.

I start with a fieldtrip to the monastery of Masqal Kəbrā in northern Ethiopia (Təgrāy), and describe the context for Ethiopic manuscripts culture as well as illustrate how philologists and church researchers navigate their work with monasteries. This fieldtrip, being paradigmatic on the one hand, was also absolutely unique for its participants in terms of hospitality and unprecedented trust of people, the rare cultural environment, as well as the physical difficulty of the trip and terrain. One of the important factors here is the monastery’s remoteness from any modern cities, which, in my eyes, makes local culture less contaminated with modern practices.

In November 2016, in the company of a local liqa kāhənāt (‘head of priests’, administrative title given to the head of a monastery or a church), a local scribe from Šəre, an old friend who lived in Aksum, a colleague from Mekelle University and a senior Italian colleague from Hamburg, I headed to the monastery of Masqal Kəbrā.  In the text of the ‘Life of Lālibalā’, Queen Masqal Kəbrā is the second important protagonist. Yet, it is not the ‘Life of  Lālibalā’ that informs us about the monastery of Masqal Kəbrā, but a recent paper manuscript containing the ‘History of Lāsta Kings’  by Gabra Masqal Tasfāyye, a historian who lived in the twentieth century in the surroundings of Lālibalā city. According to Getatchew Haile, the ‘History of Lāsta Kings’ was a source for writing the ‘Life of Lālibalā’. (viii) However, further research shows that it is a later compilation of various sources, masterfully combined by Gabra Masqal Tasfāyye, who had the ‘Life of Lālibalā’ as one of his sources, not the other way around. (ix)  As yet, many of the sources employed by Gabra Masqal Tasfāyye remain to be identified. Just as the archaeologist who is looking for material evidence to account for gaps in human history, the philologist confronted with recent texts talking about the ancient times is looking for earlier material evidence - written artefacts- in order to be better equipped for evaluating their historical authenticity.  One of such ‘dark’ pieces  in the ‘History of Lāsta Kings’ was a passage that narrated a certain moment Queen Masqal Kəbrā left the court and her royal husband Lālibalā behind, went to Tabor Madabay, and founded a monastery where she then lived praying, until she passed away. 

Figure 2. Afa mamhǝr (title of the spokesman) Allabbāččaw Ǝratta, local scholar and lifelong student of the history of King Lālibalā and Lālibalā city, who, however, was not familiar with the ‘end’ story of Queen Masqal Kəbrā’s life as chronicled by Gabra Masqal Tasfāyye. Photo by Getu Sisay Alebie. Lālibalā city, 2014.

The Təgrāy monastery of Masqal Kəbrā in Tābor Madabay is almost never mentioned in the academic literature, apart from the just-cited ‘History of Lāsta Kings’ (x), which exists in the form of a manuscript, which is written in Amharic language and which is generally not widely known yet. My interest during this trip was to visit the place and to see what we could find there, at least to confirm for myself the existence of the monastery, see what kind of written sources they have, to situate the monastery on the map, and maybe uncover further information about King Lālibalā.

This monastery is situated in the military-control-free zone on the way to the border with Eritrea, and so we had left the last Ethiopian military post far behind. Due to its remoteness and due to the border conflict which was settled only in 2018, visitors were rare. I felt like everyone whom we met treated us as dear guests, as pilgrims, not as strangers. But I could hardly speak, because for everyone apart from the liqa kāhənāt priest, it was a most challenging journey. Our bodies were exhausted, but our spirits were uplifted, literally helping us to bear our bodies.

Figure 3. Monastery of Masqal Kəbrā hidden behind the rocks. Queen Masqal Kəbrā is said to pray on the top of this rock. This is a place of Masqal Kəbrā’s tomb, according to the locals. Photo by the author. Tabor Madabay, 2016.

We arrived at the place at around 5 pm, soon before sunset. On the day of our arrival, liturgy was being celebrated in the church of Masqal Kəbrā that morning, so there was an issue of what to do in order to respect two rules: no one may enter a church after liturgy, and a guest should be honoured. In our case, we happened to be guests interested in history and in manuscripts, which were preserved in the side room of the church, accessible only through the main entrance and our request was kindly granted.

Given that it was already late afternoon, we had only one hour to view the manuscripts. When everything was ready (people, manuscripts and equipment) for work, in order to efficiently use the single hour, we split into two groups: one would conduct interviews and the other would examine manuscripts. All the manuscripts in their possession were of parchment. Their ages varied. We saw recent manuscripts, produced at the beginning of the twentieth century. We saw manuscripts produced before the fifteenth century. I do not know how many manuscripts there are altogether at the monastery; all in all we only had time to inspect a few and to photograph the contents of two of them. Those of a significant age were strongly affected by humidity, which acts on parchment in such a way that its pages try to revert to their original form of goat skin, meaning that the shape of the entire parchment book becomes rounder. Manuscripts that were in poor condition of preservation we left unopened. These damaged manuscripts were no longer being used but were still kept together with other church items and manuscripts that were still in use.

Figure 4. The priests and deacons themselves went inside the church and brought out the manuscripts they had. Here is a medieval manuscript that has become rounder, affected by the humidity. Photo by Antonella Brita. Tabor Madabay, 2016.

Figure 5. The agents of Ethiopian Christian culture: interviewing clergy in Masqal Kəbrā monastery. They repeat the same passage recorded in the ‘History of Lāsta Kings’: at a certain moment, Queen Masqal Kəbrā left her husband King Lālibalā, came to Tabor Madabay and founded here a monastery. As I could see later, the same passage about the queen, this time recorded in Gǝʿǝz, is contained in one of the manuscripts we could photograph, dated to the beginning of the twentieth century. Consequently I conclude that either this is a copy from an older manuscript or it comes from oral tradition that was then recorded. Until further material emerges, this passage about the queen and foundation of the monastery can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century, not earlier. Photo by Antonella Brita. Tabor Madabay, Ethiopia, 2016.

After the daylight was gone, we were invited to the house of a local priest. According to their custom of hospitality, when we entered the house, the priest washed our feet. This custom of washing the guest’s feet is not so common anymore, but it is repeated in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church at least once a year on Holy Thursday to commemorate what Jesus Christ did to his disciples.  To feed us, members of the church killed a goat and cooked it for us, eating it raw themselves. As dessert, we had the soft drink Mirinda, the only reminder for me that we had not travelled back in time.

Figure 6. Men ate raw meat from a common plate. We sat in front and waited for food to be cooked and made a circle. Photo by Antonella Brita. Tabor Madabay, 2016.

Then the priests chanted hymns venerating Saint Masqal Kəbrā, the namesake of the monastery. Later we were left to rest on goat skins, all together; the women were given space on the only bed, while the four men slept on the ground. At 4 o’clock in the morning we started our journey back and by the evening that day we reached Aksum, our home at that moment.

At the monastery we lived through a natural cycle of a parchment manuscript in a small universe. In my opinion, this illustrates the authentic traditional milieu of parchment manuscripts production and preservation, where individuals trained through the traditional church schools produce parchment manuscript using traditional ecological techniques (zero waste) and local materials. In short: coming to the monastery, we saw shepherds and goats, eating grass; one of a goat became our dinner; goatskins served us as bed-covers,  goatskins we turned into parchment, forming manuscripts; some manuscripts started to revert to their original form of goat skin. Further, in my opinion, this monastery trip helped us to experience an absolute (meaning an independent from other factors) sacrality of parchment manuscripts for the church community. A fundamental concern in my research has been how the community treat and understand manuscripts: are they different from printed books, are they considered sacred in any way and how is this difference articulated by the clergy? This trip proves that when manuscripts are not confronted with printed books, when they are the only text carriers available, the clergy does not treat books as a precious historical heritage, but as sacred objects intended for practical use. There are three factors that help to measure a manuscript’s sacrality: its divine content, its liturgical use and its place of storage.  Further we see that printed books fit in this matrix. In the case of the monastery of Masqal Kəbrā, they have only parchment manuscripts with the liturgical content and their treatment seems pragmatic: they are kept clean and protected from intentional damage. The clergy will read aloud from the manuscripts in the classical Ethiopic language Gǝʿǝz, which, though not comprehensible to the vast majority of the population, is considered the language of Paradise. After the reading is over, believers might kiss the book, understanding it as a mediator of the divine. The reading is performed holding a candle to light up the manuscript (as we also did, being in the same environment, see video), which inevitably drops wax on the parchment. Fingers may also leave traces of soot. These are all seen as natural parts of use.

Figure 7. Reading from manuscripts in the monastery of Dabra Ṣǝyon Abuna ʾAbrǝham. Video by Nafisa Valieva. Təgrāy, Ethiopia, 2017.

Handmade parchment manuscripts are in common liturgical use not only in Masqal Kəbrā monastery but all over Ethiopia. Indeed, I would hypothesize that in the rural areas, even if all the printed liturgical books were available to the church clergy, up until today, manuscripts (if they have them) would still be used, particularly on special occasions. This liturgical practice concerns particularly the veneration of saints: within the extremely rich hymnographic and hagiographic literature, some hymns or texts are more rare and have not yet found their way into any printed books, which means that they can only be recited from manuscripts.

However, on the spot, there is almost no chance for a person present during liturgy to be sure whether what is being read or recited comes from a manuscript or a printed book, unless you are admitted to stand very close to the reader or a member of the clergy shows you the book himself. Regardless of whether it is a printed book or a manuscript, the book’s paper or leather cover is wrapped in cloth. When the congregation is invited to kiss the book after the reading, it is the cloth cover that they kiss, not knowing (or caring) whether what is inside the cloth is a printed book or a parchment-bound manuscript.

Figure 8. ‘The ‘Life of Lālibalā’ from the Church of Golgotā. The book covered with cloth is a manuscript, but nothing can prove it, unless one opens it. Upon my question whether a church has a manuscript containing the ‘Life of Lālibalā’, I was sometimes given a mistaken answer ‘yes’, while what they were referring to was a printed edition. Photo by the author. Lālibalā city, 2017.

In the rock-hewn church-complex of Lālibalā, popularly regarded as one of the wonders of the world and often crowded by tourists, the spirit of conservatism and a desire to preserve everything unchanged (at least visually) is particularly articulated by the local church community. This amazing place attracts tourists with all possible technological gadgets and, at the same time, attracts young Ethiopians, who prefer traditional church education to modern education (or want to combine both), as the school of traditional education in Lālibalā remains among very prestigious. Within the frames of traditional education, students learn to treat liturgical books with knowledge and care. Traditionally transmitted knowledge enables church conservatism, which makes liturgical experience in the churches of Lālibalā close to the one in the monastery of Masqal Kəbrā. Popularity of using parchment in parish churches is part of the church conservatism, although it is getting less and less possible due to the presence of non-clergy employees, whose concept of national heritage protection often differs as they tend to forbid the clergy using manuscripts during liturgical celebrations.

Figure 9. Morning service of Kidān in front of the church of ʾEmmanuʾel in the city of Lālibalā, church school pupils coming to their Gǝʿǝz reading class. In this case, with the liturgical text covered by cloth and resting on a stand, it is unclear whether pupils are reading from a printed book or a manuscript. Photo by the author. Lālibalā city, 2017.

These details of how liturgical texts are recited and their carriers are preserved would seem to argue that the aesthetic and sensory experience is much the same regardless of whether an actual handmade manuscript is used or a modern printed reproduction of it. And yet, in the course of my research on parchment manuscripts, I found ‘sympathisers’ among clergy members, who prefer parchment manuscripts to printed editions. I was often told that, for the clergy and celebrants (such as myself), the effect of reading from a parchment page is different—as a liturgical experience – than when reading from a printed book, for with the former, one can feel palpably a stronger connection to the past and the illusion of touching eternity, also due to the durability of parchment. Even if a parchment page is recent, you feel alliance with the ancient craft, the warmth of hands.  These details are most important to those closest to the materials (the priests, deacons and readers), less so for celebrants.

There are also less spiritual reasons for this preference for books produced from parchment. The first is a general religious conservatism which disfavours innovations. Some clergy, feeling uncomfortable with or seeing no need for any change in general, will say: ‘Parchment is a durable material. Why would one need to replace what has been used since ancient times?’ However, to create a parchment manuscript by copying from a printed edition has become an accepted practice. Why does this happen? Until recently, scribes, were limited to copying whatever manuscript they could find around, and would sometimes be forced to travel long distances to produce a copy, which could take months. I was told that in order to acquire a manuscript containing the ‘Life of Lālibalā’ for the church of Nāzret Māriyām in Təgrāy, people walked for a week to Lālibalā city (500 km away), made a paper copy and, after coming back, commissioned a professional scribe to make a parchment manuscript. It is now preserved in the church and used for liturgical veneration of the saint on his annual feast and on monthly commemorations.  Nowadays, a scribe can use a printed text as an exemplar text for preparing a manuscript.  Copying a printed text on parchment shows how church’s conservatism can accommodate new developments.

At the same time, one should not neglect the fact of urbanization and modernization processes’ impact on life in Ethiopia under Emperor Mənəlik II (1889-1913), that from the advent of the printing press, printed books have gradually entered the liturgical space. For example, a pilgrim can receive a list of books the community needs that they will purchase in the capital or other main city. Church communities naturally become used to printed books and urban Christians play a role to help circulate printed books by gifting them to remote churches and monasteries.

Today, often liturgical books, either parchment or printed, are all stored together, under the same conditions (xi). Some are kept in the church’s sanctuary (maqdas), but most of them are in the əqā bet (storehouse); only one specially appointed member of the community has a key and knows what is preserved there.

Figure 10. Storehouse of the church of Nāzret Māriyām. Liturgical objects (a hand cross is visible) and manuscripts are arranged on alga (bed). Photo by the author. Nāzret Māriyām, Təgrāy, 2017.

To conclude, my impression is that in general, in Ethiopia, members of the Christian Orthodox community will regard liturgical books (handmade or printed) as sacral objects intended for practical use, primarily due to their content which believers see as divine, secondly, due to the use for liturgical celebration, while repeating the same ritual treatment. The fact that all kinds of liturgical books can be found stored together support this understanding. Yet, individually, people can have various emotional attachments and reasoning for their preferences. For now, one can see that printed books gradually enter the same matrix of ritual treatment, developed in the milieu of parchment manuscripts. At the same time, through belonging to a certain church or a person, all liturgical objects tend to accumulate more and more sacrality in the eyes of the believers, yet, one need to investigate more in order to make this difference between various levels of sacrality tangible.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Getie Gelay, Professor of Amharic at the University of Hamburg, as well as Hewan Semon Marye, PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg and a co-author of Amharic-English political dictionary, for providing their expertise and support to finalize the Amharic translation of this essay.

Endnotes

[I] Nosnitsin, D. 2020. ‘Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands :Some Analytical Insights’, in S . Kelly, ed. A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea  (Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), 283.

[ii] Nosnitsin, D. 2020. ‘Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands :Some Analytical Insights’, in S . Kelly, ed. A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea ( Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill, 2020),  292.

[iii] This is according to an estimate by Eyob Derillo, the curator of the British library collection of Ethiopic manuscripts.

[iv] Nosnitsin, D. 2020. ‘Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands :Some Analytical Insights’, in S . Kelly, ed. A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea ( Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), 289.

[v] See Derat, M.-L. 2018. L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle, Hagiologia (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2018).

[vi] See Kur, S, Derat, M-L. ‘Mäsqäl Kǝbra.’  In EAe 3 (2007).

[vii] See Finneran, N. ‘Lalibäla.’ In EAe 3 (2007).

[viii] See Derat, M-L. ‘Lalibäla.’ In EAe 3 (2007).

[ix] See the soon-to-be-published dissertation by the author, Valieva, N. ‘The Life of Lālibalā: tradition and documentation.’

[x] See Derat, Marie-Laure. “Autour de l’homélie en l’honneur du saint-roi Lâlibalâ: écritures hagiographiques, copies et milieux de production”, Oriens Christianus, vol. 99, 2016, pp. 101–132.

[xi] See Nosnitsin, D. 2020. ‘Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights’, in S . Kelly, ed. A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea  (Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill, 2020),  318-320.