Ethiopian Scribal Practice 1

The series Ethiopic Manuscripts, Texts, and Studies offers, in the first place, catalogues of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project, whose purpose it is to digitize and catalogue collections of Ethiopic manuscripts in North America and around the world. Beyond this, though, the series offers a venue for monographs, revised dissertations, and texts that explore the rich historical, literary, and artistic traditions of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. From the Series Foreword.

There are many stories to tell about the Ethiopic manuscripts in the collection of the Mekane Yesus Seminary in Addis Ababa. The stories about the content of the manuscripts are told in the catalogue (EMTS volume 13). But this volume recounts stories about the book culture that produced the manuscripts. One study provides a general introduction to Ethiopian Christian codicology and the scribal practices in evidence in the collection. Another focuses on the particular story of scribal errors and corrections. And a final study provides an art-historical account of all of the illuminations contained in the collection--even down to the crude drawings in pencil that adorn some pages. Books contain texts. But they are witnesses, first and foremost, to a particular people, at a particular place, at a particular moment in time, who had a particular way of making and using their books. The content of their books tells us about the community's past, about the authoritative texts from antiquity which they valued. But their book culture tells us about their present, about the history of the reception of those works among these people in order to articulate in the present their identity and ethos.

This book is the companion volume to the Catalogue of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project, Volume 1: Codices 1-105, Magic Scrolls 1- 134. It contains at least one plate for each of the 105 codices described in that volume. But this is designed to be more than just a plates volume.

The series Ethiopic Manuscripts, Texts, and Studies offers, in the first place, catalogues of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project, whose purpose it is to digitize and catalogue collections of Ethiopic manuscripts in North America and around the world. Beyond this, though, the series offers a venue for monographs, revised dissertations, and texts that explore the rich historical, literary, and artistic traditions of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. From the Series Foreword

The Ethiopic version provides a window into the state of the Greek Bible as it circulated in East Africa at the end of the fourth century. It is, therefore, an extremely important witness to the Bible's early transmission history, yet its testimony has typically been ignored or misunderstood by text critics. This study examines the history of the book of Acts in Ethiopia and reconstructs its earliest attainable text, which then is assessed using the latest text-critical methods. It therefore provides a solid base for interpreting the data of this key witness and lays the groundwork for future text-critical work in Ethiopic and other early versions.

The present volume contains twelve chapters authored by specialists of Asian, African and European manuscript cultures reflecting on the cohesion of written artefacts, particularly manuscripts. Assuming that 'codicological units' exist in every manuscript culture and that they are usually composed of discrete elements (such as clay tablets, papyrus sheets, bamboo slips, parchment bifolios, palm leaves), the issue of the cohesion of the constituents is a general one. The volume presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted to achieve this cohesion by manuscript cultures distant in space (from China to West Africa) and time (from the third millennium bce to the present). This comparative view provides the frame for the understanding of a phenomenon that appears to be of essential importance for the study of the structure of written artefacts. Regardless of the way in which cohesion is realised, all strategies and devices that allow the constituents to be kept together are subsumed under the term 'binding'. Thus, it is possible to highlight similarities, convergences, and unique physical and technical methods adopted by various manuscript cultures to face a common challenge.